What Remains

The papaya sat on the counter, turning from green to bruised yellow, a clock measuring time in fruit. It had been four days since Marcus walked out, leaving behind his multivitamins—the expensive kind with iron and omega-3s—in the medicine cabinet. Julia swallowed one each morning with the grim efficiency of someone performing a necessary surgery on herself.

The cat, Barnaby, kept looking at the door. Animals lived in the present tense, but they also knew when their world had been carved open. He'd taken to sleeping on Marcus's pillow, as if his body heat could summon the man back.

At the office, her boss Gary was what her mother would have called "a bull in a china shop." Gary preferred "disruptor." He'd fired three people this month with the cheerful ruthlessness of someone playing a video game where no one actually died. The office humbled you. It made you grateful for small things: a hot cup of coffee, a sunset, a papaya that hadn't yet rotted.

What she couldn't shake was the goldfish. It had been a joke gift from Marcus last Valentine's Day—something about how their love should be simple, uncomplicated. It swam in endless circles in its bowl on her nightstand, opening and closing its mouth in perpetual surprise. Three seconds of memory, they said. Sometimes she envied it.

Tonight she cut into the papaya. It was finally soft, yielding to her knife like forgiveness she wasn't ready to give. The flesh inside was bright and terrible, like a wound that refused to scar. She ate it standing at the sink, juice running down her chin, while Barnaby wove between her ankles demanding dinner, and the goldfish opened and closed its mouth in its tiny glass universe.

Tomorrow she would buy fresh vitamins. Tomorrow she would look for a new job. Tomorrow she would change the goldfish water. But tonight she let herself be someone who still ate the fruit her lover had touched, someone who still believed that things could ripen before they rotted.