She stands in the lunch line, tapping her foot to the frantic trill of “Bohemian Rhapsody” blasting through headphones—the old fashioned kind, with a cord and everything—echoing inside her tempestuous mind.
Carry on, carry on
Her chin bounces nervously, her teeth chattering. The hairs on her arms stand erect, lined up like little centurions scanning for danger. The line moves forward. The bouncing continues.
As if nothing really matters
Will today be the day it really won’t matter? And then she sees them. Over there, they rest righteously at the salad bar. Sterile and cold and wrapped in metal. Like bodies in the freezers at a morgue. A shudder wracks her shoulders as her chest convulses and her diaphragm spasms, sending her into a violent fit of coughing. Wishful thinking that the cafeteria might leave her alone today.
Carry on
Strawberries. What was there to like about strawberries anyway? Little red devil fruit. They’re shaped like a heart. Not the innocent, rounded teardrop on a cute little card that your crush hand-cuts for you on Valentine’s day. No. Construction paper has nothing on the pulpy monstrosity that lies within, blue veins disfigured like cracks in a sidewalk. Like the fissures in her own fractured heart. Real love is ugly. It is gory. Real love can bring you to your knees in grief, crafted of mere human flesh and blood as you are. The fruit-that-shall-not-benamed is formed from this meaty core, which the grim reaper, after cracking open your ribs, pulls from your body. Beating and bleeding. Barbaric. Pulsing and repulsing. Repulsive. Strawberries are shaped like the organ that gives out on a cold metal gurney in the hall of a crowded hospital, fluorescent lights flickering as a doctor screams code.
Someone shoves her from behind as the line lags in her stillness. Her breath catches as she stumbles forward, tripping on the untied shoelaces of her black Skechers. The boy snickers. Her face burns.
Carry on, carry on
“Bohemian Rhapsody” became a sort of comfort to her in the time since it happened. Unlike this lunchroom. Why couldn’t his favorite fruit offer the same solace as his favorite song? Probably because of the way both their worlds effectively ended at the hands of one little red morsel.
They’re hairy too. What’s up with that? No one wants to eat a hairy little heart. Also, no other fruit has the audacity to turn its insides out for the whole world to see, each seed a beady little white eyeball, haunting her dreams till the end of time.
He used to laugh when she brought up the eyeballs. Oh stop, hermana, he would say, rolling his eyes. He loved strawberries.
It wasn’t like she’d never had one. You can’t judge before you’ve tried, mother used to say. He always said he was curious as to how she’d apply that logic to drugs, but all that ever got him was a swat on the bottom. Silly little boy. No, she’d had strawberries before. She could still remember the last taste–warm sunshine exploding on her tongue like a burst of bliss and life and sweet comfort itself. And of course, she could still remember what followed. The way his voice ceased mid-laugh. The world filled with the twinkle of his joy, only to be so violently replaced by a deathly silence, thick and heavy with shock. Then the screaming. The pleas. The sirens. The way her mother hysterically prayed to Dios as she followed the ambulance in their silver 1999 Toyota Corolla. How she sat frozen in the back, gripping the door handle, knuckles stretched tight as she too prayed to Dios that her mother could see the road through her tears. She would always remember later, in her last moments with him, and the goodbye she couldn’t face. A single drop of strawberry juice, thick like blood, crusted at the corner of his mouth; his eyes stared open and unblinking in the tumbling roar of silence. The only marring on his skin. The only sickeningly outward wrong that would inform the rest of her existence. The same DNA that had so recently run through his veins pumped scrambled through her own frantically beating, strawberry-shaped heart. Her baby brother. They were an inextricable part of each other’s lives. And just like that, his was over.
She turns sharply and vomits into the trash can at the junction of the buffet. A ring of disgusted kids fan out around her, exclaiming in rude delight as only teenagers can. She looks down, arms braced on the edge, panting shallowly. like the little white shih tzu they used to have, back when things were good. Bruno was the dog’s name. A single, perfectly untouched strawberry stares back at her with a thousand beady little white eyeballs, splattered with yellow-green blobs of her regurgitated breakfast. Bruno is also dead, it taunts. Life will never be good again. She pulls herself upright and walks out of the lunchroom, keeping her eyes trained on the doors as she passes the salad bar. Maybe tomorrow will be easier. But who is she trying to fool?
Carry on, carry on as if nothing really matters.
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