I Am Kurious Oranj Rar <Tested>

They called me Kurious because I asked questions. “Why must the peel be our tomb?” I asked the tangerine to my left. It told me to shut up and photosynthesize.

The silence after the Harvest was the first true music I ever heard. The wind sounded different. It sounded like a cello being played with a hacksaw.

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.

Days passed. My skin softened. My internal clocks began to tick backwards. While other oranges grew sweeter, I grew bitter. Then, past bitter, I grew sharp . A single wasp, drunk on the fermenting juices of a fallen apple below, landed on my cheek. It did not sting. It bowed. It recognized a kindred spirit of decay. I Am Kurious Oranj Rar

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.

The fall came. Not a dramatic plummet, but a tired loosening. I landed in a crack in the concrete, a hairline fracture filled with moss and the ghost of a cigarette. This was my stage.

Day one of my ground-life: A slug traced a silver question mark across my face. I felt it as a cool, ambiguous caress. They called me Kurious because I asked questions

I was never a rarity.

And I wept. Not tears, but a thin, amber exudate that smelled of cloves and regret. Because she understood. The deepest story is not about rising. It is about the grace of falling apart, and being seen, truly seen, in the ruins.

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. The silence after the Harvest was the first

I dreamed of rot.

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.