The Papaya on the Counter

The papaya sat on the granite counter like a tropical accusation—bright orange flesh speckled with black seeds, foreign in our Seattle kitchen. Elena had bought it. She always brought home things I didn't know how to eat.

"Try it," she'd said yesterday, her hair still wet from the rain, darkened to near-black. "It's like everything you've ever tasted, but none of it exactly."

Now she was in the shower, and the papaya was the only thing between us and the conversation we'd been avoiding for three months.

I picked up a knife. Outside, the sky purpled. The first storm of autumn. Lightning fractured the clouds—a sudden spinal column of white light that lit up the kitchen like a strobe. In that flash, I saw my own reflection in the window above the sink: thirty-five, mouth slightly open, holding a knife over an exotic fruit while my marriage dissolved down the hall.

When had we become this? Two people who could spend an entire evening talking about papaya instead of saying what we meant?

"I don't know how to cut this," I called out, though she couldn't hear me over the water.

The lightning came again, closer this time. The thunder shook the windowpanes.

I sliced into the papaya. It bled orange juice onto the cutting board. The flesh impossibly bright against our gray lives. I ate a piece right there, standing over the sink. It was exactly as she'd said—familiar and strange, sweet with something almost peppery underneath. It tasted like beginnings and endings at once.

I heard the water stop. The storm raged harder now, relentless. I took another bite, then another, until my hands were sticky and most of the fruit was gone. Seeds scattered like evidence.

When Elena walked into the kitchen, towel-drying her hair, she found me leaning against the counter, orange-stained, alive in a way I hadn't been in years.

"Well?" she asked.

"I ate it," I said. "All of it."

She smiled. Just a small one, but real.

"There's more," she said. "At the store. We can go tomorrow."

And for the first time in months, I believed we might.