The Fruit of Waking

Maria pressed the fork into the papaya, its flesh yielding like soft butter. The seeds spilled across her desk—tiny, perfect black beads that reminded her of nothing so much as the eyes she'd been making at her spreadsheet for three years.

She was thirty-four, and she had become, without quite noticing, a zombie.

Not the Hollywood kind—no rotting flesh, no hunger for brains. The corporate kind. The kind that showed up at 9 AM, answered emails until lunch, attended meetings where words were spoken but nothing was said, then went home to scroll through social media until sleep came like a mercy.

Her mother had called last night. "You sound tired, mija."

"I'm fine, Mom. Just busy."

The papaya had been a mistake—a rare impulse purchase at the grocery store, a splash of orange in a cart full of frozen dinners and meal replacement shakes. She'd bought it because it reminded her of their honeymoon in Costa Rica, before David's promotion, before the mortgage, before they'd started sleeping with their backs to each other.

David sent a text: *Working late again. Don't wait up.*

Maria typed *OK* and set the phone face down.

The water cooler hummed in the break room—that steady, mindless drip of hydration for the walking dead. She filled her cup and watched the surface tremble. Something about the water's relentless small movement made her chest tighten.

Her reflection in the break room mirror showed dark circles, a mouth that had forgotten how to smile without effort. A face that belonged to someone who had stopped choosing.

She thought of papaya in Costa Rica—how David had fed her slices from his fingers, juice running down their chins, laughing at nothing because they were twenty-six and the future felt like something they'd invent together, not something that would happen to them.

Maria returned to her desk. The papaya seeds stared back, absurdly beautiful against the quarterly reports.

She took another bite. Sweet, slightly musky, alive.

Then she opened her email, found the resignation template she'd drafted six months ago and never sent, and began to type.