Pocket Avocado by Courtney Clute
Associate fiction editor Olivia Kingery on today’s bonus short-short story: This story is all about love: a mother and son’s love, a love for perfection, a longing type of love, and of course an avocado’s love. But the most unexpected love is the one the reader feels when returning to this story over and over and over again.
Pocket Avocado
I keep an avocado in my pocket at all times. Usually, it’s in the pocket of my basketball shorts, the looseness making the avocado inconspicuous at school, basketball practice, and church, but if I’m wearing tighter pants, it goes in my backpack. My mom keeps her daily avocados in her purse or briefcase.
The avocado I pocket every day is hand-picked from the collection that sits in the avocado bowl in our kitchen. My mom buys us fourteen avocados every Sunday—seven for me, seven for her—carefully choosing them based upon their ripeness, selecting a variety of squishy and hard so each day we can pocket one just ready to eat.
“Okay, little guys,” she says to the bowl, towering over them like their maker. “You will each get your day. And we will both take good care of you.” She wraps an arm around my shoulders and squeezes me tight, but not so tight as to squish the avocado in my pocket.
Before going to sleep each night, I eat the avocado I carried around all day—warm and sticking with pocket lint. In my bed, I carve the avocado with my Boy Scout pocket knife, cutting it in half, inserting the knife into the pit, twisting the seed out, then scooping slices of avocado into my mouth. When I’m finished, I wipe the blade clean with my tongue so bits of avocado won’t get stuck when I fold the knife back into place. I go outside and deposit the skin and seed into the compost container my mom keeps in the backyard. I place my shell on top of hers, a mother and son avocado duo ready to be put to sleep. My mom is passionate about the cyclical nature of things.
I go back inside and say goodnight to my mother, and she asks how the avocado was today. I always reply, “Just right.”
“That’s because you’re a good avocado keeper.”
“Thanks, Mom. I learned from the best.”
***
One day, I’m walking home from school, alone on the street in my neighborhood, and I take that day’s avocado from my pocket, cradling it in the nook of my elbow. Sometimes I do this to give the avocado some one-on-one time, and sometimes I do this because I’m lonely, and I need someone to talk to.
“My day was horrible,” I tell it. “I failed the algebra pop quiz. Again. And when I finally worked up the nerve to sit with Trevor and his friends at lunch he laughed, and they all got up and left me at the table alone.”
The street begins to slope into a sharp ascent, signaling that I’m close to home, just 12 mailboxes away. I plop one foot in front of the other, the familiar tugs in my thighs comforting. It’s unseasonably hot and my bookbag starts to weigh heavier against my back, but I look to my avocado for motivation and comfort.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t take you out at school all day.” I stroke the avocado with the back of my index finger, memorizing its ridges and bumps, the way it differs from all the other avocados I’ve cared for and eaten. This avocado feels especially ripe, ready to be peeled open and devoured. “You know Trevor and friends would only make fun of me more.”
I’m halfway up the hill, and sweat starts to pool across my body: on my forehead, my lower back, in between my toes and fingers, and in the crook of my elbow.
“Let’s put you back in my safe pocket. You don’t deserve the sweat.” As I carefully scoop the avocado out of my arm, my sweaty hands slip, and I knock the avocado to the ground.
My breath traps in my throat like I’ve been punched in the gut. Gravity sends the avocado tumbling down the steep street, and I dart after it. I abandon the added weight of my bookbag and chase after the avocado which rolls about two feet ahead of me. It’s hard to run down the hill without tripping over my feet. The space between me and the avocado lengthens. It gets faster. There’s a street that runs perpendicular to this road at the bottom of this hill, where the ground levels out. I have to get to the avocado before it rolls into the street.
But I don’t make it.
The avocado spills into the traffic heavy street. A mini-van drives over it with a loud squash. There’s a sharp pain in my chest, like I’ve been stabbed.
I run into the street, cars swerving to avoid hitting me, their honks drowned out by the fog beginning to form in my head. I kneel down to the avocado corpse, scrapping it from the asphalt, just pieces of green ooze and a flattened pit.
It can never be eaten. It can never be enjoyed. I think about tonight, how I will go to bed without my belly full of the perfect avocado, how my mom won’t have a reason to talk to me, how I’ve failed her.
I sink onto the street and cradle what’s left of the avocado to my chest, the car horns singing a melody of grief, feeling its lifeless form, a heavy weight that I will soon bury, unfinished.
Courtney Clute just completed her MFA at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida, where she studied flash fiction. Her work has appeared in Z Publishing’s Florida’s Emerging Florida Writer’s: An Anthology. You can find her on Twitter at @courtney_clute.
