The Last papaya

The papaya sat on the counter, softening by the hour. It was supposed to be breakfast yesterday, and the day before, but Maya kept forgetting. Like everything else in the refrigerator, it had become a monument to good intentions gone wrong.

"You bought it," David said from the couch. He was watching something on cable, some documentary about deep sea creatures that neither of them cared about. The television cast a blue glow across his face, highlighting the circles under his eyes.

"You could eat it," she said, chopping spinach for a salad that neither of them wanted.

"I don't like papaya."

"You used to."

"A lot of things changed."

Maya dropped the knife. It clattered against the countertop, loud in the silence of their apartment. She watched an orange peel curl away from itself in the garbage bowl, a bright burst of color in a gray room.

The argument had been brewing for weeks. David's promotion, his hours, the way he came home smelling like other people's perfumes and corporate anxiety. Maya had found herself identifying more with the spinach—wilted, forgotten in the back of the refrigerator, slowly turning into something unrecognizable.

"Are you going to say anything?" she asked.

"What is there to say?"

She remembered their honeymoon in Hawaii, how they'd eaten papaya every morning, sweet and musky, juice running down their chins. They'd been so young then. They'd promised each other everything.

Now David muted the television. The silence was worse.

"I ran into Sarah today," Maya said, her voice steady. "She asked how we were. I didn't know what to tell her."

David's jaw tightened. "What did you say?"

"That we were fine. That we were happy. That we were eating a lot of papaya."

He turned to look at her finally. His eyes were tired, but something else was there too—fear, maybe. Or recognition.

"Maya—"

"Don't. Just don't."

She turned on the faucet. Water poured into the glass she'd left out hours ago. She watched it overflow, spilling onto her hands, cold and clean and endless. Something about the way it kept coming, regardless of anything else, made her start to cry.

David stood up. The cable from the television snaked across the floor like a divide neither of them could cross anymore.

"I don't know how to fix this," he said.

"Me neither," she said. "But maybe we should stop pretending."

The papaya sat between them on the counter, too soft now, too sweet, like something that had waited too long to be consumed.