The Last Papaya

The papaya sat on the kitchen counter, softening in the silence. Mara hadn't bought it; it had appeared in her fruit bowl sometime after David left. A gift from the universe, or perhaps from the elderly neighbor who kept leaving produce on her doorstep like offerings to a grieving saint.

She sliced into it, the knife sliding through flesh the color of a sunset they'd watched in Bali three years ago. David had said then that he wanted to grow old with her, that he wanted to be that couple still holding hands at eighty, wrinkled and content. Now he was thirty-five and halfway to Chicago with a corporate development analyst named Jessica who probably ate sensible things like grapefruit and ran marathons.

The backyard light flickered on, illuminating the baseball that had been sitting on the patio table since July. A foul ball from the minor league stadium downtown—caught by David's father, who'd given it to his son with a look of pride that made David's chest swell. The old man had died two weeks before David packed his bags, and Mara had wondered if grief had simply snapped something loose inside him, some tether that had been holding them together through five years of mortgage payments and shared Netflix accounts and increasingly infrequent sex.

She ate the papaya standing at the sink, the taste tropical and unfamiliar on her tongue, like something you'd eat on vacation when you're pretending to be someone braver than you are. The streetlights cast an orange glow through the window, the same color as the sunset from Bali, the same color of the envelope containing the divorce papers that sat on the dining table.

Her phone buzzed. A text from her mother: "Thinking of you, sweetie. Remember, everything happens for a reason."

Mara typed a reply, deleted it. Typed another: "I don't know what reason this is."

She carried the baseball inside, placed it on top of the divorce papers. In the morning, she would mail them. Tonight, she would finish the papaya and drink wine she couldn't afford and maybe finally watch the documentary about space she'd been saving for when she felt like understanding her own smallness. Everything in the universe was eventually pulled into something else's gravity. Maybe that was the point.

The papaya seeds went into the trash, black and shiny and full of impossible promises.