The Papaya at the Bottom of the Pool

The office betting pool had reached forty thousand dollars. That's what happens when you put a merger on hold for six months — people get creative with their anxiety. Mara stared at the spreadsheet, the orange cursor blinking like a heartbeat she didn't feel anymore.

"They're announcing at 5 PM," Chen said, leaning against her cubicle wall. "You in?"

She'd stopped betting three months ago, right around the time her husband moved out. Not that there was a connection. Probably.

"I have a meeting," she said, which wasn't exactly a lie.

The heat wave had persisted for eleven days. The air conditioning in her apartment had died on day three, so she'd been spending evenings at the community pool, floating in the chlorinated blue while children screamed and elderly ladies did water aerobics to 80s pop. It was the only place she didn't feel like she was suffocating.

On day nine, she'd met him there.

He'd been eating a papaya at the edge of the pool, spooning out the orange flesh with this terrifying deliberation. Like he had nowhere else to be. Like time wasn't something that happened to him.

"It's ripe," he'd said, holding out a spoon.

She'd taken it. The fruit was sweet and slightly musky, nothing like she expected. They'd talked for two hours about nothing — the heat, the properties of chlorine, the economics of fruit importation. His name was Julian. He designed hotel lobbies.

"You should come to my place," he said on day ten. "I have air conditioning."

She almost went. She'd stood outside his building, a brutalist condominium with a fountain that didn't work, papaya from the bodega on the corner in her bag like an offering, or maybe a test. But she'd remembered Simon's face when he packed his books, how he'd said, "You're always waiting for something to happen instead of making it happen."

She'd gone home to her sweltering apartment instead.

The announcement came at 4:47 PM. The merger was back on. The betting pool winners screamed. The losers made jokes about asking for advances. Mara sat at her desk and thought about Julian's spoon, the way the pool had looked at dusk, purple and strange, the papaya sticky on her fingers like a second skin she couldn't quite shed.

She thought about Simon, about all the things she hadn't said.

At 5:15 PM, she walked out of the office. She didn't go to the pool. She went to the bodega, bought a papaya, and stood on the corner, eating it with her hands, juice running down her wrists, staining her sleeves, waiting to see if she'd remember how to feel something.