The Last Papaya

The papaya sat on Mara's desk like an accusation. Perfect, spherical, sunset-colored—a gift from Tom, who still believed gestures mattered in department meetings. Mara hadn't eaten it. She couldn't. Her stomach had been twisted into knots since the restructuring announcement, since she'd walked past the conference room and seen Tom's name on the elimination list through the glass walls.

He was dead weight on paper. But Tom with his tropical fruit and his terrible puns was the only thing keeping Mara from feeling like the rest of them: zombies in business casual, shuffling between Zoom calls, their eyes glazed over from spreadsheet-induced paralysis. She'd caught her own reflection yesterday—hollowed out, makeup applied by rote, wondering when she'd stopped recognizing the person staring back.

Now she stood outside his office, her palms sweating against her skirt. The papaya was heavy in her hand. An orange sunset blazed through the floor-to-ceiling windows, casting everything in apocalyptic light. Tom was packing a box. A photo of his daughter. A spinach-green mug from some charity run. A plant with leaves curling toward the window like desperate fingers.

"You should have this," she said, placing the papaya on his desk. "It was going to go bad."

He looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time in three years. "You knew?"

"I saw the list."

"And you didn't say anything."

"What could I say?" Her voice cracked. "We're all just surviving, Tom."

He laughed, bitter and exhausted. "That's the hell of it, isn't it? We're not even doing that well."

Mara walked back to her cubicle as the orange light faded into gray. She sat at her desk, opened her laptop, and stared at the spreadsheet. Behind her, she heard Tom's footsteps recede toward the elevator, and she forced herself to keep typing. Some survival instinct, some remnant of the person she used to be. Some zombie reflex that wouldn't let her stop moving even when there was nowhere left to go.