Fruit of the Dead

Maya stood at the kitchen counter, knife poised over the papaya's sunrise-colored flesh. The fruit sat obstinate on the cutting board, its skin mottled with yellow spots like age spots on something that had seen too much. Outside, rain drummed against the windowpane — water, relentless and indifferent, much like the silence stretching between her and Daniel.

He sat at the table, back to her, hunched over his iPhone like a scavenger picking through remains. The blue light painted his face in ghostly hues, illuminating the dark circles beneath his eyes. Three years of marriage, and somehow they'd become strangers who happened to share a bed. Daniel had stopped looking at her months ago. Now he only looked at screens, at notifications, at the digital lives of people he'd never actually touch.

"The papaya's ripe," she said, her voice sounding thin in the room's heavy air.

No response. Just the tap-tap-tap of his fingers against glass, a sound like rain on a tombstone.

Maya sliced through the fruit. Orange juice bled onto the cutting board, vivid and alive in this house of the dead. That's what they were — zombies in love's aftermath, moving through days that felt indistinguishable from nights, eating meals that tasted like cardboard, sleeping back-to-back in a bed that had grown too large for two.

She remembered when they'd met, how Daniel's eyes had crinkled when he laughed, how his hands had known the topography of her body better than she knew herself. Now those same hands only knew the contours of his phone, his thumb finding its home on the screen's edge.

The papaya seeds scattered like black pearls. "I'm going to stay with Sarah for a few days," she said, and this time her voice didn't sound thin at all. It sounded like water breaking through a dam, like the first note of a song she'd forgotten she could sing.

Daniel's fingers stilled. The iPhone screen dimmed to black.

Maya picked up the papaya half, its flesh glistening in the gray morning light. She wasn't hungry anymore. She was something else — something that remembered what it meant to be alive.