Ripe Season

The papaya sat on the counter, its skin mottled with yellow like something dying slowly. Elena had bought it two weeks ago, back when they still spoke in full sentences, before everything rotted from the inside out.

Now the condo was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and the cat—his cat, technically, though it had always preferred her—pacing circles around her legs. Miso sensed it too: the end of something.

"I'm going to the pool," she called out, though she knew he wasn't listening. The office door was closed. Had been closed since Thursday, since she'd found the messages.

The water stretched out blue and artificial, the pool empty at this hour. She slipped into the deep end, letting the chlorinated silence envelope her. Floating on her back, she watched the sky turn from bruised purple to tentative morning pink. This was where she'd first learned she was pregnant with the baby they'd lost. This was where he'd proposed, drunk on sangria and possibility.

Her phone buzzed on the lounge chair. Marco.

She didn't answer.

Back inside, she sliced the papaya. It was soft, nearly fermenting, sweet in that way that makes your chest ache. She thought about last night—how he'd looked at her across the dinner table, pushing his spinach around his plate, not meeting her eyes. The resignation of it. The way he'd already left, really.

The cat jumped onto the counter. Elena set down a slice of fruit. Miso sniffed it delicately, then walked away.

"That's fair," she said aloud.

She packed a bag. Not everything—just what mattered. The photos, her mother's jewelry, the good wine glasses. She left the papaya on a cutting board, a cluster of black seeds like a small galaxy suspended in gelatinous orange.

At the door, she paused. The office was still closed. She could hear the faint click of his keyboard through the wood, steady and rhythmic, like a heartbeat that refused to acknowledge it was already dead.

"The papaya's ripe," she said to the closed door. "If you want it."

Then she walked out into the heat of the day, leaving the cat to watch through the window as she disappeared into the water-bright glare of morning, carrying nothing but the certainty that some things, once they start to rot, can never be saved.