What Remains in the Cart

The fluorescent lights hum their perpetual three AM song as Elena moved through the empty aisles, the cart's one squeaky wheel marking her progress like a metronome for her insomnia.

She reached for the papaya — his favorite, the one he'd eat with increasingly theatrical enthusiasm whenever she made the mistake of buying it, as if consuming tropical fruit could somehow compensate for all the ways he'd failed her. The papaya sat heavy in her hand, ripe and fragrant, mocking her with memories of breakfast table silences and the way he'd always leave the sticky spoon on the counter.

Nearby, a woman in a faded cardigan was aggressively reading the label on a bottle of vitamin D supplements, her brow furrowed with the intensity of someone searching for meaning in a world that refused to provide it. Elena wanted to tell her that the vitamins wouldn't fix what was broken — that she'd spent three years trying to supplement her way out of loneliness, swallowing pills like tiny prayers, but the holes inside had only grown larger.

Instead, she pushed her cart toward produce, where the spinach lay wilting in its misted cage. She and Marcus had fought about spinach once, after his mother asked why Elena never cooked greens anymore. The memory of his defense — "she's just not domestic, that's all" — still burned three years later, domestic as an insult, as if keeping house were the only way to prove love.

"Don't forget the cat food," she whispered to herself, the reflex automatic. Then she remembered: Barnaby was gone. The tumor had come six months ago, taking with it the last living thing that still greeted her at the door. Marcus had cried at the vet's office, genuine tears that had almost made her forgive him everything. Almost.

The papaya went back on the shelf. The vitamins stayed in their aisle. She abandoned the cart midway through the store, leaving it parked like a ghost ship between the frozen foods and the bakery, and walked out into the predawn darkness, her hands empty and beginning, finally, to feel like her own.