Fiction Fix Sixteen

The Taste of Strawberries Today
didn’t believe them.
It was not her fault, he tried to assure her, that her daughter abandoned her, chose
to break off all relations, virtually disappear. But how could it not be her fault? That’s
what Sarah wanted to cry out, but if she did the words would rip her apart right down the
middle, like a knife slicing into a strawberry. So she didn’t say them, but they ripped her
anyway, but silently, invisibly. That’s what it was like: like she was bleeding away inside.
What was it with strawberries nowadays? She and Walt discussed it often. They used
to seem a lot sweeter. Was it a result of the way they farmed, force-growing crops for
maximum yield, spraying them with poisons, and harvesting them before their time to
speed them to markets thousands of miles away from where they were grown? Was it that
the soil that was growing depleted, the planet exhausted, running out of sweetness? Or
was it memory that was at fault, making the strawberries of yesteryear bigger, redder, and
sweeter than they actually were? Were strawberries ever that good? Had Sarah ever really
tasted the strawberries she remembered?
There is a Tarot card that describes the way she’s feeling. It depicts a heart floating in
empty space among the clouds, and it’s run through with three swords.
Come to think of it, did she ever remember strawberries being sweet, or was it really
someone else’s memory that she repeated, even took to be her own? Maybe that was just
another thing people said to explain why they felt so disappointed and dissatisfied with
their lives. It was the kind of thing you expected older people to say. She was growing
She took a little nibble but couldn’t taste anything sweet about the
strawberry no matter what part of her tongue she put it on. Could
it be that we were sold a bill of goods, that we were told that
strawberries were sweet so many times that we came to believe it?
older, surely, but was she really that old? It seemed to her that people were growing older
sooner nowadays, even as they hung on to their youth longer than ever.
What did it mean, then, to have a daughter here, an ex there, another ex somewhere
else… to have a past populated with people to whom you were an ex, an ex-person, who
never wanted to speak to you again?
X marks the spot.
X’s marking off days on the calendar.
Where is the buried treasure?
What did it mean except that you’d made quite a few mistakes in life? You could
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