People Need People (And Other Stories About Humans)

Tangerine Sleep

Everything would turn out okay. His mother told him so.

He sat harboring an active mind atop a lazy neck. Every now and then, he would take a break from peeling his tangerines and let his head fall to his shoulder. Sometimes, he would let it roll back so that the bottom of his skull was touching the top of his spine but, then he would return to his tangerine peeling. He did it with the utmost care, making sure he was going slow and steady. He watched as the citrus mist fell away from the warm, orange skins each time he pulled them back. Then, he would drop them into the white ceramic bowl placed at his elbow. Though he enjoyed watching the natural perfume break away into the air, he made sure not to peel to close to his face or else the fine fragrance caught into his eye and sent a bitter stinging sensation through it. And after that, he would have to tend to his sickly body member, protecting it with a sweet palm laced with the residue of the fruit. It would cause him to let his neck fall again on to a bony shoulder and at last to the slight knobby rise on his back.. He would find himself staring up at a blank sky, feeling small and teary eyed and in this state with a blur through his vision, a thin sourness covering his tongue, and the subtle fragrance of the days work slowly wrapping his being in a layer of mysterious sleep, it was almost like he was paralyzed. The rest of the day would be inevitably dreamt away and his mother wouldn't get her white ceramic bowl of the familiar tangerine peels. Then, there would be none to distribute between the plates in the cabinet and on the top of the fire place mantel and without tangerine peels between the plates in the kitchen cabinet and decorating the mantel in the living room, the house wasn't the same. Being paralyzed in the hazy trance was to him giving up his home for the day. Getting the acid squirt into his eye was a promise that nothing would get done, therefor leaving him to reside in a foreign place with rooms he did not recognize an smells that in no way resembled the home that he knew. Her voice echoed through his body:

"The peels are what makes this place home, my dearest son. It pulls the sadness right out of the air and drowns it in its sweetness. Every house needs tangerine peels, they just don't know it yet is all. If only they could drown out the sadness, then everything would be okay."

This explanation of her strangely beautiful and newly found tradition use to be enough to satisfy him. But, then he realized that drowning out sadness was not getting rid of it. It was only cloaking it in a mask of something horribly temporary and that something was always dangerously fragile. One wrong move, one misguided step and the cloak would slip away and reveal an ugly truth. That must be why, he thought, mother makes me peel everyday and scolds me when I don't complete the job. Those days he was usually captured in the eerie cage of stillness but, he was always terribly sorry afterwards and made sure not to mess up for a whole week straight.
He finally understood the weight of his task and it came close to crushing him.
It had something to do with the distant glossy spheres embedded into his mothers face. They were swirling with expectations and occasionally they would flash with waves of insanity. Sometimes they went by so quickly that he would practically drive himself mad with the preoccupation of their existence. But, he always came to the same weary conclusion of  "Yes. Yes, that wave of insanity that flew through mothers eyes was one of the realest things that I ever saw." And it was, because now whether it was the task of drowning out the world's sadness or the request of bringing her her favorite magazine clippings with the dog eared corners and yellow undertones, it was never what it seemed.
Somewhere beneath it, he always found heavy burdens that were not fit for a child's hands, nevertheless, his had to take them and somehow extract the pieces of salt buried in the forgotten wounds. All in the hands of a baby; soft flesh and the cruelty of innocence.

Everyone must learn to fall gracefully when we find out that it is all not a great dance of merriment and that fathers don't always stay to see how the tress they planted grow. This one had to learn much sooner than the rest. The answer to it all lay some place between the Fields of green littered with specks of orange that he selfishly kept to himself and the empty space that his father left behind when he disappeared. The latter would forever remain lost in its own ambiguity. There were days when it seemed as clean and fresh and new as any other empty space, ready for someone to call it home a fill it with whatever they had in their possession. But, other days in spun around in clouds of poisonous memories dangling off the tip of somebody else's tongue. It wouldn't let anyone near it. Some way it managed to scream the name of its owner. In it, there was force that would never truly let go. It wasn't fair but, nobody said it had to be so the old man of a boy and the endless desert of a woman let it alone and never looked back.

An uneasiness rocked him from his insides; an internal shiver with a cold bite. If his home and his happiness depended on the shell of a little fruit, he was truly a lost boy. What if the world ran out of t tangerines, then where would he be? What would he have left? He pushed the thought aside and imagined his mother's defeated features. She had changed alot since father had faded away and the city lost its color. Now she claimed to see only in shadowy and obscure shades of grey. The tangerine peels allowed her to see flashes of color but, never enough to provoke more than the beginnings of a smile. Then, she would let her lashes collapse again and her lips go back the their angry writhing. They would twist and squirm like they were dying to speak their truth but no sound ever came out.

He thought of her beady little eyes, her colorless world, and disillusioned mind. The image burned itself into his heart and he cracked the knuckles of his red and tired fingers and picked up another tangerine.