The Last Green Thing

Maya stood in the kitchen of her suddenly empty apartment, staring at a plastic container of spinach that had turned to slime in the crisper drawer. Three weeks since David left, and she was still discovering the small ways a life for two had become impossible to sustain alone.

Her iPhone buzzed on the counter—her mother calling again, no doubt to ask if she was eating enough, if she'd found a new therapist, if she was taking her vitamins. Maya let it go to voicemail. The vitamins sat in a cabinet above the sink, a colorful array of promises she couldn't bring herself to keep: D for the seasonal depression that settled like fog each November, B-complex for the energy she couldn't summon, omega-3s for a brain that felt increasingly porous, leaking thoughts and memories she couldn't retrieve.

She missed Barnaby, David's cat, more than she missed David some days. The cat had chosen to leave with him—a betrayal that still stung with its quiet logic. Animals knew. They sensed when something had rotted from the inside out.

The only living thing remaining was the palm plant in the corner of the living room, its fronds brown at the edges, drooping with what Maya recognized as neglected heartbreak. David had bought it on their first anniversary, something about creating a sanctuary, about growing something together. Now it was just another thing she was failing to keep alive.

She reached for her phone instead of the vitamins, scrolling through photos from two years ago: David laughing over dinner, Barnaby asleep on Maya's chest, both of them sunburned and happy in Mexico. The palm in the background of every shot, green and impossibly tall.

Maya deleted the photos. All of them. It took seventeen minutes.

Then she watered the palm, opened the container of slimy spinach to dump it in the compost, and swallowed three vitamins without water. Some days, the small betrayals were the only way forward.