The Fruit of Dead Dreams

The papaya sat on Mara's desk like a small, tropical accusation. Perfect golden skin, faint freckles ripening toward decay. She'd bought it yesterday with the desperate optimism of someone who still believed she might eat something that wasn't delivered through a drive-thru window.

Now it was day four of the pyramid scheme—no, not a scheme, a "multi-tier marketing opportunity," as her coworker Brad had corrected her with the earnestness of the recently indoctrinated. Brad, who three weeks ago had been trapped in the same fluorescent-lit purgatory as her, now wore silk ties and spoke about "financial freedom" while his eyes remained stubbornly dead.

Zombie was the wrong word, Mara thought. Zombies wanted something—brains, flesh, the hot pulse of life. Brad wanted nothing. He had achieved the perfect capitalist nirvana: complete emptiness wrapped in expensive fabric.

Her iphone buzzed on her desk. Tom again.

She watched the screen light up with his name, feeling that old familiar water rising in her chest—the panic, the grief, the crushing weight of something that used to be love drowning her from the inside. They'd talked about escaping together once. Running away to somewhere with real water, not the stagnant kind pooling in her lungs.

That was before the papaya incident. Before she'd realized Tom's dreams were as hollow as Brad's eyes.

Brad was at her desk now, his smile fixed and terrible. "Mara, have you thought about the investment tier? The exponential growth potential?"

She looked at the rotting papaya, at Brad's zombie-sweet face, at her iphone still glowing with Tom's name like a dying star.

"Actually," she said, standing up, "I have been thinking about it."

She picked up the papaya, perfect and rotting and golden, and hurled it across the room. It splattered against the pristine whiteboard like something violent and alive.

"What I've been thinking," she said, walking toward the door, "is that pyramids were built for dead people. And I'm not ready to die yet."

She left her iphone on her desk. Let Tom drown without her. Let the machine keep buzzing. Somewhere out there, there was real water, waiting.