Fruit of False Summers

The cable box had been flickering for weeks, a strobe-light interruption to our already fractured evenings. Marcus sat in his recliner, eyes locked on the baseball game—the Yankees down by three in the eighth—while I stood at the kitchen counter, slicing into a papaya I'd bought on impulse. Something about its gravid, alien shape had appealed to me during the lonely grocery run.

"They're going to blow it," he said, not turning around. "Just like they did last September."

"The game or the season?" I asked, though I wasn't listening. The papaya's flesh was shockingly orange against our gray countertops, its black seeds like suspicious eyes. We'd never bought one before. We were people who bought apples, potatoes, things with names everyone knew. Things that made sense.

"Both. Both seasons." Marcus finally looked at me, or past me, at the cable box blinking its demonic red light. "You think he's gonna call the repairman tomorrow?"

"He," I said, sliding the papaya into a bowl, its juices weeping against ceramic. "Right. Because women don't know about coaxial cables and connection issues. Because that's not, what? Two-thirds of my actual goddamn job."

He sighed, that married-man's sigh that said: here we go again, another argument about nothing, another night where everything becomes about everything. "I just meant the landlord, Elena. Christ. The landlord."

I brought the papaya to the coffee table, sat on the floor instead of the couch. A deliberate distance. The baseball game roared to life—the Yankees had rallied. Two men on base.

"Try it," I said, pushing the bowl toward him. "It's supposed to be exotic. Expensive. Something we're not."

Marcus took a tentative bite, made a face like he'd bitten into something already rotting. "Tastes like musk and disappointment," he said, and for a moment, I almost laughed. Then I didn't.

"We used to be people who would try things," I said, watching the cable's hiccup become a full-blown blackout. "We used to be people who could afford expensive fruit."

"Elena—"

"I filed the papers yesterday," I said to the dark screen, to the papaya, to the baseball game we'd never see the end of. "I'm leaving next month."

The cable chose that moment to come back, flooding the room with light and sound. The Yankees had won. Somewhere, confetti was falling. On the floor, between two people who didn't know each other anymore, the papaya sat untouched, its orange flesh already beginning to brown, already forgetting what it had meant to be ripe.