Go Figure
Look at him go! If you asked the old man in the straw hat why he was carrying a sack of cantaloupes through the crowded streets of the city, he would tell you he’s got a hankering for cantaloupes, true enough. But that wouldn’t be the whole truth. What he wouldn’t tell you is that he loves a woman who doesn’t love him back. He stops at the crosswalk. The curb thickens with people. Pedestrians’re what we call them, like it was a calling, a quest maybe, to be so named amid all the many tribes that people the land. The pedestrians gather.
Don’t be shy now. Join them. Shoulder past the shred-as-a-cabbage-at-the-elbow jacket the stevedore wears and round the umbrella the lady in the silk hovers, just so, between the sun and the soft-as-a-mango skin of the cheek. Budge on ahead. You belong here, you pedestrian, you. Look down, and there it is: the fist, the hemp, the skin of the cantaloupe. Wrinkled is what it is. What a wonder. Fresh on the inside, sweet like a sunrise on the inside, but on the outside? The hide of a rhino, my friend.
The cantaloupes dangle in the sack. How strong the man must be to hold it so. His knuckles waver with the weight, but the strain he feels (he waits with his shoulders back, like a soldier) he feels because he loves the woman. The love is like the earth that pulls at him, waking or sleeping, sitting or standing, at a walk or at a run or even now, as it were, at ease.
In the tiny room up top the crookedy building where he sleeps, he grows the melons, and every day, he carries a harvest to the woman who sits on the bench in the center of Broadway, in the park the size of a tug at the heart of a harbor. Every day he—
Enough already, you say. The man is old. We get it.
Roger Wilco. So the journey ends. Long the labor of love, etc. The he. The she. The light of the moon.
It is with the sweetness of the cantaloupe the old man hopes to win her. He slices the melon to offer her a sliver, but she is not of a mind to surrender to this, or to that, or to any such of a thing as the man has to offer. She tastes. She shakes her head. She turns away. Maybe tomorrow.
What! What kind of a story is this? The moon ripens. From your hiding place in the sliver of dark between the buildings you go to the place where the woman sat. You drop to one knee. With the empty of your hand you travel the soil. You might as well be reaching for the moon for all the good it will do you, my friend, but you can’t help yourself, can you? Young is what you are. Young. Your hand closes around the seed.
ALEN SINCIC
Luis Meléndez. The Afternoon Meal, 1772. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A teacher at Valencia College, Alan Sincic’s fiction has appeared in New Ohio Review, The Greensboro Review, Hunger Mountain, Big Fiction Magazine, A3 Press, The Gateway Review, Cobalt, and elsewhere. He recently won the Texas Observer Short Story Contest and the Adrift Short Story Contest (Driftwood Press). Visit alansincic.com for more.
Winner
2020 Flash Fiction Contest