ripping the blues from your throat (in g minor)

the art of buying bananas

Daniel "Technoblade" Moriangel drives into Manberg-on-Avon on a grim Tuesday morning, the kind where the clouds hang lower than branches of a weeping willow and cast the whole world in grey.

Tommy's brother makes his return

MIDWAY THROUGH THE CALCULUS LECTURE, TOMMY GETS A TEXT FROM PHIL. 

can you grab milk and fruits from the store?

Tommy sinks into chairs and softly groans. Eryn looks over at his best friend and slides the phone over to himself so he could see it better.

"He's being a bitch again?"

Tommy scoffs, "You don't even know the half of it."

So Tommy's at the local grocer's two hours later, after a less than pleasant bus ride. The man sitting in front of him smelled so strongly of cigarettes that Tommy found himself sniffing his own blue jacket long after he got off at his stop to see if the smell stuck to him.

He makes it to the dairy aisle without anyone visibly cringing at the potential cigarette smell, so he considers himself safe.

Looking at the refrigerator holding the milk, he can't remember what kind of milk Phil usually buys. He just goes with the whole milk and calls it a day. It's not like Phil would be around or care enough about what type of milk he gets.

With that he goes over to the produce section while making sure his earbuds don't get caught in the shopping basket handles. He's listening to some hip hop artist that Eryn recommended. He's gonna need apples and bananas, maybe he'd grab some pears too.

He puts a bag of "freshly picked" apples in his basket. Bright red, just how he likes. The beat's interesting, he decides, and takes a second to add the song to a playlist. The bananas were next.

Tommy likes to think there's an art to buying bananas. An art he's studied for years and is the sole expert on. He could write papers, he thinks, all about the time it takes for a banana to ripen to its matte yellow skin (two days of phil being out) or to become fully browned (perfect for banana bread by the way!) or whatever millions of things you can make from neglected bananas.

(He could also write papers about how he was all alone, going from bright green and youthful to brown and sagging, barely able to keep shape day to day.)

He scans over the banana display, scrutinizing each with a careful eye. Some are too yellow, and would likely bruise in the ride home. He lands on a bunch that's the perfect shade of chartreuse with a few on the more yellow than green side. That's not a problem though, Niki showed him a new banana muffin recipe he wanted to try.

"Those bananas are not going away, you know."

Tommy yanks out his earbuds, "What?"

Joan Davies stands next to him, holding her own basket full of various vegetables and a baguette. She pays no mind to Tommy's little scare and choses a bunch herself.

"Ms. Davies!" Tommy greets her, "I didn't see you there."

The older lady huffed. She was a short woman, nearly a foot and some shorter than the lanky teen. Wrinkles carved themselves in her face, made by the sculptor called time. Her hair was untouched though, soft brown strands pulled into a simple updo. "No one ever does," She states bitterly.

He only knew Joan from her position as a librarian at his old school and retired when Tommy was in Year 8. Now she lead the local book club full of other dotting grandmothers and —