Tiny Tyrant

 

The orange – well, the clementine – sits peacefully in my pocket unaware of its impending doom. 

What a completely wild transformation. “Orange” to “Clementine.” It’s simply smaller and sweeter – easier to peel and cuter. 

Perhaps that last note alone justifies changing the first letter of the word from “O” to “C”, but the rest seems obnoxious. Getting smaller earned the baby four more letters? Absurd. 

Anyways – regardless of the name – it only has moments left to live. 

Now on the table – so perfectly tossable. It will either meet its end decaying in my belly or dashed against some brick wall rotting in the dirt under a bush. Dying next to a lost dusty debit card.

I’m inside and the whale-like sonic calls from my belly demands consumption.  

I puncture the skin. My fingernails are short – but after years of breeding, the orange skin has lost all its strength and is only about as strong as the tootoo-like wrapping that cups a Reese’s. Perfectly peelable. 

I commence my unique shedding method – tear a line across the center of the orange – frick; “clementine” – rid the tiny planet of its equator. There goes Mexico – Egypt – India, but just before I connect somewhere in the pacific, my devastation turns up and severs the crust of the northern hemisphere from the magma. Before detaching the head I attempt to take the spine with it. 

I gently, yet firmly, grasp the spinal cord and tug upwards. Success. 

Now only the southern hemisphere remains clothed. 

A similar fate renders the orange – fricking frick! – “clementine” – disheveled and naked in only two single peels. 

Not only am I a destroyer of worlds – I’m an efficient one. 

To these succulent treats I’m like a Hitler or a Thanos – “I’m inevitable.” 

The remaining skin lies, already drying, on the stale gray counter in a slightly phallic formation. Two circles and a long strand in the middle. 

Lol.

The smell. Incredible. Only a few milliseconds after my first puncture wound, the most perfect smell in the universe fills my entire head – reminding me of that obscure bathtub cleaner that was made by some forgettable cleaning company. Or the dusting spray who’s oils left my junky dresser looking and feeling royal after years of dust are wiped away. 

Odd that one of the most natural smells in the world has been so effectively mimicked that I no longer think of an orange tree – but rather more human constructs that exist only to serve and delight me. 

In subconscious memory I mock this tiny fruit, and in its last desperate moments, deny it of its heritage. Brutal. 

But the smell – the smell calls to me again. A smell so familiar, so comforting and exciting. The thing seems to want to be eaten. 

And there it is. 

The justification I needed to tear its flesh apart – flesh that so perfectly lends to tearing.

Like my joints to a bear?

Nevermind that – these are perfect wedges, fruit who once held seeds, seeds that needed a mushy stinky start to become a tree. 

This sterile human-made snack may as well be the dusting spray. It exists only to be used by me – to be eaten – and therefore must want it, right?

It wants to be eaten – or, at least, deserves to be eaten. 

Is this what the bear thinks when it tears me to pieces? My yells of horror, the perfect splitting of my bones, the satisfying pop of my shoulder blade, the delicious irresistible salty smell of my blood, all attest and manifest to the senses of the bear as cries for joy or relief. Justification and manifestations that I was made to be eaten. 

Until I shoot the bear. 

Is the sugar in this orange its bullet? Its subtle feeble way of fighting back – of besting me? 

Doesn’t matter now. It’s gone. 

The last act of our exchange is of me destroying the phallic assemblage of its remaining skins. Someone might see it and think I'm dumb for not noticing.