Exotic Fruits in July

The papaya sat on the counter like an accusation. Too orange, too tropical, too unlike the apples we used to share. Sarah had brought it home from that new specialty market on 5th Street—the one with the jaw-dropping prices and the implication that our neighborhood wasn't good enough anymore.

"It's supposed to be excellent with lime," she'd said, already somewhere else, already gone.

The baseball game droned on from the television. Cable television—another thing we'd upgraded, another monthly payment for another version of something we'd had before. More channels, more options, more ways to avoid each other. The Yankees were losing. Again. I'd stopped caring around the same time Sarah stopped sleeping in our bed.

She'd left that morning. Or yesterday. Time had blurred into one continuous gray smear of baseball highlights and takeout containers. Her note had mentioned something about "finding herself" and "needing space"—the same clichés we'd both used in our twenties when we didn't know what else to say. Now, approaching forty, they felt less like promises and more like epitaphs.

I picked up the papaya. It felt heavy in my hand, absurdly present for something that had become a symbol of everything failing between us. Sarah wanted papayas now. She wanted cable packages with premium channels. She wanted weekend trips to places we couldn't pronounce. She wanted to become someone who didn't eat microwave dinners while watching baseball games someone else had already recorded.

The knife slid through the fruit's skin too easily. Inside, it was the wrong orange, the wrong texture, everything wrong. I ate a slice anyway, standing over the sink, the juice dripping onto my shirt like blood.

"Excellent with lime," I said aloud to an empty kitchen. The refrigerator hummed its indifference.

The baseball game ended. Yankees lost, 7-2. Somewhere, Sarah was probably eating something authentic, something that required preparation and intention. Somewhere, she was becoming someone else.

I ate another slice of papaya. It tasted like abandonment, which was, I suppose, exactly what she'd intended.