The Oranges
By Ethan Denault
Every Saturday morning, Jean-Claude bought six oranges from the fruit stand on Amsterdam Avenue.
The man who ran the stand knew him well enough not to talk much. He would place six oranges into a brown paper bag, hand it over, and say, "See you next week."
"God willing," Jean-Claude always answered.
He was fifty-three years old. He drove a school bus in the Bronx. His apartment was small and neat. His shirts hung evenly in the closet. His shoes pointed in the same direction beneath the bed.
The oranges sat in a ceramic bowl on his kitchen table.
He never ate them.
By Thursday they would begin to soften. By Friday they were spoiled. Saturday morning he would throw them away and buy six more.
The routine comforted him.
Outside his apartment window stood a sycamore tree. In summer its leaves shimmered green beneath the streetlights.
Some nights Jean-Claude woke at three in the morning and found the tree crowded with people.
Not real people.
Just silhouettes.
Hundreds of them.
Balanced silently among the branches.
Women carrying baskets. Children with dusty knees. Old men leaning on walking sticks. Some carried machetes. Red drops gathered at the tips and hung there, refusing to fall.
When he blinked, they vanished.
He never told anyone.
One evening a young woman moved into the apartment next door. She worked late shifts at a hospital and often returned home after midnight.
Sometimes they shared the elevator.
Sometimes she brought him leftovers.
One humid night she knocked on his door carrying a container of soup.
"You shouldn't be alone all the time," she said.
Jean-Claude smiled.
"I’m not."
She laughed.
"I’m glad.”
For a moment he looked puzzled.
As if she had told him grass was blue.
That night he dreamed of rain.
Not New York rain.
A warm rain that smelled of the red dirt beneath the Ibirunga. He stood again in the field where the men had worked until sunset, and by dusk there had been no one left alive to call it a field.
Then thousands of oranges fell from the sky.
They struck the ground without bruising.
Without making any sound.
The field filled with them.
Bright as lanterns.
Bright as little suns.
When he woke, tears covered his face.
It took him a long time to sit up.
The next Saturday, he bought six oranges.
The fruit seller handed him the bag.
"Big plans for the weekend?"
Jean-Claude considered the question.
It seemed enormous.
As enormous as asking someone why rivers move.
"No," he said.
Then he walked home.
At the apartment he placed five oranges into the bowl.
The sixth he carried to the window.
The sycamore tree swayed in the heavy afternoon heat.
For a long time he stared at it.
Then he set the orange carefully on the windowsill.
An offering.
A payment.
A promise.
He wasn't sure.
A warm breeze moved through the leaves.
The branches rustled softly.
For just a second, he thought he saw a little boy sitting high in the tree.
The boy couldn't have been more than eight.
He was smiling.
Not waving.
Just smiling.
As though he had finally found the person he was looking for.
Jean-Claude smiled back.
The boy disappeared.
The room grew quiet.
Outside, the orange sat alone in the fading sunlight, impossibly bright.
Jean-Claude watched until darkness swallowed everything except that small circle of color.
Then he turned on the kitchen light and stood there beside the bowl, counting softly to six.
THE END
Author Bio: Ethan writes fiction about ordinary people confronting the strange and unexplainable. He lives in the Midwest, where the weather, the landscape, and reality itself occasionally develop a hairline crack.