Fruit Gems: Tropical

It was another Monday of unemployment. Not being productive in a late-stage, capitalistic hellscape was a death sentence every day I realized I hadn't lived up to my potential. I had died 61 times already. Before those 61 deaths, everything had been the same as it always was. I would leave my house and go to work. I would sit at my desk and exchange light conversation with my coworkers and pretend I was engaged with my tasks, but we all knew that wasn't possible. To get by was to lie. Ever since leaving, I had been alone. I no longer felt comfortable being seen in public. I didn't want to be put on the spot to answer anyone's questions about what I was doing next. I held the weight of my entire future on my shoulders for everyone to see, accepting that they wondered, in passing, how I would manage to carry it up the mountain in front of me. I didn't know how steep that mountain was-- just that it was there and it had to be crossed.

"Boring people certainly do have boring problems. That's the truth, and I can say that as a boring person." I announced to no one, since no one was in the room with me at the time. Of course there was no response, just the silence of defeat because I had spent another day being too comfortable in my own company to leave my house. Truthfully, I needed to hear my own voice-- anyone's voice, really. I felt a far too familiar urge to glance over to the shiny idle screen of my phone so as to validate my own existence via the far too familiar face that threatened to look back at me. Before I could though, everything around me shifted.

At first, I wasn't sure if I was imagining things or if it was really happening, unable to decide which circumstance was worse. Everything making up my room-- the white walls, my shelves, my desk, my cats-- grew dark and formless, melting into a gelatinous silver mess. The universal laws of physics had sneezed directly into my face, forcing me to close my eyes reflexively. Both fast and slow, eternally and instantaneously.

Before I knew it, I was being poured into an airtight canister. I wanted to protest and alert whatever was pouring that most of me had missed getting past the opening and had instead been scattered over a dirty counter in an unlit office kitchen somewhere, but no one heard me and nothing about the situation changed. It was hopeless. I had to accept that I was to be cleaned up some other day in the ambiguous future. When would it be my turn? I thought to myself as if I had gone through the same cycle of being displaced and abandoned many times before. I couldn't face the shame of saying it out loud, even to an audience of nobody. The shame made the coldness of the canister's metal walls harsher and inexplicably acrid, glorifying a complete ignorance toward their surroundings. They didn't expand and contract when I begged them to, to make room for the rest of me, and I couldn't summon my other parts to help me plead my case like I typically could from my comfy bed, all alone in my house. I was in two places at once. It began to really sink in via a downward pull on what would be my gut, had my gut even been there. I was bits of dried up leaves. I had no body and no barrier between me and everything that was not me. The cold was in me and all around me in the shape of empty space. I was piled up on top of myself, and yet, so much of me was missing. It felt real, but I couldn't sense it. I no longer had the luxury of a buffer that the peripheral nerve endings in my skin had loyally provided for so long. I had almost forgotten who I was before in my room with my bed and its white walls and the boring, lonely reality I had made for myself. In this new reality, there was no more me. I was simply a part of it, and I had no say.

I closed my eyes, or intended to, because how do you close eyes you don't have? I tried to breathe without lungs while being nauseated without a stomach. I was being dragged through a slow-moving molasses made up of unused time. And I gave up. It was unceremonious, but entirely necessary to preserve whatever consciousness I had left at that point.

“It's time to wake up!” I heard a soft voice chirp from beside me. If I had a head I would have turned it to look, but I didn't. I had already surrendered to nothingness.

“Get up!” A shriller voice chimed in, bringing along brand new annoyance to supplement the uselessness I had succumb to throughout the forever-long preceding moments.

I don't know how, but I snapped out of it, accepting all I could do was to face my own confusion and disbelief. To my surprise, I had eyes and a head and a body and legs again. I was back in a bed that looked a lot like mine, in a room that looked a lot like the one I had been so comfortable in over the past two months, but nothing was the same as it was. The walls were yellow, an arm chair took up the space of my desk. My cats were replaced by parrots, but the cat tree was strangely still there. Only the shelves were the same, which brought me a sliver of comfort that almost didn't seem noticeable compared to the weight of being trampled by my own anxiety.

“Hellooo??” The same shrill voice rang out sounding irritated. I turned my newly acquired head to one of the parrots on the cat tree and felt something light up in my stomach, like I had just uncovered a clue. I wasn't sure if it was my cats that occupied parrot bodies in this reality, or if they no longer existed at all.

“Tomato?” I asked.

“Mother?” The red parrot responded, flying over to me, perching on the edge of my bed while the other stayed on the cat tree, grooming itself. “Mother, I'm hungry!”

