Seeds We Carry

The baseball card was still in his wallet, edges soft as old suede. Johnny hadn't thought about it in years—not since the accident, not since his father had started wandering the house at night, a hollowed-out version of himself, eating expired food from the back of the fridge, eyes fixed on something Johnny couldn't see. That was what dementia looked like: not death, but something worse. A body moving without its inhabitant. A zombie.

Johnny started running after the diagnosis. 5Ks turned into half-marathons, half-marathons into something else—movement as protest, as proof he was still alive, still present in his own skin. The morning air, the rhythm of breath, the ground beneath him: these were the only things that felt real anymore.

He met Elena at the grocery store. Both of them reaching for the same papaya, fingers brushing. Her hair was dark, streaked with silver at the temples. She was maybe ten years older, tired around the eyes, but there was something fierce in her posture—like she'd survived things and hadn't let them break her.

"My husband used to love these," she said, pulling her hand back. "Before."

"Before?"

"Before the stroke. Now he's... somewhere else."

They ended up talking in the produce aisle, surrounded by pyramids of unblemished fruit. Johnny told her about the baseball card, about his father's vacant gaze. Elena talked about her husband's laugh, the way he'd hum while cooking, how she still bought spinach every week even though he couldn't eat solid food anymore. The papaya sat between them on the conveyor belt, a riot of improbable orange.

They went to her place. Not for sex—though that happened too, eventually—but just to be near someone who understood what it meant to watch someone disappear in slow motion. To witness the emptying of a person while their body kept going.

Her kitchen smelled of garlic and grief. They drank wine on the back porch, watching the sun set behind the oak tree, and for the first time in two years, Johnny didn't feel like running.