What We Keep

The sphinx moth had been dead for three days before Maya noticed it on the windowsill. Its wings, dusted the color of dried lavender, were spread like a question mark left unanswered. She should have swept it away—she should have swept a lot of things away—but instead she'd left it there, a tiny monument to something that had once known how to fly.

"You're doing it again," Elena had said the night she left, standing in their doorway with a box of books balanced against her hip. "Turning everything into a riddle I'm supposed to solve."

Maya hadn't known how to explain that some things weren't riddles. Some things were just doorways you couldn't walk through anymore.

That was months ago. Now, in the silence of her apartment, Maya finally understood what Elena had meant about the weight of unsaid things. Her mother's voice on the phone, careful and measured: "Have you heard from her?" The pause before answering, the way she rearranged the truth to make it fit a shape that wouldn't worry anyone. Fox-like, she thought. Not in the way of cunning, but in the way of burrowing underground when the world above became too sharp, too bright.

The cat from next door had taken to sleeping on their fire escape. It was an ugly thing—patchy fur, one ear permanently folded—but it had the sort of quiet that Maya found herself borrowing. Sometimes she left the window cracked just enough to let in the morning air, and the cat would slip inside like it owned the spaces between things.

"You feed it," her mother accused during one of their careful conversations. "I know you do."

"I don't," Maya said. And it was true—she never put out food. But she didn't shoo it away either. There was something about the way it moved through her apartment,不走looking at things that weren't there anymore, that felt like permission.

The sphinx moth was gone when she finally swept the windowsill. She couldn't say when it had disappeared, only that the space it had left behind was precisely its size. That was the thing about grief, she realized. It didn't take up more room than it needed. It just took exactly what it needed, and you learned to fit yourself around the shape it made.

The cat curled at the foot of her bed that night, its breathing a small, steady thing in the dark. Outside, the city hummed with all the lives people were living without her. She thought about calling Elena—just to say, I think I understand now. But some words, once spoken, can't be gathered back into the mouth. So she lay there instead, listening to the cat breathe, and let the house settle into whatever shape it was becoming. Not emptier. Not fuller. Just hers again.