Tomato motioned to his beak using his wing and ruffled his red feathers and I felt relief from being understood.

“Tomato, I'm so glad you're here! But you were a cat before... what is this?” If he had the where-with-all to recognize me as a talking bird, maybe he could tell me why things had changed.

“Mother! What is cat?” He squawked at me, turning his little head in confusion.

“That's okay.” I responded, disappointed. “You probably want a snack, right?”

Tomato bobbed his head with ferocity and Parsley, covered in brilliant green feathers stopped grooming herself and joined in. She silently bobbed on a carpeted tree that wasn't meant for her, in unison with her brother, both of them staring at me with unfamiliar and beady eyes.

“Okay. Snacks for both of you.”

I gathered all the strength I could and aimed it toward my knees when I decided to place my feet on the ground and stood up. I felt shaken up. None of this made sense. I was scared to go to the pantry and stood there in place, trying not to worry the little idiots begging me for food. Would their snacks have changed too? Or do I have to give them crunchy tuna treats? I asked myself.

Tomato and Parsley watched me as I walked out of the room, their heads synchronously panning to follow me out. It was as cute as it was creepy. The hallway looked the same, but I was worried that it had turned into a portal, or something. In a moment of utter fear, I felt the ground shake, and braced myself to be transported again, but nothing seemed to happen, so I proceeded. The pantry looked the same on the outside, but my cereal, previously unsweetened shredded wheat had turned itself into a saccharine flake variety. The vegetable soup was now chicken with noodles and the feeling of being somewhere I wasn't supposed to be hung over me like a dark cloud as I searched for what to give Tomato and Parsley. A bright blue bag with the logo of a palm tree and a slick looking seagull poked itself out of a basket on one of the shelves as if to make itself starkly noticeable to me. Fruit Gems: Tropical. I grabbed the bag, relieved I could give them something for their own species and walked back.

Parsley met me at the door, looking up at me from the ground, turning her head with her beak slightly ajar.

“Hi mama.” She squeaked sweetly as she flew up onto my wrist. She motioned her head to the bag I held in the same hand, “For me?”

“Yes, Parsley! For your brother too.”

“Yuck.” She said and flung the bag out of my hand to the floor.

“Why'd you do that??” I asked her gently. She hopped up onto my shoulder.

“Mama...” She delicately squeaked into my ear, but suddenly, the parrot voice I was expecting had been taken over by something more fluid, almost as if it was coming from an ensemble of ancient human ghosts rather than a bird. “You must go home.”

Chills shot through my spine from the ground up like my body was telling me to run from that exact spot to who knows where else.

“Parsley, what did you just say?” I leaned back to be able to see her little face close to mine. She tilted her head again. She stayed there staring into my eyes, utterly motionless without responding as her brother came out of the room and started to destroy the treat bag.

“Mother, treat!” He screamed while thrashing the bag around.

I didn't know what to do. The pulling sensation I had felt in my gut earlier came back and my heart began to beat in my throat.

“Mama, treat!” Parsley shouted into my ear as she unfroze, almost knocking me back in a startle.

A bell began going off in the distance. It sounded like it was running up to me at a terrifying speed. It felt like I heard it before it even made a sound.

“Get the door!” Tomato screamed as I stood there, shaking. There was no time to think. Or maybe there was, but having just been spooked by two birds I had never trained to speak, I opted for urgency. I ran up to the door and looked out of the peep-hole. No one was there, but I could feel someone watching me from behind. When I turned around, Parsley and Tomato were right there, both staring at me from furry, four-legged, long-tailed bodies. One of them meowed but I couldn't tell which one. I ran to the pantry. The unsweetened shredded wheat cereal returned along with the cans of vegetable soup. No more chicken noodle. The blue bag in the hallway remained though. Tomato approached me and put his paws on my knees in a deep stretch and the tag on his collar collided with the little bell, producing a familiar jingle. He looked me in the eyes, blinking slowly. I felt a wave of peace I hadn't felt in a long time.

That blue bag taunted me as it sat there on the ground in front of my bedroom door, still containing indents from an angry beak and radiating an eeriness that I didn't want to think about. It was the only thing that had stayed and part of me wanted to leave it there—just learn to live with its presence on the floor, and whatever alternate timeline it symbolized. The cats stood behind me and watched, refusing to go near it when I did. I reached down taking the entire span of human history just to make contact with the cool, crunchy plastic. My fingertips crashed into the seagull logo and as soon as the tactility signaled its way into my brain, I was back in my bed, watching the cats groom themselves in their tree next to my desk in front of a backdrop of white walls. I was tempted to glance at the reflection on my phone screen.