It begins not with a seed, but with a rind. A tough, bitter, solar-orange rind that has been peeled back by a thumbnail caked with soil. Beneath it, the pith is a wound of white, and beneath that, the flesh is a universe of wet, segmented stars.
I was never a rarity.
She was right. I was. My peel was the crust, cracked and tectonic. The blue-gray mold was my atmosphere, a poisonous, beautiful sky. The tiny, wriggling larvae of a fruit fly were my first citizens. They had no politics, only hunger. It was a perfect anarchist society. I Am Kurious Oranj Rar
“Why is the color of joy the same as the color of prison jumpsuits?” I asked the grapefruit to my right. It said I had a complex.
The day of the Harvest came. A hand, gloved in impersonal latex, plucked my siblings. They were loaded into a wire basket, laughing with a shrill, citrus terror. I held on. I flexed the tiny stem that connected me to the branch, the umbilical of lignin and sap. I held on until the hand moved on, dismissing me as a runt, a weird one, not worth the calorie of the pluck. It begins not with a seed, but with a rind
Not the sickly, black rot of neglect, but the noble, alchemical rot. The kind that happens in a dark cellar, where the green mold blooms like a map of forgotten continents. Where the sugars ferment into a sharp, intelligent vinegar. Where the fruit, in its surrender, becomes something else .
Day seven: A child found me. A girl with mismatched socks and the hollow, searching eyes of someone who has already learned that adults lie. She did not see a rotten orange. She saw a world. She squatted down, her breath fogging the cool air, and whispered, “You’re a little planet, aren’t you?” I was never a rarity
I am Kurious Oranj Rar. The name is a misprint, a scar left by a drunken typesetter in a forgotten punk zine. Or perhaps it is the truest thing about me. I am a curiosity. An orange. A rarity.
I dreamed of rot.
“You are Kurious Oranj Rar,” she said, giving the misprint a crown. “Keeper of the rot. King of the compost.”