Juice Box Kind of Tuesday

The orange sat on his desk like a small sun, its dimpled skin catching the fluorescent office lights. Marcus hadn't eaten it in three days. It was becoming a thing—his own personal installation art about decay, or maybe just about how he couldn't make himself do the simplest things anymore.

His iPhone lit up again. Sarah, asking about dinner Saturday. They'd been separated four months and she still texted him like nothing had changed. Maybe for her, nothing had. The lawyer kept telling him to document everything, keep the texts for the custody discussion, but Marcus couldn't bring himself to treat his marriage like evidence in a case he was losing by default.

He popped a vitamin D supplement. Three a day, the doctor said. Your levels are catastrophically low, the doctor said, like it was Marcus's fault the sun abandoned him for an entire Cleveland winter. He swallowed it dry, like he'd swallowed everything else lately—his father's death, the demotion at work, the way his daughter looked at him when he forgot her school play.

"Marcus."

He jumped. Karen from accounting stood in his doorway, holding something. "Your son left this again."

She handed him a baseball, scuffed and grass-stained, with a Sharpied signature across the sweet spot. Leo's team had lost the championship yesterday. Marcus had meant to be there. He'd even put it in his calendar, set three alarms, and then sat in the parking garage for two hours staring at the concrete wall until the game ended.

"Thanks," Marcus said.

"You okay?" Karen asked, and the way she said it—like she already knew the answer—made something break open in his chest.

"I'm going home," he said, standing up.

"It's 10 AM."

"I know."

He picked up the orange, finally. It was soft now, giving under his thumb. He peeled it in the elevator, juice running down his wrist, sticky and bright and overwhelmingly real. For the first time in months, something tasted like something. He ate the whole thing, section by section, letting the mess happen, letting it stain his shirt cuff.

He called Sarah from the lobby. "I'll be there Saturday. What time should I pick up Leo?"

"Six," she said after a pause. "He's got baseball practice at seven. You could—you could come with us."

"Okay," Marcus said. "Okay."

He walked out into the morning sunlight, vitamin D coming for free, and found he didn't hate it quite as much as he'd expected.