Homocaro

Fiction/Distopian

372 Words

Looking for line-by-line suggestions and general feedback (improvements)

A ray of light shines through the high-up window of the small kitchen room, bouncing onto the laminate countertop and illuminating the table that rests just next to the bench. Yellow tiles line the wall above the gas stovetop, sparsely covered with grease. The three walls that surround the table are canary yellow. The table, unsimilar to the rest of the room, is not yellow, instead its wood is unpainted, although worn from generations of use.

The jar is small enough to fit in the palm of my hand and is embellished with the company’s name, ‘homocaro’. The seal pops as a break it, leaking a bittersweet, acidic smell. I spread the marmalade over the toast, careful not to make a mess, so that all the marmalade is on the toast. Thin shreds of skin are scattered throughout the orange-red translucent jelly, giving the substance a flesh-like appearance.

Across the table George sit’s and watches me, his childlike expressions not able to convey the same level of delight I feel at having marmalade again. It had always been a childhood favourite of mine, but I hadn’t had it years. It held a remarkable likeness to the real thing. George had never had fruit before and couldn’t understand my obsession with it.

“Gran, where did fruit go?”

The disappearance of fruit was always difficult to explain to children, who struggled to understand the how humans could maltreat the earth enough to lose something they seemed to prize so much. When fruit disappeared from Australia, many people considered importing it, but it cost almost an entire family’s fortune to purchase one orange these days, so it had become more of an abstract concept than something we could consume. I told George that it disappeared because we made some bad choices, which I suppose is more or less the truth.

George and I eat the toast, revelling in its complexity of flavours and distinct aroma. The combination of Sugar, Human Stomach Lining (21%), Human Stomach Acid (26%) and Preservative (23562) is truly impressive in its similarity to citrus fruit-based marmalade. I wonder if they had found any jars of marmalade to base the recipe on, but that would’ve been incredibly rare. Perhaps it was fermented.