Cracked Screen Season

Maggie sat on her balcony in Key West, nursing a hangover that tasted like cheap tequila and regret. Her iPhone lay shattered on the table - spiderweb cracks radiating from where she'd dropped it drunk-dialing Mark again at 3 AM. Again.

The papaya she'd bought at the morning market sat uneaten, its orange flesh softening in the humidity. Below, a group of men played baseball on the sand, their shouts carrying up to her like ghosts of a life she used to have. Mark had loved baseball. He'd taken her to Fenway for their first anniversary, bought her a Red Sox cap she'd worn ironically, then sincerely, then not at all.

"You're too much in your head," he'd told her during their last fight, standing in their kitchen with his palm against the doorframe, blocking her exit. "You think everything means something. Sometimes things just are."

She'd moved out the next week.

A baseball sailed over the balcony railing and landed with a soft thud beside her papaya. Maggie stared at it, then at her phone, then at the fruit that was beginning to weep juice onto the table. Everything rotted. Everything broke. You couldn't stop either from happening; you could only decide whether to be present while it did.

The player who'd thrown it - a man her age, shirtless, sun-bleached hair - appeared in the doorway below. "Sorry," he called up. "Mind tossing that back?"

Maggie stood up. For the first time in three months, she didn't check her reflection in the darkened phone screen. She picked up the papaya in one hand and the baseball in the other.

"Hey," she called down. "You want this fruit? It's perfectly good, and I'm not going to eat it."

He looked up, confused, then smiled. "Only if you come down and have a beer with us."

Maggie set the broken phone on the table. The cracks would still be there later. Some things you couldn't fix, and some things you didn't want to.

"Be right there," she said, and meant it.