The Riddle of the Sand

The papaya sat on the nightstand between us, overripe and weeping juice onto the coaster, like everything else in this marriage that had gone soft and forgotten its purpose.

Elena stood at the window of our honeymoon suite, framed by palm fronds that scratched against the glass like desperate fingers. Behind her, the television murmured—a baseball game in extra innings, the crowd's roar rising and falling like our own decade of false starts.

"You're doing it again," she said. "That sphinx face. Like you're guarding some ancient secret."

I wasn't. I was remembering how we'd met—twenty years ago at a seafood shack in New Orleans, where she'd ordered a whole fish and eaten it with her hands, bones and all, laughing when I'd stared. That woman was gone. In her place was this creature who parsed every silence for betrayal.

"I'm not guarding anything," I said. "I'm just tired, El. Can't we—"

"Running. That's what you're doing." She turned, and I saw the papaya reflected in the mirror behind her—yellow, spotted, collapsing under its own weight. "You've been running since the miscarriage. Since the promotion you didn't want. Since your mother—"

"Stop."

"—died alone in that apartment, and you didn't visit, because you were busy playing baseball in a corporate league that doesn't even keep score." Her voice cracked. "You hit a home run in your head every night while the world rots around you."

Outside, a sphinx moth battered itself against the lamp, drawn to a flame that would kill it. I watched it and thought: we are all just things that want what destroys us.

"What do you want from me?" The question came out small, pathetic. The baseball game ended—someone won, someone lost, the stadium emptied, and nobody cared.

Elena walked to the bed, sat, and picked up the papaya. Its skin gave under her fingers. She broke it open, revealing black seeds like dead eyes in a yellow skull.

"I want you to be in the room," she said, pulling apart sections of the fruit. "Not in the past. Not in some imaginary future. Here. With the rotting papaya and the moth that's going to die and the marriage we both know is already over."

She extended a piece to me. Her fingers were sticky.

I took it. The fruit was sweet and faintly fermented, like something that had waited too long to be consumed.

"Okay," I said. And for the first time in years, I meant it.