Blood Orange
Here I sit at my kitchen table, about to eat a blood orange. It’s a Friday afternoon in the District of Columbia and I’m not doing anything at all, just sitting around about to eat a blood orange I’ve sliced into fourths.
I don’t eat oranges that much. Oranges belong to an America of elementary-school soccer game sidelines and pre-plastic Christmases. Their distinctly anachronistic aftertaste does not sit well with me.
But this is a blood orange, which is something a little different. So I give it a chance, cast off the baggage, try to just enjoy the damn fruit.
I tell myself to be present with the blood orange. To concentrate. Blood orange concentrate. Ha. Do they even make blood orange juice, and do they make it from concentrate? What’s so wrong with juice from concentrate anyway? Would blood orange juice taste different than regular orange juice? Would it be arresting and pink and strange?
Focus.
I take a bite. Sinew and marrow. Pith and peel and pulp. Guilt-free sweet. Pockmarked, lesioned, clotted. I savor it. The juice – the blood! – of the bloody blood orange squirts and gushes and leaks and drips down my stubbly chin and pools on the table.
But who picked the blood orange, and where, and how much were they paid to do it? Do they have a family and a bed to sleep in and what are their dreams? How did this particular blood orange get to my grocery store? Who drew up the supply chain logistics and where did they go to college? Did they always want to do this for a career or are they disappointed with themselves? What are they paid? Do they have benefits, and where do they go when they take some paid time off? How long before A.I. takes their jobs, and how long before climate change ravages the global food supply? Is there any room for hope?
All done. Husks. Corpses. The peels like oysters, flesh sucked down a hungry gullet. A flash of an ancient shame, and an ancient question: must we ravage creation?
Last night I had a dream of a spaceship cruising through the streets of D.C., hovering just above the ground. A colossal alien ocean liner pulverizing Teslas and knocking the cornices off rent-controlled buildings. I watched the pavement crumble beneath it, bollards demolished, bike lanes protected no longer. In its wake, a gash in the ground cutting straight through the transit-oriented, walkable dreams of the wonks and technocrats.
The night before, an American Airlines flight from Wichita collided mid-air with a military Blackhawk helicopter outside of Ronald Reagan National Airport. It exploded in flames before plummeting into the Potomac. The very vision of hell: the inferno, the fall, the icy depths. No survivors.
I let the remains of the blood orange sit there for a few minutes. Subtly but undeniably, decomposition begins to set in. A certain dullness in place of a once glimmery sheen. I contemplate leaving it there forever on my kitchen table to rot and shrivel away.
But I don’t do that. I pick up the mangled peels, so revolting — so like snakeskin in my hands — and throw them in the trash. They can continue their decay in some wretched landfill I can only hope to never see.
I scroll through the New York Times app with my sticky fingers. Memos and executive orders and resignations and confirmation hearings and terminations.
I get another blood orange. With this one, I take a different tack – I lay waste to it: tearing and ripping and gobbling and guzzling. Alas, this does not make me feel better. Not really. Before the carcass of my second blood orange, it is clearer than ever that I am the object of men and gods far beyond my grasp.
But sometimes it feels good to eat a blood orange like a maniac and imagine power.
© Jack Olson McAuliffe
Jack Olson McAuliffe is based in Washington, DC. He is a graduate of Yale and holds a Master of Arts in Theatre from Ohio State. His performance projects have been seen in New York, New England, and Ohio. This is his first published work of creative non-fiction.
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