Somewhere Over the Sun

The first orange to be taken onto a plane will not know what is happening. It will be split into 2, then 4, then 6, then 8 wedges and will believe that it is simply about to be eaten, like most oranges in the past have been and most oranges in the future will be. Wedges 1 and 2 are eaten by the pilot before takeoff, so the orange simply says goodbye to those two parts of itself and wonders what the loud whirring is.

Then the plane begins to climb and almost immediately the orange knows that it is reaching new heights for an orange. It quickly gets up higher than the tallest orange tree, and not long after, it is higher up than the oranges which get eaten in very tall buildings, higher even than the oranges that get carried up elevators in the Empire State Building by businessmen who need a snack after lunch.

Wedge 3 will roll off the pilot’s lap during the ascent into the sky, rolling all the way to the back of the plane, where it will remain until landing, thus becoming the only orange wedge to ever make it up to the highest point an orange has ever been and lived to tell the tale.

Wedges 4 thru 8, meanwhile, are not entirely sure whether to be thrilled or terrified. They understand the historic implications of just how high up they are, and the view of the clouds and the ground and everything in between the two is quite stunning, but they do not know how their bodies will react in such an environment. Especially since the pilot has gone and exposed their pulpy insides to the air. Wedge 6 can’t contain its fear and bursts into tears, one of which finds its way into the pilot’s eye and momentarily causes a chaos in which the rest of the wedges and both humans on board become entirely terrified and not at all thrilled. But the pilot recovers and then eats Wedge 6 as punishment.

Wedges 4, 5, 7 and 8 lament their friend’s passing, but are happy it is not them, and that they are allowed to slowly become less terrified and more thrilled, like how they get sweeter and less acidic as they ripen. Almost all oranges prefer to be sweeter, but they’re thankful for the bits of acidity that make them a bit more complex, and sophisticated. Unlike bananas, which are just that one stupid flavor throughout their long, stupid bodies.

At a cruising altitude of 25,000 feet, the pilot offers the co-pilot a wedge, and thank God the co-pilot refuses, because what’s left of the orange is really starting to enjoy being at the highest point an orange has ever been. It makes the orange feel legendary, like this is something that it will be able to tell its grandkids about. Wedge 7 interjects that oranges don’t exactly have grandkids, just seeds the bloom more oranges on a new tree, and that, even if you could call those children, it’s highly unlikely that their seeds will make it to fertile land from all the way up here. The other wedges, upset at Wedge 7’s negativity, shove him into the pilot’s mouth. This awakens the pilot’s appetite, and he eats Wedges 5 and 8.

This leaves Wedges 4 and 3 (still all the way in the back of the plane, on the ground, never to be eaten and without a good vantage point of what it looks like being up so high, but at least still alive) as the only parts of an orange still up that high. Chewed up oranges don’t count. The plane begins its descent, and though they aren’t quite as high up anymore, they’re still higher up than any orange has ever been, so the wedges are happy.

 Then the co-pilot changes his mind and says that on second thought, he would love an orange wedge. Not only that, he does a sloppy job of eating the orange, as if he’s never actually had an orange before and only accepted because he is afraid that the pilot might think he’s a strange person for never having eaten an orange. So, Wedge 4’s death is sloppy and painful, and it makes Wedge 3 cringe at the sight, even from way in the back of the plane.

After the plane lands, someone finds Wedge 3 and tosses him into a garbage bin, and then someone comes and dumps the garbage bin into a truck, which is taken to a landfill at the edge of town. Wedge 3 is forced to sit next to a banana peel for the entire ride to the landfill, but once there he finds a few more orange wedges to rot away with. He tells them about being part of the first orange to be taken onto a plane. They listen interestedly, although most of them don’t believe the story, because who’s heard of anything higher up than a tree. 

Yesterday morning, I received an email from the literary development company in Los Angeles informing me that their agent is skeptical about the manuscript I’ve been working for them and the project will be abandoned. Today, I released my collection of short stories, The Calvin Sky on Amazon as an e-book.

Rejection is deeply ingrained within this profession. It’s not a matter of if it will happen, but when, and how many times, and to what extent.

Rather than lament on a closed door, I open a new one. I believe in myself, in my abilities, and that sooner or later, someone in the right position will see them all, too. It takes time (there’s a reason why The New Yorker has a list of the best 20 writers under the age of 40, and not 30, or 20). Meanwhile, all I can do is continue to write, and put my writing out for the world to read.

The Calvin Sky is now available on Amazon Kindle for $1.99. Enjoy!

Entirely, not fully. That was the word he had been searching for, and finally it had come during a middle-of-the-night piss. He flushed and went back to his room, turning on the computer that he kept by his bed. Entirely, not fully, he kept saying, lest the midnight weariness erase the perfect word choice. He hoped the glow of the screen would not keep him from falling back asleep, but there were more important matters at hand.

This was it: the greatest moment of their lives. Adi and Shay, ages 11 and 13, respectively, had procured a BB gun.

