Papaya Season

María stood in the kitchen, the papaya's orange flesh gleaming under fluorescent lights. David was leaving tomorrow—three years dissolved into a single cardboard box by the door.

"You need more spinach," he'd told her last night, his voice clinical, detached. "Your iron's low." As if nutrition could explain why she'd started sleeping in the guest room, why his cologne on her pillow made her stomach turn.

She placed the papaya on the cutting board. In the bathroom cabinet, her vitamin bottles rattled like dry bones—D, B12, the iron supplements David prescribed. She swallowed them religiously now, as if pill-popping could fix the corrosion spreading through their marriage.

Her phone buzzed. Ryan from accounting. " Drinks? ; ) "

María stared at the message. The fox—it had to be a fox—she'd glimpsed that morning in the alleyway, its rusted coat brilliant against dirty brick, watching her with predator eyes. That sudden flash of wildness. That hunger.

She grabbed her hat from the hook, the wide-brimmed straw thing David called "your old lady affectation." She caught her reflection in the hallway mirror: forty-three, cheekbones sharp, something feral in her eyes that hadn't been there yesterday.

The papaya sat untouched on the counter, its seeds clustered like tiny possibilities.

Her phone lit up again. Ryan. Or was it someone else? She didn't look. She just grabbed her keys, the hat settling over her hair like a halo.

Outside, the city hummed. Somewhere in the distance, something wild howled.

María stepped into the heat and didn't look back at the apartment, where the spinach wilted in the crisper drawer and the papaya whispered of all the sweet, rotting things she was finally ready to taste.