Fruit of Forgetfulness

Maya stood in her mother's kitchen, the papaya sitting on the counter like an accusation. Her mother had once devoured them with sensuous pleasure, digging into the soft, salmon-fleshed fruit with a silver spoon, declaring each one sweeter than the last. Now dementia had hollowed her out, left her a stranger wearing her mother's skin.

"They're out of season anyway," Maya muttered, pushing the fruit aside. It rolled against an orange that had sat there for days, its skin beginning to pucker. The collision made a soft thud that seemed louder than it should.

From the living room, her mother's cat—that ancient, indifferent calico named Mango—stretched and yawned. Mango was the only one her mother still recognized sometimes, though even that was fading. The cat had outlived two husbands and now seemed prepared to outlive the woman who'd once spoiled her with fresh fish.

Maya's phone buzzed in her pocket. A text from David: *I think we should take a break.*

She stared at the message, feeling strangely hollow. They'd been drifting apart for months, two satellites in decaying orbits. And now this casual cruelty delivered at 2 PM on a Tuesday, while she stood in a kitchen that smelled of papaya and old paper and inevitable endings.

"He doesn't love you anymore," her mother said from the doorway. Maya hadn't heard her approach. Her eyes were clear for once, lucid in that terrifying way dementia sometimes granted before receding again. "Your father stopped loving me in 1998. I could taste it in his coffee."

"He died in 1997, Mom."

"Exactly." Her mother smiled, a small, wicked thing. "Time is slippery like that."

Mango twined around Maya's ankles, purring like a small engine. Outside, the afternoon light was turning orange as the sun dipped below the horizon, that particular shade of golden hour that made everything seem simultaneously beautiful and fading, heightened and doomed.

Maya picked up the papaya and cut into it. The flesh was perfect, ripe enough to weep juice onto her fingers. She ate standing at the counter, letting the sticky sweetness fill her mouth, thinking about love and memory and how they both rotted from the inside out, often before you even noticed. The cat watched her with yellow eyes, and in the other room, her mother began humming a song Maya didn't recognize, and for the first time all day, she didn't feel completely alone.