The Wilting

The spinach had been in the crisper for three weeks. Sarah stood before the open refrigerator at 2 AM, her iPhone casting a ghostly blue light across the kitchen, illuminating the bag of greens gone slimy and black at the edges. Like our marriage, she thought, then immediately hated herself for the cliché.

Mark was asleep upstairs—or feigning it. They'd become masters of the art of coexistence, two zombies moving through shared rooms, careful not to touch, not to speak, not to acknowledge the elephant that had grown to fill every space between them. The elephant's name was grief, though they never said it aloud. Their daughter had been gone two years now, and somehow they'd forgotten how to be people without the job of parenting her.

Sarah's phone buzzed—work email, of course. Always work email. She stared at the screen without reading, watching water condense on the refrigerator door and bead down like tears. When had they last really looked at each other? Really spoken?

She remembered buying the spinach. They'd talked about trying again—eating better, maybe exercising, maybe pretending that healthy bodies could house healthy hearts. That was six months ago, when they'd still been trying.

Her fingers hovered over her sister's contact. She could call. She could say she couldn't do this anymore—this half-life, this walking-through-mornings, this existence that felt less like living and more like waiting. But she didn't.

The refrigerator hummed. The spinach rotted. Somewhere, water dripped.

"Can't sleep?"

Sarah jumped. Mark stood in the doorway, gray-faced in the harsh kitchen light. For a moment, she saw him as he'd been—before. For a moment, he saw her too.

"No," she said.

He crossed to the sink, filled a glass with water, and drank it in three long swallows. She watched his throat move, remembered how she used to trace that line with her fingers.

"The spinach's bad," she said.

"Throw it out," he said, and left.

Sarah closed the refrigerator door. The darkness rushed back in.