The Riddle of Empty Seasons

The papaya sat on the counter, softening into bruised yellow. Sarah had bought it three days before the hospice nurse came, full of strange optimism about new diets, fresh starts. Now it rotted alongside his marriage, alongside his future.

Mark stood in the kitchen at 2 AM, the refrigerator's hum the only sound in a house that used to hold laughter. He felt like a zombie moving through someone else's life—performing the motions of grief without feeling them yet. Numbness had its uses.

The cat appeared then, Sarah's stray, the one she'd taken in "temporarily" five years ago. It wove between his legs, purring insistently, demanding the breakfast she'd always given it. He picked up the can, his hands remembering what his heart couldn't yet process.

In the living room, the TV played softly—baseball, recorded from whenever. He'd never cared about sports, but Sarah had. She loved the geometry of it, the green field stretched like a promise. Now he watched it for clues: how to stand at home plate when life pitched you something you couldn't swing at. How to keep going when you'd already struck out.

Her tumor, she'd said, was a sphinx—a riddle with no answer, only an inevitable endpoint. Chemotherapy failed to solve it. Radiation failed. The experimental trial with its brutal side effects failed. The riddle consumed its asker.

He sliced into the papaya, its flesh revealing black seeds like tiny coffins. The smell hit him—sweet, cloying, the scent of a thousand hospital mornings. She'd made him eat it once, claiming antioxidants, hope, the litany of things that might work.

What none of them tell you about grief: it's not the absence that destroys you. It's the presence of all the things that remain.

The cat jumped onto the counter, licked at the papaya juice on his knife. Mark set the bowl down, let it eat. Something in the house should still take pleasure, still find sustenance.

Outside, dawn bruised the sky the same color as the fruit on his counter. Another day. He'd shower, dress, call the hospice line, sit by her bed and hold the hand that used to fit perfectly against his. He'd learn again to be a person who wasn't half of a whole.

The zombie could feel itself beginning to wake, and that was the true terror—not that he'd never feel again, but that feeling would eventually come, and it would hurt like nothing ever had.

But for now, there was papaya to discard. A cat to feed. A ballgame to watch, one more time, before the sun came up.