Juice
Sept 2023
Isabella Thompson
The man lives for his smoke breaks. When he smokes, he wants to get as far away from his life as he can, so he does. He likes to go to the abandoned mall parking lot, but lately he’s found the place boring and stale. So instead, he keeps walking, trusting his feet to take him somewhere new.
He walks for a while until he comes to what he imagines as the pinnacle of abandoned scenes: a dead field with shredded, faded caution tape. He doesn’t recognize it, but there’s PTA-mom disapproval written all over it, from the rusted chain-link fence to the crumbled remnants of a brick building. His cigarette aches between his teeth, begging to be lit.
He slumps to the ground and pulls out his lighter, but the flame won’t appear, no matter how many times he clicks it between his fingers. Eyes-closed, he drops his head against the chain link fence behind him, the kinetic energy fizzling out as it travels through the interwoven channels of metal. Eventually, he looks over his shoulder.
Poking between the diamonds of the chain link fence is a single branch adorned with flattened leaves trying to squeeze through and a single raspberry, dried and shriveled and more brown than red. He looks at it, his whole field of view narrowing, zeroing in on the empty drupelets, without seeds and shine and substance. He reaches over, his unlit cigarette pinched between the pinkie and ring finger of his trembling hand, and plucks it from the branch, tearing it from the stem. He lets it roll into his palm and settle at the intersection of his fate and life lines, and then he closes his hand, digging his fingertips into his flesh and squeezing until his fingers ache, until he can’t tell if the dark trickle trailing toward his wrist is blood or juice. He tosses the berry carcass behind him, out of sight on the other side of the fence. All that’s left in his hand now is a tiny puddle of dark red, and he closes his eyes as he imagines pressing his hand to his lips, parting them, and throwing his head back, downing every drop.
When he opens his eyes again, he’s ten years old, sitting against the fence with his hands clasped over his lap, like there’s a secret sandwiched between his palms.
Two days before the one from this memory, that secret something had been a tiny toad, one he’d found hidden next to that same wall of twisted metal. He’d offered it gleefully to every girl in his fourth-grade class and sent them running, squealing for the recess monitor. But when he showed it to her, she’d taken it from him, plucked it right out of his hands, and kissed it.
Now, she’s sitting next to him cross-legged. He’d waved her over this time, and she is the first person—the only person—he wants to show this to. The grass, long and green, tickles his bare legs, but she’s wearing tights, and she doesn’t seem bothered by the scratchiness. He looks up at her and then back at his cupped hands, and his eyebrows shoot up under his bangs. Do you want to see? he asks with wide hazel eyes. She nods.
He lifts his left hand, holding his right one out to her. In his upturned palm are berries, various shades of blue that he picked from the two unruly bushes on the other side of the fence. Their juices seep into the concave center where heart and head and life lines slice across the otherwise unmarred skin.
Go on, he says with his eyes. Take one. She plucks out a raspberry, the only drop of red among his handful of blue and the only berry that remains dry and unsquished, and pops it into her mouth, squinting from the sourness pinching at the junction of jaw and neck, just under her ears.
He throws the blueberries into his mouth, and after swallowing, he smiles at her, his crooked teeth stained, splattered with blue. She starts to say something to him, but the bell rings, and she runs off across the field to push past the kids lining up next to the chalk-drawn hopscotch squares—she’s the line leader. He’s the caboose. When he catches up and takes his spot behind everyone, she steps out of line and cranes her neck to find him. When she finally does, she raises her fist and pumps it in the air, twice, shouting, “Toot-toot,” before leading the train back into the classroom.
In the near distance, a freight train races past stopped cars on either side of the blinking signs, its presence announced by the wind, which captures and carries both the screech of the rail wheels over the tracks and the blare of the air horn.
He looks up, suddenly, his chin untucking from his collarbone. He scans the barren ground that stretches out before him, where the patches of browned, brittle grass interrupt the expanse of dry dust and dirt. As the whistle abates, he thinks he hears a laugh, snorts and guffaws puffed out around bunny rabbit front teeth clamping down on a bottom lip. But there’s no one there. It’s just him and the wind and the remnants of the crushed berry that he threw, the drying juice etching a wobbly line down his arm.
He wipes his hand on his trousers, trying to rub away the red staining his palm. Somewhere in his periphery, a faded, tattered ribbon of caution tape tangled in the chain link flicks in the wind, and he tries not to remember how bright and yellow it had been wrapped around the bush, the one he’d picked the raspberry from at recess not even an hour before the tape was wound around the branches and the fence and the school, before his life was reduced to savoring smoke.