What We Feed the Dead

The papaya sat on the counter, its skin freckled with brown like the woman I'd become. Marcus had brought it home from the bodega on 3rd Street, some gesture of domesticity that felt almost violent in its normalcy. We hadn't touched each other in three months. We moved through our brownstone like two zombies in a reasonably priced horror film, shambling past each other in the hallway, our eyes carefully averted, our mouths forming the shapes of words we no longer meant.

At the padel club on Saturdays, we played with exaggerated enthusiasm. Rachel, my friend from college, watched us sometimes from the sidelines, her face drawn tight with something I refused to name. She'd started texting me at odd hours. Nothing inappropriate. Just: *Thinking of you.* *Remember that trip to Barcelona?* The kinds of messages that eat holes in a marriage.

"Your teeth," Marcus said over dinner that night. We were eating sautéed spinach, something green and fibrous and aggressively healthy, as if either of us believed we had a future worth preserving. "You've got spinach."

He reached across the table, his fingers brushing my lip. The touch sent electricity through me, the kind that makes you nauseous because it's been so long. His eyes caught mine, and for a second, we were both there, both alive, both trapped in the wreckage of what we'd built.

"Leave it," I said.

"What?"

"The spinach. Just leave it."

He dropped his hand. The papaya sat on the counter behind him, softening, fermenting, something that would never be eaten. We were feeding our dead marriage on small indignities and old memories, pretending we couldn't taste the rot.

Rachel texted that night: *The papaya's always sweetest right before it turns.* I stared at my phone in the bathroom, Marcus asleep in the other room, and thought about how some things have to spoil completely before you can admit they're gone.