When I asked my husband if he'd like to fuck instead of going to the food store, he said "There's only one apple left." I looked across the counter at the fruit bin and he was right. It sat alone with a lime that had gone bad weeks ago. No bananas, no fruit flies swarming above.

One apple should be enough, shouldn't it? I read somewhere that apples contain leptin, a chemical or nutrient or something that's supposed to make you feel full. I'm not sure if it's artificially filling, or lets you feel the fullness that actually exists. It's hard to tell sometimes how full I am, so I'll close my eyes while lying in bed and try to feel just my insides, just my stomach, the open part that waits for food, and ask—is that hunger? And when I decide that it is, I wonder, what type? It's hard to tell most times if I'm happy. If I'm doing ok.

I'm not sure if I even wanted to fuck, if someone were to present me with the choice of stripping down naked mid-day and lying under the hot heat of a ceiling fan that whirs without AC and figuring out how to make two bodies see each other, work together, or having an apple on the small of the couch alone, biting into its skin and hearing the sound of its meat grind between my teeth— I'm not sure what I would choose. I'm not sure why we need more than one apple in the summer anyway. Seems like the time where you bring home a disintegrating blue carton of strawberries or a dozen peaches in those big open boxes with plastic lids. Even though peaches don't fill you, or they don't fill me. They sit on my countertop waiting for the moment where I've had enough of being useless, where I move my comforter watching Love Island into the kitchen to become a whole baker—pulling out butter and brick-hard brown sugar and plastic bagged-flour from the cabinet and slicing the peaches one by one. I'm gonna make this cobbler, I say out of nowhere, I'm gonna turn the stale smell of this house into a home, and I try to open my shoulders over the cutting board like the yoga teachers always say. Bring them out and down, they tell me, and so I push them to what feels like open but can never see a difference in the mirror. In the mirror they still look like two bones that frame my face, creeping upwards like they want to swallow my head whole. Do I even want this cobbler? It will end up sitting beneath tin foil in the fridge and when I ask my husband, would he like a slice, he'll look at me for a moment and say, no thanks, I think I'm good.

I don't choose the cobbler either, so it sits and rots until it's time to scrape it into the trash. The way it all tumbles out and plops, wet-like, on top of the crumpled-up paper towels and dust from the dust bin, it almost feels like an orgasm gone wrong. Then I have to let the dish soak until the brown spots come loose, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't choose the sex. Did I say that yet? That I'd choose the apple on the couch? The quiet around each munch and chomp, my husband dozed off on his side of our bed and a man across the street outside my first-floor window sitting with his arms resting on a wheelchair staring at the trees. He doesn't see me but I see him and sometimes it feels like that's how this always goes. The peace and the sadness in that, being tight-shouldered and invisible but able to see, the leptin going down with each swallow and either making me feel like this is all enough or maybe actually being enough, and really, do I even need to know the difference? There's one apple left, and it's enough that we could skip the food store and stay and have sex, but really, it's enough that we could not. I told you already what I would choose, even though I'm the one who did the asking, and nowhere in this story did anyone ask me anything.


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