The Dead Serve

The papaya sat on the bench between us, ripe and weeping, its orange flesh exposed like a wound. Marcus hadn't touched it. Neither had I. We'd been coming to this padel court every Thursday for three years, ever since his divorce, ever since mine. A friendship forged in mutual ruin, sweating out our midlife crises on a rectangular stage of blue and green.

But lately Marcus had become something else entirely. A friend in name only, going through the motions of his life with hollow eyes and mechanical responses. A zombie of the man who'd once dragged me to karaoke at 2 AM, who'd helped me bury my dog in the rain, who'd held my hair back while I puked cheap merlot all over his bathroom tiles.

"Your serve," he said, voice flat as expired soda. He stood there, racquet dangling from limp fingers, staring past me at something that wasn't there.

"Marcus." I stepped closer. "When did you die?"

He blinked. The papaya's sweetness filled the silence, heavy and suffocating. It was her favorite fruit. His ex-wife's. That's why he'd bought it. That's why it sat between us like a gravestone offering.

"She's getting remarried," he whispered, and suddenly the zombie facade cracked. "He's twenty-eight. He plays padel professionally."

The pieces clicked into place with agonizing clarity. The weekly games. The gradual hollowing out. The man standing before me wasn't undead—he was in mourning, grieving a marriage that had ended two years ago while the rest of the world had moved on.

I walked over to the bench, picked up the papaya, and took a bite. It was perfect, sickeningly sweet. "He's twenty-eight," I said, "and he probably doesn't know she cries during pharmaceutical commercials."

Marcus's lip twitched. The ghost of a smile.

"She hates papaya really," I continued. "Only ate it because you loved it."

"She what?"

"Yeah. Asked me once if I'd noticed you always ordered it. Said she acquired the taste for you."

Marcus stared at me, then at the fruit in my hand. Something shifted behind his eyes—the dead coming back to life, not with violence and hunger, but with the slow, painful return of feeling.

"Your serve," he said again, but this time his voice cracked. "You're up fourteen-love. Don't make me say it twice."

I swallowed the papaya. It tasted like memory, like bitterness, like something we'd both forgotten.

"Game on."