What We Leave Unburied

The fox appeared at dusk, orange coat bright against the dead grass of our dying lawn. I watched from the kitchen window while Elias stirred something at the stove—the smell of garlic and spinach filling the small room. We'd been eating so much spinach lately. He said it was for his heart, but I knew it was penance.

"I feel like a zombie," he'd said the night before, not looking at me. "Just going through the motions since..."

Since the miscarriage. Since the silence grew loud enough to choke on.

The fox on the lawn carried something in its mouth—a rat, maybe, or a fragment of someone's trash. It moved with purpose, wild and alive and utterly indifferent to our carefully constructed suffering.

"You're watching it again," Elias said behind me. I hadn't heard him approach. He set a bowl of wilted spinach salad on the counter. "Dinner."

"I used to feel things," I said, still watching the fox vanish into the neighbor's yard. "Real things. Sharp things. Now it's all just—dull. Like I'm dead but still breathing. Like you said."

His hand settled on my shoulder, tentative. "That's grief. It rots you from the inside out."

"Then what's the antidote?"

He didn't answer. Instead, he turned off the stove. The spinach sat there, green and untouched, while the kitchen grew dark around us. Outside, somewhere in the distance, I heard the fox's sharp cry—something alive and hunting in the dead of night.

"Maybe feeling dead is the first step," I said finally. "Before you can feel alive again."

Elias's fingers pressed into my shoulder. "Maybe. But right now, I'm just hungry. Are you going to eat that spinach or not?"

I laughed—a small, broken thing, but real. The fox was gone. We were still here.