What We Carry Into the Water

The papaya sat on the terrace table, bright as a traffic light against the weathered tile. Elena had ordered it from the market because it seemed like something someone who stayed in a Mexican villa would eat. Someone who wasn't a forty-two-year-old woman whose husband had emailed her a separation agreement three weeks before their fifteenth anniversary.

She cut into the fruit, the knife sinking through skin that felt too much like her own lately—soft, yielding, easily bruised. The flesh inside was startlingly orange, filled with black seeds that looked like nothing so much as tiny eyes watching her judgment.

The first taste was sweet and musky, almost rotting. A little like how her marriage had tasted toward the end, before she'd noticed the rot was there all along.

She left the half-eaten fruit and walked down to the infinity pool, the blue water stretching toward the ocean like a promise she couldn't keep. Her phone buzzed in the pocket of her robe. David again, wanting to discuss the division of assets. As if there was anything to divide except the hollow space where their life used to be.

She shed the robe and stepped into the water. The shock of cold against her skin was almost violent. She began swimming laps, counterclockwise, then back again, cutting through the water until her muscles burned and her lungs strained. This was the only time her mind stopped spinning—that space between breaths where grief couldn't follow.

Then she saw it.

A bear stood at the edge of the pool, massive and impossible, its dark fur gleaming in the sunset. It raised a dripping snout and sniffed the air.

Elena froze. This couldn't be real. Bears didn't exist in coastal Mexico. Unless she'd finally cracked—unless grief had conjured this monster, this manifestation of everything she'd been running from since she was sixteen years old and her mother had told her, "You're too sensitive, Elena. You feel everything. It'll destroy you."

The bear dipped its enormous head and drank from the pool, its pink tongue lapping the chlorinated water. It didn't look at her. It was just thirsty.

And Elena understood with perfect clarity that she had been running her whole life—running from feeling, running from loss, running from the essential animal truth that she could survive being swallowed by the dark. That sometimes the only way through was to stop running, stand still, and bear witness.

The bear lifted its head, water dripping from its muzzle like diamonds, and ambled back into the jungle without glancing back.

Elena swam to the edge and pulled herself out, her body trembling with something beyond cold. She walked back to the terrace and sat down before the papaya, its orange flesh now warm from the sun, and took another bite. It was still strange, still unfamiliar, still not what she would have chosen.

But she would learn to swallow it anyway.