Afterimage
By Kate Tooley
Maeve walks past the stepped-on banana every day. On the first day it’s still yellow and sticky and kind of a spilled-fruit sex-metaphor of a banana. She has doggie bags with her, and she thinks about scooping it up. There’s a trash can right there, after all. She’s going to have to pass it every morning and Groucho Barks has already tried to lick it once, but she doesn’t. There’s something horrifying and appealing about the gentle obscenity of a banana oozing onto the white pavement, bruises slowly rising on its yellow flesh.
Her sister’s never going to forgive her. They’ve had a lot of fights over the years, but it’s never gotten physical before. But now there are bruises coming up on her arms, and she’s not even sure if what crossed the line was her opening her big mouth, or all the fucking stupid excuses she’d made afterward.
Kay had said, “Why the hell would you tell him” and Maeve whispered that it was an accident, and then when her sister had only gotten angrier, she’d said that Dad had already guessed and she didn’t want to lie. But nothing was making it better, so Maeve launched into a series of explanations that she was making up on the fly, each one less plausible than the last.
The banana peel is still there the next day, most of the yellow already faded. No one else has cleaned it up. She still hasn’t called Kay. Somewhere between contradictory explanations three and four, Kay, too pissed to form words, had grabbed her by the forearms and shoved her away from the door she was blocking. She hadn’t meant to stand in front of it; maybe it was instinct: the slipknot fear of being left by the only family member still speaking to her.
In college, there had been a dead squirrel in the driveway of her apartment the day she’d moved in. It had been fresh, didn’t smell yet. A small gray thing with its gut burst open, and its perfect head and soft ears and delicate paws intact. She knew she should have scraped it up and put it in the trash, but she hadn’t told her parents she was moving out, and her phone had been going off for hours, and she just didn’t have the energy. After three days of starting classes and not answering calls from home, she’d started to feel the guilt, but it had taken another two weeks to drum up the courage to call. By that point, it felt too late and too awkward. Every morning for three months she rode past the dead squirrel. It stank far longer than she thought a corpse should, and she wondered where the carrion birds were when you needed them.
On day three, the ends of peel have just begun to blacken, and the interior of the banana is melting, caramelizing in the sun. Maeve wonders what it would be like to press her fingers into the banana’s center. What would she find if she dug beneath the still firm peel, draped casually over itself like a like a tall curvy woman crossing her legs at a party? She shivers and pulls Groucho Barks away.
Kay hasn’t called or texted; they’ve missed old-movie night, and the bruising on her arms is dark now. She misses her sister. Neither of her parents ever tried to find her at school, but Kay did. Kay had waited outside the cafeteria on a Wednesday and immediately started screaming when she appeared. She’d come out to Kay then, right in front of half the track team, and they’d sort of made up, but when her parents found out, they blocked her number.
Somewhere in the four days of the long weekend she starts to dream of Kay and the banana assumes a menacing air; it’s finally reached the state of decomposition where picking it up would be impossibly messy. She imagines the interior separating and dripping out of her hands and the peel sloughing off as she tries to carry it to the garbage. Groucho Barks side-eyes it as they walk past but doesn’t try to sniff; she attempts, in the light of day, not to remember how angry she’d been in the moment she’d outed her sister — how badly she hadn’t wanted to be the “bad daughter” anymore.
Maeve still dreams about the dead squirrel and the indignity of being left on an overgrown gravel drive to rot. Being hit by car must be a common death, but it doesn’t stop it from being unnatural. Her mother died while she was away at college and she came for the funeral but didn’t sit with family. She missed most of the service thinking about how she hadn’t buried the squirrel, whether it didn’t deserve something better than maggots in the sticky Alabama sun. Her dad had started speaking to her a few years later, but he didn’t hug her, and they didn’t laugh at each other’s jokes the way they had when she was in high school.
It takes two weeks for the banana to stop being a banana. In the end, it looks more like tire marks from a squirrel-sized vehicle, or fire burn, or the remains of something cursed by a fairytale witch. She’d gone on a bad date the night before and out of habit had almost called her sister to debrief. When Kay first came out to her, a year ago, she’d thought it was a joke. There couldn’t possibly be two of them. She’d told Kay how excited she was that they could talk about girls, but she’d never told her how unfair it felt that Kay got to be with women and still get hugs from their dad, how jealous she was that Kay seemed to live happily half in the closet. She bends down and tries to scrape up the peel with her bare fingers, but it’s an afterimage — there’s only pavement.
Kate Tooley (she/they) is a queer writer who lives in Brooklyn and watches too many nature documentaries. Originally from the Atlanta area, she is currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction at The New School. Her writing can be found online in Barren Magazine, Pidgeonholes, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Longleaf Review, and elsewhere; it has been nominated for Best Microfiction and Best American Essays (2020).