By Laura Casey
I watch silently as the robin hits the window. It crashes against the glass with a sharp, dull thud. Someone else might call it a sign, an omen. I’ve had enough of those.
Instead, I sigh and walk into the kitchen. I flip the switch on the coffee pot and listen as it comes to life. The machine gurgles and sputters as dark brown liquid drips steadily into the carafe.
I reach up to grab a mug from the cabinet above my head, and that’s when I see it.
The blue-grey mug with a slight chip in the handle. A large letter ‘M’ painted on both sides.
The room tilts. My feet move backward without permission. For a moment, I watch from above, like some uninvited fly buzzing on the ceiling, as I collide with the countertop behind me.
“Shit.” I rub the back of my arm where it hit. That’s going to bruise.
Mara must have left it behind. I’d thought for sure she’d taken everything. She’d been so methodical—each box taped, labeled, and stacked with deliberate care. The spare bed. The desk. The chair. They were all hers. The cardboard boxes had haunted the hallways for days.
The mug had been part of a matching set we bought on our first date. Mine had an S for Sam.
I had taken her to a tiny Italian place. After one too many glasses of wine, we wandered through HomeGoods. She’d plucked the mugs off a clearance shelf and held them up between us.
“They’re so tacky,” she’d said. “We have to get them.”
I knew at that moment that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.
The first year we were married, we ordered Chinese takeout and watched trashy reality TV that neither of us actually liked every Friday. She’d narrate over the dramatic music in a ridiculous announcer voice until I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe. Sometimes she’d rest her head on my shoulder and close her eyes.
“Love you,” she always murmured before finally drifting off.
The summer after we moved into this house, we spent nearly every night sitting on the front steps watching the neighborhood kids pedal around the cul-de-sac in uneven figure eights until the streetlights flickered on. We’d talk about nothing important: what color we wanted to paint the spare room, the annoying coworker she had to share a cubicle with, whether we were too young to feel this settled.
On the drives to Dad’s in Columbus, she’d sing along to the radio. Always off-key and too loud, drumming her fingers against the dashboard like she was playing to a stadium of adoring fans.
I don’t remember when she stopped singing, or when we stopped watching the kids, or when she stopped saying “I love you” before falling asleep.
One evening, she sat me down and quietly slid divorce papers across the kitchen table.
“Our lives are going in different directions,” she said. She sat up straight and tucked a piece of brown hair behind her ear. “This is the best decision for both of us.”
The words hung in the air, polite and final. The refrigerator hummed. My phone rang faintly somewhere in the other room. I froze, unsure how to react. I reached for the pen and signed my name anyway.
It’s strange, the things that stay with you. Not the last words or the final kiss, but the way she packed her hairbrush. How she paused at the vanity, lifted it from the place it had sat every day since we’d moved in, and turned it once in her hand before lowering it into a brown box on top of a pile of folded clothes.
The mug seems to glare at me from the cabinet. I take it in both hands. The ceramic is cool and familiar against my palms. I hurl it to the floor. It breaks with a flat, heavy crack. The pieces scatter across the tile. A faint cloud of dust rises from its shattered edges.
Outside, through the window, the bird is gone too. A muddy streak on the glass the only proof it was ever there at all.
* * *
Laura Casey is an emerging writer from Chicago, Illinois. She recently graduated from DePaul University where she earned a Bachelor’s degree in English. When she is not writing, she can usually be found reading a good book and sipping an iced coffee.