The Last Orange

Martha stood on the pedestrian bridge, the steel cables cutting through the fog like piano wire. She peeled the orange—her lunch, her luxury, her small rebellion in a life that had somehow compressed itself into the size of a cubicle. The citrus scent hit her, sharp and foreign, like something from another decade.

Below, the river moved with that terrifying indifference she'd come to recognize in everything lately. She remembered swimming in Lake Michigan as a girl, how the cold water had felt like permission—permission to scream, to thrash, to be alive without apology. Now her body felt like something she carried around in a worker's comp case.

"They're laying off fifty people," Rick had told her over coffee that morning, his voice flat as he scrolled through cable news on his phone. "Including Debbie from Accounting. Remember? The one who helped us with the mortgage papers when we bought the house."

Martha had nodded. She remembered Debbie. She remembered the house. She remembered the version of herself who believed in promotion cycles and 401(k)s, who thought dog-paddling through the right meetings would eventually feel like swimming.

The orange sections were weeping juice through her fingers. She ate them anyway, one by one, letting the acid burn her tongue. On the bridge's suspension cables, a bird had built a nest of wire and trash—a suspended home in mid-air, somehow surviving.

"What are you doing out here?" a woman asked, walking past with a stroller.

"Eating lunch," Martha said, and it wasn't a lie. She swallowed the last orange wedge, spit a seed into the wind, and watched it fall toward the river—tiny, brave, and utterly alone. Somewhere downstream, it might take root. That was the thing about seeds: you never really knew where the drowning ended and the growing began.

She wiped her sticky hands on her work slacks, untucked her blouse, and walked back toward the office building. Not because she wanted to. Because the cables held up the bridge, and for now, the bridge held up her. The swimming would have to wait.