The Last Papaya

The internet went down at 8:47 PM, the cable severed somewhere between our building and the world beyond. Marcus didn't notice. He was already unreachable, sitting on the balcony in that trance-like state he'd been slipping into for months—some emotional zombie, hollowed out by grief or burnout or whatever it was that he refused to name.

I stood in the kitchen, slicing a papaya I'd bought two days ago hoping its sweetness might remind him of our honeymoon in Oahu. The fruit had ripened too fast, its flesh grown soft and fermenting at the edges, much like whatever remained between us. I scraped it into the trash, the smell cloying and sad.

"You're like a sphinx," I said to him through the sliding glass door. "Sitting there with your riddles and your silence."

He turned slowly, his face a mask I couldn't read anymore. "What's the riddle?"

"The riddle of us," I said. "The riddle of when this became two people sharing space instead of two people building something."

The papaya juice on my fingers grew sticky. Somewhere downstairs, someone was pounding on the building's utility door, shouting about the cable outage, about their show, their connection, their whatever. I wanted to pound too—to make noise about what I'd lost, the way he'd been disappearing one small piece at a time.

Marcus stood up and came inside, closing the door on the city's darkness. He reached for my hand, the one sticky with fruit juice, and held it like he was trying to remember what touch was supposed to feel like.

"I'm not a riddle," he said quietly. "I'm just trying to figure out if I still know how to be the person you married."

The papaya sat in the trash, too ripe and too late. But he was still here, still asking questions. Sometimes that has to be enough.