Orange We Happy

Foliate Oak Literary Magazine,

As the YouTubers say, “ … for entertainment purposes only … ”.

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Orange We Happy

The tree was a tangerine, but he insisted on calling it an orange, no matter how many times his wife showed the difference with store bought fruit.

“Tangerines huddle and easily separate.” She zippered back the rind to reveal the juicy segments. “Oranges,” knifing a cross through the thick fruit, “demand a good quartering.”

“Chop chop. It’s all citrus to me,” he said.

He planted the tree in the side yard, digging a proper size hole and burying the root ball with the best organic soil on the market. He watered the tree an hour every day and fertilized once a week, hoping to hurry along the first fruiting. “Trees, especially fruit trees, don’t warrant such attention,” his wife said, but he paid her no mind and upped fertilizing to twice a week.

The tree dropped all its leaves all at once. “You wicked wench,” he shouted at the bare tree, “after all I’ve done for you.” He turned his back on the tree as he did with his wife.

“You shocked that tree from the inside out,” she said.

He fumed and hollered and stabbed his finger in her face. “I’m cutting that tree down to the quick,” and stormed off to the shed for the chain saw.

“That tree’s not to blame,” she yelled after him, knowing full well he’d never find the chain saw or the bow saw or a single pair of clippers for that matter. She’d hidden every sharp edged tool he owned after he installed an automatic sprinkler system scheduled to water the tree every two hours. She had gone as far to hide her best scissors under the mattress in the guest bedroom. She knew his signs, she knew what was coming. He chainsawed the Christmas tree in half a few years back, lights and all, after a week of obsessive straightening. Her husband had a temper with trees.

He dragged the stepladder to the tree and from the top down, stripped off the withered branches with his bare hands. The tree stood dismembered and as dead as he felt. For weeks after dinner, he pulled a lawn chair out to the side yard and sat and stared at the tree. He whipped out his baseball bat a couple of times and bashed the tree a few solid slams. During the blue moon, he poured an entire container of bleach around the trunk, drenching the root system. As days cut short and nights dropped early, the wake ended. He tossed a tarp over what was left of the tree and decided to chop it down come spring, when chain saws went on sale for cheap.

The raccoons savaged the first fruit first, sucking the innards concave and tossing the peelings on the weathered tarp, drawing the flies, the flies drawing him to the tree, unfurled, wild, straggly and free. All shapes of oval sprouted like tiny footballs from young branches. “You beautiful wicked wench,” he breathed more than said, tugging the brightest fruit from the tree.

His wife followed the hoots and hollers out to the side yard.

“I told you. Tangerine trees are best left alone.”

“Orange,” he said, peeling back the rind.

Photo by Dhaya Eddine Bentaleb on Unsplash

"Orange We Happy" first appeared online at Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, (2/1/2019). Works published by Foliate Oak Literary were archived by the Arkansan Review, but unfortunately the link appears deader than a frozen fruit tree.