Fruit on the Desk

The papaya sat on Elena's desk like a small, amber sun — her one act of rebellion against the fluorescent tyranny of corporate America. She'd bought it on a whim from the street vendor who always seemed to appear when she needed permission to feel something real.

"Bullshit," David said, leaning against her cubicle wall, "that's what I told them. Pure bull."

His hair was thinning in that particular way that happened to men who spent too much time pretending their bonuses mattered. Elena imagined him at forty, fifty, sixty — same posture, same complaints, same carefully cultivated expression of beleaguered importance.

"The merger?" she asked, though she already knew. Everything was the merger these days.

"They want us to hit the ground running. Quarter's already shot to hell, and somehow that's our fault." He laughed, that hollow laugh that meant he'd already accepted whatever they planned to do to him. "Remember when we played softball that summer? The company league?"

Elena remembered. She'd played outfield, spending most games watching baseballs arc toward her like small, betraying comets. David had pitched, throwing strikes that nobody could hit, as if athleticism could compensate for whatever desperation had driven them all to spend Saturday afternoons pretending to be colleagues instead of strangers competing for the same shrinking slice of something.

"I hit a double that one game," she said.

"You did."

"I haven't run since."

They stood there for a moment, the papaya between them like an unspoken thing, growing riper by the hour. David's phone buzzed — his wife, probably, or someone else who expected him to be somewhere else, someone else. He excused himself with that practiced apologetic smile, the one that meant he was sorry but not enough to stay.

Elena picked up the papaya. It was soft now, giving slightly under her thumb. She sliced it open at her desk, the flesh bright and shocking against the gray laminate. Somewhere on another floor, people were deciding which of them would still have jobs in three months. She took a bite, sweet and strange and entirely unlike anything she was supposed to be doing, and for a moment, it was enough.