What the Bear Knew

The papaya sat on the counter, rapidly browning, like some abandoned experiment in entropy. Elena hadn't bought it. Marcus had, three days ago, during that brief window when he'd still been trying — bringing home strange fruits from the international market, suggesting they try new things together, as if exotic produce could repair what twelve years of marriage had slowly unraveled.

Now her iphone vibrated against the counter, Marcus's name lighting up the screen. Again. She watched it ring through to voicemail, something curdling in her chest that was equal parts relief and something like nausea.

"You have to talk to him sometime," Sarah had said over drinks that had turned into drinks-that-weren't-really-drinks-because-she-was-driving. "Closure isn't real, but limbus is worse."

Elena picked up her phone, thumb hovering over the callback button. The last text he'd sent still waited beneath her thumbprint: I saw the bear today.

She hadn't understood until she'd driven past the tattoo parlor on Fifth — the one where she'd gotten the bear inked between her shoulder blades at twenty-two, foolish and romantic and convinced that permanence was something you could choose. The bear with its half-open eyes, the one she'd told Marcus represented her grandmother's spirit animal, the one that had watched over them through two apartments and one house and three miscarriages and that terrible year after her mother died when Marcus had held her every night through the wet, animal sounds of her grief.

The bear that had watched, passive and permanent, while they'd somehow become strangers who shared a bed.

She sliced into the papaya now, its flesh giving too easily beneath the knife, soft and overripe and weeping juice. The smell hit her — sweet, fermented, almost unbearable. Marcus had brought it home because she'd once mentioned she'd never tried it, back when they still discovered things about each other. Back when they still wanted to.

Her iphone lit up again. A text this time: Can we just talk? Please.

Elena ate a piece of the papaya, its taste complex and unfamiliar — sweet beneath the rot, something almost metallic beneath the sweet. Like grief itself, she thought. Like love that had overstayed its welcome and yet had nowhere else to go.

The bear on her back seemed to shift, a phantom weight between her shoulder blades. Watching, as it always had. Waiting, perhaps, for her to finally choose something else to be permanent.

She typed: I can't talk about this yet. Then deleted it. Typed: The papaya is bad. Then deleted that too.

In the end, she called him. His voicemail picked up on the first ring. "Marcus," she said, and her voice sounded like someone else's. "I saw the bear too. It's still watching us."

She hung up before she could say anything else, before she could say that she didn't know if the bear was witnessing or haunting, only that it had seen everything and refused to look away. The papaya continued its slow oxidation on the counter. Somewhere in the city, Marcus was listening to her message. And the bear, ink permanent and unblinking, waited to see what would happen next.