The Eighth Inning

Maria sat at the kitchen island, the remains of a papaya scattered across her cutting board like a crime scene. She'd bought it on impulse yesterday at the grocery store—trying to cultivate some version of herself who ate exotic fruits and practiced yoga before dawn. The version who wasn't currently divorcing a man who still sent her texts at 2 AM asking if she'd kept his baseball card collection.

On the television above the refrigerator, a baseball game played to an empty room. Bottom of the eighth, two outs. She'd stopped caring about innings when Richard stopped coming home.

The papaya tasted wrong—too sweet, something false about its perfume. She spit it into the sink.

Her phone buzzed. Richard again. *The sphinx needs feeding,* he'd texted. The sphinx was his mother's porcelain statue collection, which he'd left behind when he moved out last month. Maria had been ignoring his increasingly desperate requests to retrieve them, as if holding them hostage might somehow leverage back the five years she'd given him.

She turned off the television. The silence roared like a bear waking from hibernation.

That's what Richard had called her, the final night: a bear—aggressive, impossible to reason with, towering over him with her unreasonable expectations. Things like fidelity. Communication. Not disappearing for weekends without explanation.

Now she was running. Not literally—though she'd started jogging at dawn, past the same houses where other couples lived predictable lives. She was running from the papaya-eating, yoga-practicing version of herself she'd been trying to become. The version who would have compromised longer, accepted less, swallowed sweet lies like overripe fruit.

Maria stood, washed the papaya down the disposal. The machine groaned, chewed, swallowed.

*Let him come for his sphinx,* she thought. *Let him explain why his mother's porcelain mattered more than the woman who cooked his dinners and forgave his absences.*

Outside, the neighbor's dog barked at something in the dark. A car passed. The world kept moving, indifferent to endings and beginnings.

Maria locked the back door and turned off the kitchen light. Tomorrow she'd buy real groceries. Things she actually liked. Tomorrow she'd stop running toward and running from, and finally just sit with whoever she was becoming.

For tonight, that was enough.