Bitter Fruit

The papaya sat on the granite counter, its skin mottled with yellow bruises like old age spots. Sarah had bought it three days ago, another attempt at something—health? Exoticism? A reminder of their honeymoon in Oahu? Now it just rotted alongside his vitamin sorter, the plastic compartments filled with D3, Omega-3, CoQ10, a rainbow of pills he swallowed each morning with religious devotion.

"You're watching baseball again?" Sarah stood in the doorway, her arms crossed. The TV flickered with the bottom of the ninth, some meaningless game between teams he'd stopped caring about years ago. Baseball had been his father's religion, inherited like a defective gene, and now he sat in his recliner, forty-two years old, watching younger men chase a ball around a diamond while his wife disintegrated in the next room.

"It's the playoffs," Daniel said, not turning around. The lie hung in the air between them, heavy and stale.

"It's November, Daniel."

The commentator's voice droned about statistics and ERAs, numbers that used to mean something to him. Now they were just noise, something to fill the silence where their conversations used to live. He'd been taking the vitamins since his doctor mentioned cholesterol. A precaution, nothing more. But somehow the little plastic organizer had become his anchor, the one thing he could control.

Sarah picked up the papaya, its flesh softening under her fingers. "Remember how we said we'd try new things? Remember that?"

Daniel finally turned. She looked thinner. They both did. The months of unsaid words had a way of whittling you down.

"I can cut it up," he offered.

"It's too late." She dropped it into the trash. "Everything's too late."

The baseball crowd roared from the television. Someone hit a home run. The camera cut to a woman in the stands, weeping with joy or despair—Daniel couldn't tell the difference anymore. He thought about the vitamins in his stomach, dissolving, absorbing, trying to fix something that maybe wasn't broken, just tired. He thought about papayas in Hawaii, how they'd eaten them on the balcony at dawn, salt air and sticky juice, the world before them.

"Sarah—"

"I'm going to my sister's."

"For how long?"

She paused at the door. The stadium noise swelled behind him. "I don't know. Maybe I'll find somewhere they grow fresh papaya."

The door clicked shut. Daniel sat back as the inning ended. His vitamin organizer sat on the end table, tomorrow's pills already sorted. He swallowed nothing.