The Last Orange at Sunset

Elena pressed her palm against the hospital window, the glass cool against her skin. Outside, the sky burned that impossible shade of orange you only see at funerals—the kind of sunset that makes you believe in significance, even when you know better.

Her father's room smelled of antiseptic and old paper. He'd been reading the same book for three days, not turning pages, just staring at words that had stopped making sense years ago. Elena adjusted the knitted hat on his head—his hair had abandoned him somewhere around the time her mother left, and dignity required coverage now.

"You're still here," he said, not as a question.

"I'm still here."

He laughed, dry and brittle. "Your mother said she'd always be my friend. Then she told me friends don't abandon each other at oncology appointments."

Elena unwrapped an orange she'd brought from the breakroom—stolen fruit, petty theft to feel something real. She sectioned it carefully, the way he'd taught her when she was six and learning that some things require patience. The citrus scent cut through the sterile air, sharp and alive.

"I'm not her," she said, placing a wedge on his tongue.

He closed his eyes. "No. You're worse. You stay."

She thought about Marcus, texting her from three time zones away about rent and cats they didn't own. About the friends she'd stopped calling when grief became a lifestyle. About how loyalty sometimes felt like a slow death.

"I should visit more," she said instead.

"You shouldn't." He opened his eyes, suddenly lucid. "That's the thing they don't tell you about dying. You don't want an audience. You want the people who love you to be somewhere else, living loudly."

He squeezed her hand, his palm dry and papery against hers. "Go home, El. Let me have this sunset alone."

She left the orange on his nightstand. In the hallway, a woman in a blue hat wept into a phone. Elena kept walking toward the elevator, toward somewhere else, toward living loudly.