The Last Healthy Thing

The orange sat on the counter, already developing soft spots. Three days past peak, much like everything else in Mara's life since Thomas left.

She'd started taking the vitamin D supplements on her doctor's recommendation — 'for the mood,' she'd said, during that annual appointment where Mara had cried through the blood pressure check. Now the bottle sat beside her coffee mug, a daily reminder that she was forty-two and trying to patch herself together with gel capsules and eight-minute meditations.

Her phone buzzed. Another Slack notification from work. She'd been functioning on autopilot for months, showing up to Zoom meetings, nodding at appropriate intervals, answering emails that somehow still needed answering despite the world having ended three times over. Sometimes she caught herself walking through the apartment like one of those office workers from the old pandemic days, moving through rooms with that thousand-yard stare, that peculiarly modern zombiehood where the body keeps going while the soul's already half-packed its bags.

In the corner of the living room, the goldfish circled his bowl. Leonard. The only living thing Thomas hadn't wanted to fight over. Leonard had been Jonathan's idea — a we-got-this-together present, back when they still bought things to mark occasions, back when she believed that acquiring objects could cement a future. Now she watched his translucent fins pulse in the aquarium light, thinking about how he'd outlasted their marriage, how he'd keep swimming in his endless circles long after she figured out whatever came next.

Mara peeled the orange. The spray of citrus hit her eyes, sharp and sudden. For a moment she just stood there, breathing it in, something finally feeling real in a week of gray flatness. Later she'd call her mother. Later she'd update her resume. Later she'd decide if forty-two was too old to start over, or exactly the right age.

But first, she ate the orange, section by section, letting the juice run down her fingers, almost surprised by how sweet it was.