They moved as one, in these moments, in a back and forth of secrets they hid from family.

The way it filled their space and the way it stung their eyes if they got too close became a new comfort. But as the child danced along, the orange began to feel natural, its presence, its being.

It was a dance, almost, of citrus notes that demanded attention and a stubborn abhorrence that challenged it. Its scent continued to diffuse through the room in those weeks, finding a home on their clothes, their bed, their skin. It continued to haunt them for weeks, and no matter how far they threw it away - the garbage outside, the neighbor’s trash, and once, out of the window from frustration - it returned, at the exact same sunspot of the sill. And the day after that, and the day after that. But the next day, like magic, it reappeared. The child had immediately thrown the orange out for fear of a reaction and a sudden rising shame that their mother would find it in their room. They had never seen one in the flesh before then, and that day, they saw the way sunlight filled the pores of its sickly skin and felt their own arm prickle in shivers. Their mother - and her mother, and her mother - claimed an allergy to oranges and all its cousins. Unexpected and foreign, they could smell the reek of it in their room.

There was once an orange that appeared on a child’s windowsill.

Peeled clementine