Fruit and Storm Weather

The papaya sat on the white ceramic plate, its orange flesh glistening with condensation. Elena hadn't touched it. She hadn't touched much of anything since David moved out three weeks ago.

"You're going to spoil," she muttered to the fruit. "Like everything else."

She sat on the edge of the pool—her pool, now, half the mortgage and all the maintenance—dangling her feet in the chlorinated water. The backyard felt enormous without his things, without his laugh, without the way he'd float on his back and make up stories about the constellations.

A flash of lightning split the sky, immediate and sharp. The storm had been threatening all afternoon, a bruised purple mass gathering over the valley. Another flash, and the backyard lit up like a photograph. In that split second of illumination, she saw them: the goldfish in the small pond near the fence, their orange bodies flickering beneath the water's surface like living embers.

David had bought them on impulse during the first month of the pandemic. "Something alive in this house," he'd said, already half-checked out from their marriage, already becoming something else—something that walked through rooms and sat at dinner and made love without really being there.

A zombie, she'd called him once during a fight. Not the brain-eating kind. The other kind: the living dead, the ones who kept going through motions while everything inside had already rotted away. He hadn't denied it.

Rain began to fall, heavy drops that struck the pool's surface like accusations. Elena didn't move. She thought about the papaya on the table behind her, how it would turn to mush if she didn't eat it or refrigerate it or do something with it. But she sat there, legs in the water, while the storm broke open and the goldfish darted beneath the lily pads, oblivious and alive and entirely unconcerned with human grief.

"Whatever," she said, and finally reached for a piece of the fruit. It was sweet against her tongue, uncomplicated and whole. She ate it in the rain, and for the first time in weeks, something in her chest felt less like rot and more like beginning.