The Papaya Room

Elena watched him eat the papaya, the juice staining his chin like something wicked. Marcus at his most vulnerable — mouth open, heart presumably somewhere in the room with them, though she couldn't locate it anymore.

"You're staring," he said, not looking up from his plate.

"I'm thinking."

"About what?" The same question he'd asked every morning for seven years. Some days she answered. Some days she lied.

The cable droned on the television behind her — news of disasters elsewhere, weather that wouldn't touch them here in this suffocating paradise of a resort. They were supposed to be fixing things. That was the arrangement. Five days in St. Lucia, couples counseling via proxy, papaya on the breakfast buffet.

"I'm thinking about bears," she said.

Marcus finally looked up. His left eye twitched — the tell she'd stopped noticing until now. "What?"

"Bears. How they hibernate. How they wake up starving and eat themselves alive if there's no food." She stood up, chair scraping against the tile. "How sometimes they just sleep through everything and die in their dreams."

"Elena..."

"I don't want to hibernate anymore." She picked up her key card. "I don't want to wake up starving."

She left him there with his papaya and his half-eaten promises. Outside, the air was thick and real. The cable from the television snaked out through a vent in the wall, a black umbilical cord feeding them both poison from somewhere else. She followed it to the edge of the resort property, where it disappeared underground.

A woman at the neighboring villa was smoking on her balcony. She raised her cigarette in a toast.

"Leaving?" the woman called.

Elena thought about bears. About waking up. About the taste of something real.

"I already did," she said.

The papaya would rot. The television would keep droning. Somewhere, a bear would wake hungry and find something worth eating.

She walked toward the road.