The Papaya Incident

Mara moved through the office corridors like a zombie, her eyes glazed from three consecutive nights of preparing for the merger that would determine whether she still had a job in six weeks. The fluorescent lights hummed their usual headache-inducing melody, and she could feel the vitamin supplements rattling in her purse—a desperate attempt to convince herself she was taking care of herself when she'd barely eaten a real meal since November.

"You look like death," Eleanor observed, not unkindly, from her cubicle. She was peeling a papaya with surgical precision, the bright orange flesh somehow obscene against the beige cubicle walls. "My mother sent this. Said I needed more potassium. Want some?"

Mara stared at the fruit. She hadn't thought about papaya since her honeymoon in Costa Rica, five years and one failed marriage ago. Carlos had loved it. He'd eaten it every morning, juice running down his chin, laughing at some joke she couldn't remember now. They'd talked about opening a bakery, about babies, about growing old together. Instead, they'd grown apart, the way people do when dreams meet mortgage payments and the slow accumulation of disappointments.

"Sure," Mara heard herself say. Eleanor handed her a wedge, and she bit into it automatically. Sweet. Impossibly, violently sweet. It tasted like the morning before everything went wrong.

"You okay?" Eleanor asked, and Mara realized she was crying.

"I'm fine," she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. "Just tired."

"We're all tired," Eleanor said. "That's why we're here. That's why we let them treat us like disposable parts. Because we're too tired to imagine anything else."

Mara looked at the papaya in her hand. She looked at the vitamin bottle peeking from her purse, supplements for a life she wasn't sure she wanted to sustain anymore. She thought about the merger, the promotion she might get, the salary bump that would let her afford a better apartment in a city she hated.

"What if," she said slowly, "we stopped being okay with it?"

Eleanor laughed, a bright, surprised sound. "Then we'd have to figure out who we are when we're not tired all the time."

Mara finished the papaya. It was the first real thing she'd tasted in months. "I think I want to find out."