What We Keep Fed

The bear had come three nights in a row. Elias saw it first—a shadow lumbering past the kitchen window, drawn by the garbage they'd forgotten to secure. By night three, the bear was scratching at the door, and Mara stopped sleeping.

"It's because we're feeding it," Elias said, pouring coffee with hands that still smelled faintly of lake water. He'd been swimming at dawn, trying to exhaust himself enough to sleep through her crying in the bathroom. "We forget to lock the bin. It learns."

"Like the fox," Mara said, not looking up from her vitamin regiment. Eight pills, sorted into plastic compartments. Folic acid, CoQ10, DHEA—tiny capsules of hope they'd both stopped believing in. "The fox that keeps coming back because someone left food out."

"What fox?"

"You don't remember?" She finally looked at him. "At the rental last year. The owners said someone had been feeding it, and now it couldn't survive on its own. Kept waiting for handouts." She swallowed the pills dry. "It starved in the end. They found it under the porch."

Elias remembered. They'd been trying then too—the temperature charts, the scheduled sex, the invasive procedures that felt more like science than love. They were still trying, though something had calcified between them. A kind of patience worn thin.

"I'll lock the bin tonight," he said.

"That's not enough." She stood up, her chair scraping against the hardwood. "You have to stop leaving things out. You have to stop expecting it to just... go away because you wish it would."

He wanted to ask what she meant—him, them, the months of measured hopelessness—but the bear scratched at the door again, a sound like something being asked for the hundredth time.

Later, when she was asleep—or pretending to be—he went outside with the flashlight. The bear was there at the edge of the yard, massive and indifferent. Elias didn't scare it off. He just watched it breathing, something wild that wanted what it had been taught to want, and felt the first real thing in months: not envy, exactly, but recognition of hunger.

Inside, he washed down four of her vitamins with tap water and lay beside her, still smelling of lake, waiting for either of them to break.