the fruiterer (fragment)

In the darkness she fell far to the bed of the male and woke swamped in its linen, the sheets earthy damp, the tang of his profuse sweat on her tongue, the sheets vast too and about her as killers, the feel of his movement still in the unnamed, the sheets stained too with streaks of shit left forgetfully with the downward pressure on his buttocks prized apart with the effort of sex (the shame! he would be mortified, she would relish it), the cooling lacquer of his festering seed dripping from hole to hole and leg also. She could hear him whistling in the kitchen and the clatter of glasses and crockery; forgetting whether he had left for hot drinks or cold she assumed the worst, his limp tea, his cheap wine, his impossible coffee granules.

They had met in a local shop, a fruiterer. Her personal sense of consumer ethics urged her to shop for fruit and vegetables at independent local businesses rather than supermarkets, but she regretted the same on a near daily basis due to the consistently low quality of the products on offer: spongy apples, bruised pears, mostly off bananas, loose rubbery broccoli, tasteless shapes the lot of it, and all so dulled and uninspiring in its palette like partial blindness, antithetical to the highly waxed platonic forms the supermarkets buffed to perfection, disappointing food made all the more so by the inflated prices necessary to the furtherance of the shop’s meagre survival. He shopped there, she ascertained quickly, because his unsophisticated tastes expected nothing more, and besides his weekly – without fail! – handful of only the most obvious items likely offered little in the way of inconsistence, it was too tedious for that. They chatted for a minute or so, his desire for her apparent from the outset, and though she was repulsed by him, she nonetheless felt something resembling an attraction to his unashamed arousal and, given her boredom and propensity to continual self-destruction of the most futile type, invited herself back to his place. He carried her blue plastic bag of fresh peas (he hadn’t known what they were, didn’t know peas came in pods), celeriac, wilted kale and heritage beets soft enough to burst with a misplaced thumb with a chivalry as ludicrous as it was surprising, gripped to his chest like a priceless artefact.