Antlers & Anxiety

The antlers came in overnight. Vega swore they were always there, which was a lie, because yesterday she’d fit through the doorway and today she left three new holes in the plaster and one very confused pigeon in the stairwell. “Growth,” she announced, “is a process.” The pigeon did not agree.

He’d stopped asking how she got in. That was the first mistake, or maybe the only sensible thing he’d done all week — because the answer was never going to be a door, and some questions cost more than the not-knowing.

By noon she had reorganized his anxieties too, alphabetically, and pinned the worst one to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a tiny moon. “See?” she said. “Manageable. You just needed a system.”