Shay had a friend who had a friend whose parents were okay with toy guns, and by keeping themselves away from candy for a couple of weeks, they had saved enough lunch money and now here it was, black and silver plastic and a thermos full of bright yellow ammunition. They had no hiding place for it yet, but that could wait until tonight, until after it had been properly used.

They both thought about it at the same exact moment, but Shay said it first, and so he would get the credit, once the blame had subsided, “The roof!”

The roof was glorious. Large and flat, open space with a great view of the city, plenty of surfaces to place toy figurines on, other buildings reasonably close by. Guns, even harmless ones, were strictly forbidden at the Alsaid household. Mom had been in the Israeli army, and so all violence was banned from the beginning, even harmless representations of it.

Shay and Adi were fantastic marksmen. Fantastic. The Mossad agents were probably on their way to recruit them. Adi shot a tic-tac from twenty feet away, true story. The BB and the tic-tac both disappeared. That’s Mossad shit right there.

Target practice lasted about 15 minutes before it was no longer exciting. There was no pain inflicted (tiny, non-harming amounts of pain, Ima). So they looked to the building across the street. A beautiful balcony, four stories below them. Tile floors, an enclosed garden, wooden deck chairs that might have been hand-crafted. But no one in them. No fun shooting at leaves, especially with no snails on them. Targets.

They took a lap around the roof, which, by itself was taboo enough to make the afternoon exciting, but they had a BB gun, so exciting enough wasn’t enough.

Ah, the adjacent building.  A story taller, and lots of open windows. Someone’s mother doing dishes on the sixth floor: too risky. A half-full glass resting on a ledge on 7: behind a protective window , barely cracked open. A challenged. Physics would never allow the shot to be successfully pulled off, but neither of them had yet taken a physics cours, so it wasn’t going to keep them from trying. A limited amount of BB’s made them look for something else.

Oh my god, what was this? Right across, on 9, a perfect shot, a kid maybe Adi’s age trying to sneak some freshly baked cookies that were cooling on the counter, tin foil shining bright beneath them. “He’s gonna get hurt anyway,” Shay said, putting the Replica Berretta X-4 Series (no orange tip!) in his younger brother’s hands. He crouched behind the waist-high wall meant to keep people from falling to their deaths and to hide boys from being spotted by enemies.

Adi crouched too, but he placed the gun in both hands on the concrete and steadied his arms, making himself only slightly more visible (in their minds, all that could be seen by the enemy were two sets of eyes and a gun, maybe a finger or two, nothing at all). The cookies looked chocolate chip, melty, and was it really necessary to say delicious?

What else was there to do with a trigger but squeeze it?

Adi wanted to look just long enough to see the reaction. He wasn’t expecting an award for marksmanship from the Mossad, necessarily, just a chance to see the fruits of his labor.

“They might have seen me.”

“They?”

“There may have been a parent in the vicinity.”

Solution: leave the roof, pretend violence had never happened. But they matched a description. Adi may have pulled the trigger, but they had both fired the bullet, and both were severely punished, although years later they wouldn’t be able to recall what the punishment had been. Regardless of Shay’s vehement claims of being an innocent bystander, he got punished too. It was unfair. What else were they supposed to do with a BB gun?

She had been naked when they went to sleep, but fully clothed when she woke him up. He didn’t notice this right away, but he would insert it into the memory years later.

The first thing he said when she told him about the email she inadvertently read was, “Zugzwang.” She just looked off into some darkened corner of the room, shaking her head, unbelieving that he wasn’t responding intelligibly.

“Zugzwang,” he said again, “story of my life. It’s usually only used to describe situations in chess, but chess being one of those games that was seemingly invented only for its value as a metaphor to life itself, the term can be quite fitting to other situations. It’s when a player would be better off if it wasn’t his turn. Making a move is counterproductive, but it’s his move and he has to go, even knowing that he’ll be worse off for it. That’s this.” He sat up against the wall, the window blinds shaking at the movement. He noticed, not without a sense of humor, that he was still completely naked. Serious conversations always went better in the nude, he had learned. But both parties had to be nude.

She turned back to him. When had she grabbed her purse, put on her shoes? She wasn’t going to say anything.

“Do you know what your credit rating is?”

“No. Probably low.”

“Isn’t it weird that that’s one of the only numbers people get assigned, measured by? Most people have some idea what their credit rating is. Maybe what their IQ is too. But the world doesn’t really measure us any other way. How good we are with money. It’d be interesting if loans were approved by IQ. Or…I don’t know. Penis size.” 

She slipped a hand just below his waist line, her fingers drumming his hipbones, and she readjusted her head on his chest. “You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

They tried to keep their laughter down. They’d woken her roommates a couple of times already, and it was getting late. “Vagina depth, that’s a number we should all know. ‘Oh no, you’ll never get a loan approved with that cavernous vagina of yours.’” She squealed, then tried to stifle the sound with his skin. This was their pillow talk, the first of it, before it became common and then was quieted by television or music or something else. They had not kissed yet. “We should take a bath together.”

“You’re mental, it’s four in the morning. They’d kill me. Plus, my shower doesn’t have a bath. It’s one of those flat showers. We’d be laying in a puddle at best.”

“We can improvise. How big’s your kitchen sink?”