Fiction Fix Sixteen

Meeah Williams
The Taste of Strawberries Today
The strawberries lay on the cutting board, side by side, like a row of little hearts. She
sliced them lengthwise, hesitated, and then decided to slice them lengthwise once again.
Behind her, at the kitchen table, Walt was reading the morning headlines off the internet.
The president was declaring the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, just not yet.
Another shocking bank scandal of the kind that had happened so many times already it
had lost the power to shock anyone. Shock, in this case, was just a figure of speech used
in headlines to get your attention. Unemployment was down, not counting, of course,
all the people who’d yielded to the hopelessness of ever again finding a job, others who’d
fallen off the unemployment rolls altogether.
Sarah turned the strawberries on their little hunched backs. They revealed, like so
many severed fruits reveal inside, a pattern suggestive of female genitalia. Why is that? It’s
not a surprise, but then it is. In this case, with their tiny seeds embedded in the outer red
flesh, they even bore resemblance to female genitalia, in this case the plump shaved mons
veneris of current pubic fashion.
Some mornings, this being one of them, Sarah was struck with such a rising-out-ofnowhere
sorrow she could almost feel her knees buckle against the sheer weight of it. An
immense, heavy-bellied gray wave of sadness rose above her in the face of which she stood
paralyzed. She could almost feel the sand slipping away beneath her feet. She could imagine
herself gratefully surrendering to the inevitably of it and letting herself be dragged
out to the sea of oblivion.
Peaceful oblivion.
Walt, used to the look that came over her at times like these, would ask what the
matter was, usually knowing full well. She found herself speechless, unable to account
for it; she imagined it to be akin to the emotion that overcomes one standing before one
of those great Easter Island heads or an Aztec pyramid. Something too big for human
comprehension.
“It’s the girl again, isn’t it?”
She nodded, unable to speak, unable to meet his eyes.
60 Fiction Fix