Papaya at the End of the World

The papaya sat on Maya's desk like an incendiary device, bright orange against the corporate gray. Three years at this firm and she'd become something else—not quite alive, not quite dead. A zombie in a blazer, scrolling through her iPhone through lunch breaks, through weekends, through what should have been her sister's wedding.

Her coworker David had left his hat on her chair before being escorted out by HR. A battered fedora that smelled of cloves and desperation. She'd been sleeping with him for six months in the stairwell, their encounters quick and wordless, desperate flesh against concrete. Now he was gone and the hat remained, evidence of their quiet crime.

She'd stopped answering her mother's calls. Stopped noticing the seasons. The only thing that made her feel anything was the golden retriever she saw every morning from the train—a dog named Barnaby who pressed his nose against the fence, watching commuters with what looked unnervingly like forgiveness. Today she'd finally stepped off the platform, knelt before him, buried her face in his fur. He'd licked her cheek with a tongue like wet velvet, and she'd wept into his collar while commuters streamed past.

The papaya had been David's parting gift—a ritual he'd performed every Friday since they'd started their affair. "Eat something that lived," he'd say, slicing through the fruit's thick skin with a steak knife he kept in his desk drawer. "Remind yourself what the sun tastes like."

Maya cut into the papaya now. The blade sank through flesh the color of a bruised sunset. She lifted a piece to her mouth, closed her eyes. Sweet. Alive. The taste of something that had grown toward light, not shuffled toward quarterly projections. She put on David's hat, felt the ghost of his head shape still pressed into the band, and opened her phone to book a flight home. The zombie contract was void. The dog had shown her the way back. The papaya was the first thing she'd tasted in three years.