The Weather Inside

Maya balanced the orange on her dashboard as she sat in traffic, rain pummeling her windshield. The fruit had been sitting there for three days, since she'd grabbed it from the bowl Marcus kept stocked by the door—his small gesture of domestic care that now felt like a reproach. She'd been sleeping in the guest room for two weeks.

Her iphone buzzed in the cupholder. Sarah again. Her sister's third call since lunch.

"He left, didn't he?" Sarah had said yesterday. "You can tell me."

"He hasn't left." Maya hadn't elaborated. What could she say? That Marcus hadn't done anything wrong? That his crime was persistence, his steady love the very thing that made her skin crawl? That at 38, she'd finally realized she didn't know how to be happy?

The pharmacist had recommended the vitamin D supplements last month. "Winter's coming, even here in LA. You'll feel better."

She'd been taking them for weeks, but the light hadn't returned.

Lightning split the sky outside her car—sudden, violent, illuminating the gridlock with a flash that made her flinch. In that brief, stark illumination, she caught her own reflection in the rearview mirror: eyes that looked nothing like her own, mouth pressed into a line she didn't recognize.

She turned right at the next intersection, away from their house, away from the dinner Marcus would have waiting, away from the life she'd built like a careful architecture of reasonable choices. She drove toward the beach, toward the storm, toward something she couldn't name yet.

The orange rolled off the dashboard as she accelerated. It fell to the floorboard, somewhere near her feet, and she let it stay there—small, bright, and forgotten.