Two Oranges
(not my painting)
ok second to last short story of mine im posting tonight. this was previously published in W&M’s The Gallery but I edited it a bit to make some of the vocab make more sense (thanks Cameron) I got some mixed reviews on this one! I don’t know what to think of it.
Two Oranges
There lay two oranges, freshly squeezed, freckled by filth that only boasted the nature by which they were brought up. Those hot Nevada summers steadily ripened the fruit, but even the heat, blistering and unfeeling as it was, held no match to the suckled, pink tongue as it fixed its way around citrus, a delight only hindered by the nuisance of pulp. So, fresh from the market they lay, in the knitted bag of a lady Professor, doused in the specific stench of that fourth glass of wine—the descent from normative to uncouth, the descent from a woman to a wo(man) inebriated. The son sips from the fridge at night, the father from his flask at his desk.
It was to be said that this was the marking of something new. This was all part of her new routine, the market, and what a good routine it was shaping out to be! First she would grade three papers, and then ask her supervisor on what on earth she could be doing wrong. She thought of herself as a decent educator; there were certainly at least three women, typically those who dressed like they were missing a tie, who hung onto her lips when she spoke, even if her colleagues joked that they’d rather climb into them.
It’s always the little lesbians who sit up front, Professor Moutgil had once spat. She smiled remembering how angry he seemed when he said it, like it was some great injustice to him.
With their knee high socks and skirts that don’t match the hair. Oh, don’t get me started on the hair.
Anyway, it was strange to her, the mismatch between the eye movement of the class and the papers that were handed to her. Some were beautiful in their youth and ineptness, so tangentially intellectual she supposed they could act as a great study on how vitality and passion crept its way through even the most rudimentary prose. A rogue sentence could be called many things, many awful things, but not uninspired. The students were not uninspired, they were inspired by the wrong things. After she graded a few papers, she’d hastily stuff them in her sling bag and by habit, make sure all the grades were facing downward, with the most obscene ones folded. It was a service, she’d thought! Then she would bring out the wine, and its redness recalled an earthy type of serenity; stoic, yet so clearly borne of air, and it felt like that when she drank it. Sure, it was expensive, but it was the type of expense she carefully allotted for when her assistant did her budget, and it was classified in the reds—an absolute necessity!
By the time she gulped down her fourth, her throat nearly brought her back to her third, and she took that as a signal to get behind her wheel and head to the market. This is where she’d pick up these oranges, and manage a smile underneath a straw hat to the father of a student of hers, maybe it was that Billy, pimpled-Michael-who-loves-Sharene, it was a boy who shared the name of a 70s jazzman, she knew that for sure! And then she’d slur that she loves the weather here and the Father would ask, not arrogantly but with this distinct reluctance, the type men save for their wives, Well, what’s different about the weather at this market than by the college? And she’d say, the people. The people are different. The people here are more earthborne, they look like they’ve stuck their fingers in dirt for fun, like that dirt has traced itself in them as a parting gift. I doubt many of my students have ever planted a seed. Orange? She extended her arm out to the Father, and he put his head down and blushed like he’d been propositioned, mumbled that he really better get going, it's late and his wife is waiting for him and all, but he eyed the orange a bit longer than he should have, because even men can not resist citrus!