Papaya Before the Funeral

The papaya sat on her kitchen counter like an accusation. Fully ripe, its skin mottled yellow-orange, soft enough to leave fingerprints if she pressed too hard. Sarah had bought it three days ago, before the phone call, before her mother's final decline into that strange, wandering half-consciousness where hospital beds and hospice rooms blurred together. Now the papaya was almost overripe, its sweetness curdling toward fermentation, just like the timing of everything in her life.

She cut it open anyway. The seeds scooped out easily, slippery and black, gathering in the compost bowl like tiny eyes. In the living room, her father's old goldfish—Casio, named for the keyboard he'd bought and never learned to play—circled his bowl in endless patient laps. He'd outlasted the dog, outlasted the marriage, and now he'd outlasted her mother. The fish had been her mother's project, one of those small obsessions that dementia sufferers latch onto. Feeding time had been sacrosanct. Sarah had found herself sobbing over pet store flakes the day after the funeral.

"You still swimming?" she asked the fish. He ignored her, his orange scales dull in the morning light.

The dog—Marcus, her sister's retriever—had been cremated last month. His urn sat on the same shelf as Casio's bowl, a terrible sort of intimacy that nobody had the energy to address. Sarah had found herself thinking about Marcus in the hospice room, how his aging body had failed him in such predictable, linear fashion. Her mother's decline had been different—erratic, looping back on itself, moments of terrifying clarity followed by hours of staring at nothing.

She ate a piece of papaya. It was almost too sweet, floral and musky, the kind of intensity that made her jaw ache. Her mother would have hated it. Too messy, too exotic, the kind of thing she'd call "unnecessary" while reaching for a plain apple.

Sarah had a massage client at noon. She'd be swimming in eucalyptus-scented oil, working the knots out of some stranger's back, her hands moving through the automatic patterns while her mind wandered back to this kitchen, this papaya, this fish swimming its endless circles. The work grounded her, strangely enough. The physicality of it. Other people's pain made sense—it had location, tension, release. Grief didn't follow those rules.

Casio surfaced, his mouth breaking the water's surface with a tiny pop. She watched him sink again, weightless in his contained world. She finished the papaya, sticky juice on her fingers, and washed her hands before her appointment. Some things you carried forward. Some things you washed away. The fish kept swimming, and that had to be enough for now.