Breaking Pitch

The papaya sat on her kitchen counter like a forgotten apology, its skin mottled with yellow and green, ripe in a way that made Mira think of things left too long. Her ex-husband used to buy them weekly, a habit from his childhood in Hawaii, and now here she was, three months after the divorce, still reaching for fruit she didn't particularly want.

Outside, rain slicked the streets of Chicago. She should have been at the ballpark—she'd had Cubs tickets since before she met David, back when Wrigley felt like church instead of just another place where couples sat too close on hard seats. But her sister had called in sick, and Mira had gone to the game alone once before, last October, and the way the older couple in the row behind her had asked "where's your husband?" with that tilted-head concern had made her want to set fire to something beautiful.

She cut the papaya. Its seeds clustered black and glossy, obscene in their abundance. David would have made some joke about them looking like something else, something that would have made her laugh even as she rolled her eyes. That was the problem with missing someone—you didn't just miss the good parts. You missed the way they'd made you laugh at things you secretly found gross.

Movement caught her eye through the window. A fox, its coat burnished copper, stood beneath the streetlamp, looking directly at her third-floor window. She'd lived in the city for fifteen years and never seen one. It tilted its head, almost knowingly, then trotted away with something clamped in its jaws—a rat, maybe, or someone's lost treasure.

The fox in the metaphor. Always leaving, always surviving. She'd used that line in the novel she'd been writing when she met David, the one she'd abandoned somewhere around chapter seven, somewhere around when she'd started thinking about joint bank accounts and whether they wanted children.

The papaya's flesh was surprisingly sweet. She ate it standing at the counter, rain drumming against the glass, baseball drifting from the television she'd left on in the other room. Some sports commentator was talking about a rookie pitcher with a wicked breaking pitch, the kind that looked like one thing until it became another.

Mira understood that completely. She looked at the empty spot where the fox had stood. Then she finished the fruit, wiped her hands on a paper towel, and turned off the television. Some games you watched. Some you lived. And some—some you finally walked away from.

Tomorrow she'd list the Cubs tickets on Craigslist. Tomorrow she'd buy apples instead of papayas. But tonight she stood in her kitchen, alone for the first time in twelve years, and something in her chest unfurled like a fist that had been clenched too long.

The fox was gone. The fruit was gone. The baseball season would end, as it always did. And she was still here, hungry and whole and unexpectedly, terrifyingly free.