Of My Eye

I’ve recently started a Flash Fiction course by London Lit Lab. This has been a very welcome push to write more and share more. Here’s the first assignment. I’ll add the brief in comments later.

The way it caught the light upset her most.

Peerless. A high shine. A weight heavy on her chest.

She felt it sharp between her teeth, inflaming irritating, where food always got stuck.

Not an heirloom variety feted by food lovers with their sandpapery skins but a much more classic archetypal cliche red with a hint of green. Taut glossy. Skin like the photoshop product on a supermarket lorry or the pore free face of the latest night cream wearer. The acid of these fruits claim renewal and transformation.

Absurdly laden with meaning and in no way original: Eve, Cezanne, Mac..

Shouldn't she be insulted? Wasn’t he suggesting a lack? Of innocence, vitality or charm?

She knew later nothing he did was spontaneous. ‘Here. Take this.’ Clipped script betrays his attempt to be casual. He smelt fastidious.

She thought about the fruit baskets quietly rotting by the hospital beds. Competing with that sludge smell of old flowers, stale water soupy.

When she had been a ward assistant there were cubicle-like rooms, flower rooms where she had scrubbed cloudy plastic vases and picked sodden leaves out of the plug hole. So much disposal on those wards. Realising in retrospect years later two chairs in front of the door meant someone had died.

She carefully decidedly placed it on the kitchen windowsill.

Drumming her fingers ignoring the regret at not saying no. No thank you. I don’t want this apple from you.

She imagined he would send her fruit every day. Wholesome more than exotic. Instructional insistent persuasive.

She didn’t need to touch it to know how sticky it had become. It was seeping. Dents had appeared in the skin. The air fizzed.

Weeks later she could barely contain it her fingers sinking as she bit.

(London Lit Lab)