Greens and Drought

Elena stood at the kitchen counter, her hands working mechanically through the bag of spinach. The leaves were already wilting, much like everything else in her marriage. Three years ago, Marcus would have come up behind her, wrapped his arms around her waist, and made some joke about rabbit food. Now, he was probably already at the office, checking his emails before anyone else arrived.

She dropped the spinach into the pan, watching it collapse under heat. That's what she felt like—something vibrant reduced to a shrinking version of herself, steam rising where substance used to be.

The phone buzzed on the counter. David.

She shouldn't answer. She definitely shouldn't have given him her number at that conference in Chicago. But she also shouldn't have spent two hours in his hotel room discussing architecture and marriage and the peculiar ache of realizing your life has become smaller than you ever intended.

"You thinking about it?" David's voice came through, warm and dangerous.

"I'm making lunch," she said, which was true and also a lie.

"What's on the menu?"

"Spinach. It's supposed to be good for you."

He laughed. "Everything that's actually good for you tastes like sacrifice."

The water in her glass caught the afternoon sun, casting fractured light across the counter. She'd stopped drinking wine at lunch six months ago, around the time she'd stopped expecting Marcus to notice her new dresses or her silence or the way she stared at the ceiling fan each night, willing herself to want less.

"Meet me tonight," David said. "Just coffee. Just talking."

"I can't."

"Why?"

"Because I promised someone something once, and I don't know how to tell him that I've become a different person than the one who made that promise."

The silence stretched between them, charged and terrible.

"There's an orange tree in the courtyard of my building," David said finally. "The fruit falls, and nobody eats it. It just rots there, looking like something that was supposed to be sweet."

Elena turned off the stove. The spinach was overdone, dark and unfamiliar, transformed beyond recognition by nothing more than heat and time.

"Tonight," she said. "Seven o'clock."

She hung up before she could change her mind, before she could remember that the last time she'd felt truly alive, it had been dangerous too. The spinach sat in the pan, a small green tragedy, and she realized she was hungry for the first time in years.