The Last Breakfast

Maya stood at the kitchen counter, knife hovering over the orange. She'd squeezed it too hard earlier—juice ran down her wrist, sticky and accusing—much like the last three years of her marriage. David sat at the table, his back to her, spine curved in that familiar way that used to make her want to trace his vertebrae with her fingertips. Now it just looked like defeat.

"I got papaya," she said, her voice flat. "Remember how we used to have it in Bali?"

David didn't turn around. "That was before, Maya."

Before. The word hung between them like smoke. Before the promotion that required seventy-hour weeks. Before the hotel room receipts she'd found in his coat pocket. Before she stopped being the person he'd met and became someone who checked phone notifications at 3 AM with shaking hands.

She sliced into the papaya flesh. It was mealy, overripe—a disappointment, like so many things lately. Her palm still bore the faint scar from where he'd grabbed her wrist last month, hard enough to bruise, when she'd asked whose number kept calling. He'd apologized. He always apologized.

"Are you going to eat?" she asked, placing a bowl of wilted spinach in front of him. His stomach churned at the sight of it; she knew he hated spinach. She used to care about his preferences. Now she served it out of something small and cruel that had grown inside her like a tumor.

Outside, their dog began barking at nothing—a rhythmic, urgent sound that matched the pounding in her chest. Buster had stopped sleeping through the night around the same time their bed became a demilitarized zone. Animals sensed these things. The house was saturated with it: resentment, indifference, the particular rot of two people who'd run out of things to say and started saying cruel things instead.

"Maya." David's voice cracked. "I don't think I can do this anymore."

She looked at the orange segments glistening on her cutting board, sharp and bright and utterly insufficient against the dark spreading through their kitchen. The papaya's seeds spilled across her palm like black tears.

"I know," she said. "Me neither."

Buster's barking ceased. Somewhere in the sudden silence, something settled—terrible and final as a door closing forever. The spinach sat untouched between them, growing cold.