The Last Supper

Elena arranged the papaya slices with surgical precision on the white ceramic plate, their sunset flesh glowing in the harsh fluorescent light of her hospital room. Six months since diagnosis, three weeks since David stopped visiting, two days since she'd stopped caring about the infusions of vitamins that were supposed to save her.

She could hear thunder building outside, the kind that stalked across the sky before lightning finally tore the darkness open. Good, she thought. Let the storm burn everything down.

The hospital's nutritionist—a woman with tired eyes who'd clearly never had the pleasure of eating something that actually tasted good—had left a lecture on her bedside table about iron-rich foods. Spinach, mostly. As if a bag of wilted greens could fix the wreckage chemotherapy had made of her body. As if the right combination of nutrients could undo the fact that at forty-seven, Elena was learning what it meant to become a ghost in her own life.

"You have to fight," David had told her, standing in the doorway with his coat already on, like he'd been waiting for an excuse to leave. "This is just a setback."

The irony wasn't lost on her—he'd never stayed for anything that mattered. Not her mother's funeral, not her father's stroke, not the miscarriage she'd spent three days bleeding through in their bathroom while he was at a "mandatory" happy hour.

He couldn't bear witness to her dying either.

She picked up a piece of papaya, let its sweet juice coat her tongue. It was the first thing she'd tasted in months that didn't taste like chemicals or despair. Outside, lightning finally struck, illuminating the rain streaking down her window like tears she didn't have the energy to cry anymore.

Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. David's name.

Elena watched it ring, thinking about how easily she could simply not answer. How she could just let this moment—this perfect, terrible moment of papaya and rain and being completely, finally alone—be enough. How some things, once broken, couldn't be fixed by vitamins or optimism or men who stayed only when the sun was shining.

She ate another piece of papaya, swallowed the storm, and let the phone ring itself into silence.