Wilting

The spinach lay wilting on her plate, a forest of dark green surrendering to heat and neglect. Maya watched it as if it might reveal something about the last three years of her marriage — how things start crisp and promising, then gradually lose their structural integrity until they're just a limp shadow of what they once were.

'Are you going to eat that?' David asked, not looking up from his iPhone. The blue light reflected in his glasses, two rectangular ghosts floating where his eyes should be.

'My appetite seems to have gone elsewhere,' Maya said. She pushed the spinach aside with her fork, exposing the papaya beneath — golden, segmented, impossibly foreign against the domestic backdrop of their dinner table. David had brought it home yesterday, some gesture of reconciliation that felt more like evidence that he'd forgotten she hated tropical fruit. Too sweet, too perfumed, too reminiscent of that ill-fated anniversary trip to Costa Rica where they'd run out of things to say by day three.

David's phone chimed. He swiped, typed, swiped again. The rhythm of his disconnection.

'Work?' Maya asked, though she already knew the answer.

'Just something that can't wait.' He didn't look up. 'You know how it is.'

She did know. She knew exactly how it was — how everything else, everyone else, came first. How her husband had become a series of notifications, a presence most available through screens.

'Maybe you should marry the phone,' she said, and the words came out lighter than she expected, almost playful. But the air between them grew suddenly heavy, charged with the terrible lightness of finality.

David looked up then. Behind his glasses, his eyes were startled, like an animal caught in headlights. 'What?'

Maya stood up. The papaya rolled off her plate and landed on the table with a soft thud, spilling its seeds like tiny secrets. 'Nothing,' she said. 'I think I need some air.'

As she walked to the door, she heard David's voice behind her, uncertain and hollow: 'Maya? Wait.'

She kept walking. Outside, the city lights blurred through sudden tears. She had no idea where she was going, only that she couldn't stay in that room one moment longer, watching everything she'd loved wilt under the heat of neglect.