Sections
by Liam Lachance
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When the ground shakes, the fish retreat to the bottom of the pond, near beer bottle reef: if the fish could look, above the surface of water, they would see boots, DO NOT CROSS tape, and a body, beneath the stretched trunks of coconut trees.
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Cassie feeds pigeons, in part, so that her walks aren’t consumed by anxiety at what happened before or might crumble next: abstract thoughts are replaced by a simple search for birds. Feathers. Soft bench.
Today, when Cassie sees the police tape, she closes eyes. Exhales. Reopens to scan the area for feathers.
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“Investigation still underway,” a spokesperson says to a camera crew, “blunt object.” The class of teenagers laugh at the pigeon that has landed on the body’s head. One of the students, Emilia, is looking up, at the coconut trees, wondering how they survive in the cold, before noticing Cassie.
Sir? she says to the teacher who is yelling at the class to move on!
Yes, Emilia?
That woman is going to kill the ducks—they can’t digest the bread—isn’t that what you said?
Well, says the science teacher, turning to examine the woman. Part of the cycle—remember how we discussed in class last week?
To murder? Sorry I was sick one of the days.
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Josie hears the story from Cassandra while dissecting a tangerine. As her teeth tear through pith, she wants to focus on the beginning and the middle of the life of the poor person in the news.
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Later, at a diner with no soul, Cassie removes a cara cara orange from her purse. A server delivers hibiscus tea so red that a baby thinks it blood. The baby cries with their single father at the nearby table. When Cassie sticks out her tongue, the infant stops, the father laughs, and she manages to finish the orange.
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Generally, grapefruit split into fourteen liths (sections). Navel oranges—like that cara cara—split into twelve. While cara caras taste mostly of your classic orange, the cara cara is pink, on the inside, like a grapefruit.
Surprises aside, the skin of a cara cara is generic: looks like an orange. Ask around: it tastes like one. However, if the twigs of a cara cara tree bear fruit, those fruit will break from the general patterns of branches and emerge striped.
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Although Emilia signed the Off Campus Permission slip on her own—and paid the trip from OT at the grocer—she has concerns about becoming her mother and failing to find Independence; if she will forever feel a visitor to her own body; how beige Autumn leaves that split beneath her sneakers no longer give the joy that she once felt as a kid, when the crackle would prick at her ears.
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That night, Emilia opens the door of her single room—for which her mother paid extra—and finds the hallway empty. She sneaks past the room of the science teacher—a nice woman who was resentful about teaching anything beneath university—and finds the door shut.
Outside, Emilia is welcomed by cool rain. She’s thankful for the isolation it will provide: how it will cloak her near the scene of the crime.
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The science teacher, of course, wakes.
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The body should not have been left at night, the investigator knows, but has convinced the captain that this killer will return to visit the body. When Emilia arrives in her hoodie, at 23:45, a police officer pretends to retire for the night.
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Cassie knows that she should not be smoking in the park at midnight. When her partner calls her smoking unhealthy, she says I don’t smoke for health reasons. She notices someone near the body.
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Emilia is pleased to find that she is arriving just as the person supervising the body is going on break. She approaches the tarp over the bulge of body. Now: a movement near the trees.
Pigeon-woman smoking alone on bench. Emilia contemplates pulling up the tarp to see the body, or walking over to join the woman in smoke.
Looks like a grapefruit, says Cassie, as Emilia sits. Tastes like an orange.
Will we die from this? says Emilia, ignoring the stranger’s fruit.
Stress will kill you just as likely. Although won’t be as quick as death-by-coconut.
Smoking saves: I like that.
Me too—but you should quit. You should really quit. While you’re still young.
Liam Lachance's work has appeared in The Feathertale Review, Headlight, and In/Words, among others. While he works in the beautiful town of Hochelaga, he was raised in the haunted village of Merrickville, Ontario, which borders the Rideau river.