The Last Supper

Julia stood in her kitchen at 11:43 PM, the fluorescent humming above her like a dying insect. She was forty-three years old and still somehow didn't know how to be a person who slept at normal hours.

The biopsy results had come back benign that afternoon — the relief so profound it felt like a physical weight lifted from her chest, followed immediately by the absurdity of having spent three weeks convinced she was dying. Now she found herself making the dinner she'd been too afraid to plan.

She chopped spinach with methodical precision, the knife's rhythm the only sound in the apartment. Green fragments scattered across the cutting board like fallen leaves. David would have made some joke about how she was finally eating vegetables, but David had left eight months ago for a woman who owned a golden retriever and didn't have panic attacks in grocery store parking lots.

Her phone buzzed on the counter — her sister, probably wanting to celebrate the clean bill of health. Julia ignored it. She wasn't ready to perform relief yet. She was still processing the weird anticlimax of it all, the way life just kept requiring you to show up even when you'd mentally checked out.

The orange she'd bought sat on the counter, its bright skin mocking the gray exhaustion coating everything. She peeled it violently, citrus oil spraying onto her wrists. The scent hit her — sudden and sharp as childhood summers, her mother's kitchen, the way time folded in on itself until she was simultaneously seven and forty-three and wondering when she'd stopped feeling like herself.

"You've been running yourself ragged," her therapist had said that morning, and Julia had wanted to laugh. Running toward what? Away from what? The word implied direction, purpose. She felt more like she was vibrating in place, a tuning fork struck by the universe's careless hand.

She stood at the window, eating spinach straight from the pan, watching the city blur past. The steam fogged the glass. Somewhere out there, David was probably sleeping. Somewhere, a bear was waking from hibernation, emerging into a world that had kept turning without it. Julia understood that particular disorientation — the way you could close your eyes for what felt like a moment and open them to find everything had changed.

"Okay," she said aloud to the empty kitchen. "Okay."

Tomorrow she would call her sister. Tomorrow she would figure out what came after almost-dying but not actually dying. Tonight, she stood with her forehead against the cold glass, eating warm spinach with her fingers, while the orange peel curled like a question mark on the counter.