By Daphne rose
In the late summer the branches of the mandarin trees are heavy with fruit. Fat and orange and sweet, sunlit in the golden hour. Here in the hills, the sky is the most shocking shade of blue. It smells like grass and mud. The gnats buzz, floating over tall, wind-swept grasses, heralding autumn. The orchards are green and orange and ripe, the dimpled skin of the mandarin cool in your palms. Your life, for once, feels ripe to you, an orchard of futures ready to be plucked and devoured. In these late summer months, you feel dizzied with it, as though you are sun-drunk. Your high school sweetheart used to take you for long drives up here in the hills, and you would kick off your shoes to sit cross-legged in the passenger’s seat. You never learned how to peel mandarins, and you would clumsily pick at the skin with your fingernails until he sighed with tender exasperation, took the fruit from your hands, peeled it for you, one long coil of whitish rind, and handed it back. He cracked your knuckles for you, too. It made you nervous to do it by yourself. The two of you drove past the old dive bar, and you count the motorcycles lined up outside, the battered old sign that threatens to topple off its ledge if a patron of the bar so much as sets his glass down too forcefully. Past the sign that says “CHICKS FOR SALE” in handwriting so scratchy it looks like the chickens wrote it themselves. You drove past the fire station and the big Catholic church, and you made him, the agnostic son of a pseudo-devout Catholic family, tell you stories about Midnight Mass. The ritual of it fascinates you. It feels foreign, and you are embarrassed at how little of it you understand. Embarrassed at the sheer force of your curiosity. You want to know what a saint is. He is willing to tell you, but you don’t have the courage to ask. Instead you tell him about the alpaca farm your mother took you to up here, the roadside stand you found once and could never find again. In a month or two, you will break up with him. He’ll take your call, his voice already resigned—he knew you were going to break up with him as soon as he got home from the East Coast. When he appears on your doorstep with a bouquet of roses, you stand on the other side of the door and watch him, silently, through the peephole until he leaves. He was good but not good for you. You feel heavy with grief, light with possibility. You have chosen your future. You have grabbed it with both hands, picked off the skin by your fingernails, and eaten it, and now hope drips down your forearms, your chin. Strange and sticky and sweet.
Daphne Rose (she/her) is the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Sequoia Speaks. She is located in Northern California.