Strange kind of beauty

Found some fruit in my desk drawer that had been there since before I'd been away from work. Not surprisingly, in the heat of the office, it had started to go off.

This one peach, or nectarine or whatever, it had this vivid spot of mould on it. The green colour - well, if you'd seen it as a tin of paint or something, and not as a bit of mouldy fruit - was brilliant.

I found I couldn't stop looking at it. It looked like an eye, or something - and there was something hypnotic about it. Funnily enough the smell, with the mouldiness and peachiness combined, was odd but not unpleasant.

What struck me, looking at it, was that life had gone on without me. I couldn't take in the fact that the people I worked with had been living their own lives, that news had kept happening, that the world had kept on spinning. But I could understand that I'd been away long enough for some fruit to go rotten in my absence.

It seemed more than amazing and mysterious enough.

After a while, aware of the attention of passing colleagues, I swept the fruit into the waste bin.



Story begins here.