The Riddle of Summer's End

Maria stood in the kitchen of the apartment they'd shared for seven years, slicing papaya with practiced precision. The fruit's flesh yielded beneath her knife, orange and glistening like the sunset they'd watched from this same window countless times. Outside, the neighbor's kid threw a baseball against the garage door—thwack, thwack, thwack—a metronome counting down the minutes until David came home for the last time.

She'd cut her hair that morning. Eleven years of growth, the hair David had always buried his hands in when he made love to her, the hair he'd absently twisted around his finger while watching movies, now lay in a dark pile on the bathroom floor. The mirror showed a stranger's face—exposed, severe, unmistakably her own.

The cable box blinked 12:00 in blue neon, mocking her. They'd never bothered to set it after the last power outage. Another thing they'd never gotten around to, like fixing the kitchen faucet, or having that conversation about children, or acknowledging the way they'd been drifting apart like continents, slowly and imperceptibly, until suddenly there was an ocean between them.

When David walked through the door, carrying a box of his things, he didn't comment on the papaya or the hair. He just stared at her, his eyes searching.

"You look like the sphinx," he said finally. "Riddles and silence."

"The sphinx asked riddles," she replied, surprised by the steadiness of her voice. "I'm done with questions."

He flinched. Outside, the baseball thudded against garage wood one final time before fading into evening. The papaya sat on the counter between them, slick and raw, its black seeds arranged in a perfect, fatalistic spiral. She wondered what riddle she'd been solving all these years, what answer she'd been too afraid to speak, and whether endings were always waiting inside beginnings, like seeds inside fruit.