The Weight of Orange

The orange peel lay curled on the counter like a question mark. Martha used to peel them in one continuous strip, pulling the fruit apart with surgical precision until she held the complete rind in her hand, a perfect spiral of citrusy surrender. Now David just tore at them, jagged and desperate, the way he'd been tearing through the last six months without her.

He'd told himself he was the one who'd needed to leave—that the crushing weight of their twelve-year marriage had become too much to **bear**, like wearing a coat made of stones. But standing here in the kitchen of his too-quiet apartment, listening to the refrigerator hum its lonely monotone, he wondered which of them had actually been the predator and which the prey. They'd spent so many years taking turns playing both roles.

The **cat** appeared then, weaving between his ankles with imperporate grace. Barnaby was Martha's, technically—a divorce court concession she couldn't take to her mother's place because of allergies. But the animal had made his allegiance clear in the weeks since the separation, choosing David's lap over the empty side of the bed Martha had vacated. David scratched behind the cat's ears, finding comfort in the rhythmic vibration of purring against his palms. Some kinds of love were simple. Some didn't require negotiation or compromise or carefully constructed arguments about emotional availability.

He finished the orange in three messy bites, juice running down his chin, and wiped it away with the back of his hand. Martha would have commented on his lack of refinement. She would have said something about how he used to be more careful, more deliberate. She would have been right, but that man was gone—lost somewhere between mortgage payments and failed IVF treatments and the thousand tiny disappointments that accumulated like sediment in a riverbed.

The cat jumped onto the counter and sniffed the orange peel with disdain before settling onto a patch of sunlight. David watched him and felt something shift in his chest—not healing, exactly, but something like acceptance. The weight was still there, but he was learning to carry it differently. He could **bear** it. He would bear it.

Tomorrow he would call the realtor about selling the house. Tonight he would eat dinner on the couch without a tablecloth and let the cat sleep on his legs. The days of spiral-cut orange peels were over. This was the season of messy bites and uneven edges, and somehow, that was enough.