What We Leave Behind

The spinach had gone slimy in the vegetable drawer, much like everything else between us. I stood in the kitchen of the apartment we'd shared for seven years, watching his silhouette move through the rooms with cardboard boxes in his arms.

Outside the window, a fox trotted across the backyard fence—amber coat brilliant against the gray February snow. It paused, looked back at me with eyes that seemed to know everything, then slipped away into the neighbor's yard. Wild. Untethered. Not like us.

"You taking Buster or me?" I asked, though I already knew the answer.

He didn't turn around. "My new place doesn't allow dogs. You know that."

The dog in question lay at my feet, chin resting on my bare toes. Buster had been my anniversary gift six years ago, before promotions and credit card debt and the silent accumulation of resentments had built walls between us. Now the dog was the only thing that still felt like home.

"Remember when we made that spinach lasagna?" I said, trying to summon something that might make him stop, just for a moment. "When we first moved in? We burnt the bottom layer."

"That was a long time ago, Maya."

"It was four months before you stopped coming home for dinner."

He finally turned then, and I saw the exhaustion in his face—the same tiredness I'd been seeing in the mirror for months. Maybe years. We'd become strangers who happened to share a bed, a mortgage, a dog.

"I'm sorry," he said, but it was the hollow kind of sorry—the kind that means nothing will change.

The fox appeared again on the fence, watching us with that same uncanny intelligence. I wondered if animals mourned when their mates left them, or if they simply found new territory, new warmth, kept moving because that was what living things did.

"Go," I said. "I'll keep Buster. I'll keep the rotting spinach and the half-empty toothpaste tubes and all the other remnants of what we almost became."

He nodded once and walked out the door. The fox vanished into the twilight. Buster whined softly, pressing his warm weight against my leg.

I threw the spinach into the trash. Somewhere in the distance, a fox cried out—a sharp, lonely sound that echoed through the empty rooms of what had once been a home.