Tropical Depression

Margot stood in the produce aisle, her thumb hovering over the **iPhone** screen where his name still sat at the top of her favorites list. Three weeks since he'd walked out with his monochromatic wardrobe and that insufferable espresso machine, and she still hadn't deleted him. Pathetic, really—thirty-seven years old and clinging to digital breadcrumbs like a lovesick teenager.

She reached for a **papaya**, its mottled yellow skin promising something sweet and foreign, unlike the predictable life she'd been living. Her apartment, now half-empty, echoed with a solitude she'd forgotten how to navigate. The **cable** bill was due, another reminder that she was still paying for channels she watched while falling asleep alone, while he was probably somewhere new, someone's sofa, someone's life.

A **dog**—some nondescript terrier mix—wagged its tail at her from the end of the aisle, tethered to a man in a faded linen shirt who was examining avocados with the intensity of someone choosing which mistakes to make next. The dog looked at her with that particular canine wisdom that sees through pretense, as if it knew she was a woman suspended between before and after.

Margot's palm brushed against the papaya's skin, and for a moment she imagined her future written there in the fruit's geography—not that she believed in that nonsense, but grief made superstitious cowards of everyone. She'd been reading articles about the psychology of sudden loss, how the brain rewired itself around absence like water finding new paths through broken stone.

"They're better when they're soft," the man with the dog said, not looking up from his avocados. "Like most things."

She almost laughed. Instead she placed the papaya in her basket, where it nestled beside the wine and the single-serving microwave meals.

"I'll keep that in mind," she said, and for the first time in weeks, the edges of her mouth lifted into something that wasn't exactly a smile but wasn't not one either.

The dog barked once, a brief celebratory sound, and Margot walked toward the checkout, the papaya heavy in her hand like an unfamiliar promise she was finally ready to keep.