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Sour Fruit

By Gillian Knox

 

The large open field was encircled by forest. Its sandy soil was home to scrubby flowers and grasses whose spindly roots reached deep into the loose ground, teeming with ants for whom the medium was perfect. Not quite in the middle was an old apple tree, twisting up from the ground, this way and that. Short and stubby. The fruit it produced was the sour, small sort that puckered the mouth with every bite. The sort that farmers had been trying to breed out of existence for countless generations. Yet, it lived. Thrived, even, in the clearing in the middle of the woods.

Fish would run to it when the lake grew too loud. Snuggling herself inside its crooked roots, stretching her small hand upwards to poke into the hole that had rotted through the middle of the old tree, watching the sun as it came through her fingertips.

The tree was the one place on the peninsula where the lake would soften.

It was still there — the constant shush-shush of waves on rock was inescapable — but it faded into the background.

It was a mild day in late September when Fish found the first gift. That’s how she thought of them. Gifts.

Jorgi had been teasing her all through the school day, pelting her with bits of chalk until the lake rushed into her ears, drowning out Teacher’s lecture on Pythagoras. She ran as soon as the bell on Teacher’s desk was rung. Out across the browning prairie grass to the twisted pine trail, over the rocks and into the field.

She cried to the tree, letting all her frustration and childish hatred out with each salty tear. Calmer, she reached up into the rotten hole and her fingers found paper.

There was no real explanation for why a bag of flour sat in the rotted-out crook of the old tree, but Fish knew immediately that it had been left for her. She stood to pull the first gift close to her chest, crinkling the paper and sending small puffs of white out from the corners. It would get on her shirt, and Mama would be cross, but it didn’t matter. Finding the treasure had lifted the weight of the day and quieted the lake enough that she could go home.

Once she got there, though, the flour became a problem. If she were to bring it inside, surely Mama would find it, take it from her, use it in her dry, crusty bread. The kind that hurt Fish’s mouth.

She stood outside the kitchen door, listening to the sounds of bustle on its other side for a full five minutes before deciding. She was the last one in that evening, and there would be no reason for her parents to leave until the next morning. She would leave it outside on the porch, wake early, be the first one out the door in time to retrieve it in the morning, and find a safer, secret space to keep it, far from Mama’s kitchen.

Papa barked when she came in. Where had she been, why had she not been helping Mama, she was a useless girl. Mama nodded along, as though she agreed. As though she wanted Fish underfoot in the afternoons. As though she wasn’t always shooing her away to run in the woods.

Fish said nothing, looking chagrined and soulful so that Papa felt his words held weight. She choked down Mama’s cooking, did her small chores, and went to bed.

She woke before the light. There was no clock to wake her, just the anticipation of being the first up. She crept down the stairs, flashlight clutched in hand, avoided the creaky floorboards, and slowly eased the kitchen door open. Just a crack. Just wide enough for her to squeeze through.

Her heart caught.

Even in the limited beam of her small light she could see the mess on the porch. The flour had been kicked over.

The lake rushed in, drowning out everything around her. Drowning out the angry keen that burst unbidden out of her throat.

It brought Mama, and a smack up the back of her head before Mama saw the mess herself. She snatched the light from Fish’s hand.

“Where’s your father?” She spat it out in a tone Fish couldn’t read. There was anger, but it was mixed with something else. Hysteria maybe. And just the slightest touch of giddy.

Fish had stopped screeching, but she couldn’t speak yet. Her gift was gone, and she could think of nothing worse.

Mama swept the beam of light out into the dark morning. The mess wasn’t confined to the porch. Boot tracks full of flour led out away from the house. Mama pulled up the hem of her robe and, with jaw clenched so tight Fish thought she could see it pulse, stomped out after them still in her slippers.

Fish had to jog to keep up as they followed the flour trail down the footpath in the woods, up the rocky berm and straight to the woodshed Papa’s papa had built in the back forty.

Fish could barely see around Mama as she kicked the door open, but she did recognize Jorgi’s Mama from the panicked screech that she let out. The cacophony of yelling that followed was too much too sudden for Fish, so she turned on her heel, running back through the dark away from whatever nasty thing was happening in the woodshed, to the quiet of her room.

The silence in her house the next day was an icy thing with thorns. Mama was still there, Papa was there as well, but they merely played at normality. For the first time since she could remember Fish was relieved to run off towards the schoolhouse.

The discomfort followed her there, as well. Whispers ran around the small room, and glances were shot, none too furtively, towards Jorgi, who looked uncharacteristically pale and drawn. His mother, Fish was informed, had disappeared in the night. Ran off, it was said, or was run off.

Fish thought it must be hard for Jorgi, but struggled to care overmuch. Perhaps this was just comeuppance. She had been told it existed, but had never seen it in action before. Maybe things were setting themselves right.

After school she went back to the tree, walking this time. Despite the terrible awkwardness everyone else seemed to be feeling, Fish felt lighter than she had for a long time. The lake was a distant shush, even before she made the field.

This time there was a little salt well waiting for her in the hollow. She grinned to herself, pleased that the tree was still giving her things, despite the mess she’d made of the first gift. The little ceramic pot was a deep, polished brown, and, when she twisted the top off, full of the most glittery rock salt she’d ever seen.

“I’ll take better care of this one,” she whisper-promised to the tree, before giving it a hug and nearly skipping all the way home.

She was wrong, of course. Mama saw it almost immediately, snatching it from Fish’s fist.

“What are you doing playing around with my salt well?” she demanded. “I’ve been looking for this for days.”

Fish got another smack across the head and took her seat for dinner, fuming. Mama crashed the salt well onto the table, hard enough that Fish thought it might break. The icy silence was maintained, though every movement Mama made echoed loudly. Papa still got his bowl of soup first, but it slopped over its sides with the force of Mama’s setting down. Fish got a smaller bowl, with a little less force but more spillage, and she sat, as was expected, waiting for Papa to start his own meal.

He twisted open the salt well in front of him. Fish felt her heart jump to her throat, and the lake was right there waiting. It sloshed around in her guts as he took an impossibly big pinch of her gift, throwing it carelessly in his food.

Fish’s fists clenched as he lifted the spoon to his lips.

He was ruining everything.

She didn’t realize he was choking at first. Sometimes he just turned red like that, after a beer, when he was particularly mad with Mama, or when Fish annoyed him.

When it clicked she kept silent-still, fascinated, watching as the red turned to white turned to purple. It wasn’t like she would have known what to do anyways.

The clatter of his head knocking his bowl over cut through the lake noise. She was surprised. It wasn’t the sort of thing that usually helped.

“Mama.” She called her over from the sink, pointing at Papa’s airless body.

For the second time in two days, Mama started screaming.

Fish was forgotten in the busy. The doctor came and carted Papa off. The neighbors came and comforted Mama. Fish was neither told to finish her dinner nor chased away from the table, so she grabbed the salt well when no one was looking and hid it under her mattress.

In the morning the neighbors were still there. Or maybe they’d gone and come back, but Fish was still ignored. It was preferable, really. She wanted to get to the apple tree before school.

Dew from the morning soaked through her canvas shoes, but she ran through the grass anyway.

This time there were no kitchen staples waiting for her, but instead five silver dollars glistening in the rotted center of the tree. She turned them over in her hand obsessively, marveling at the slick cool feel of the metal and how quickly it turned warm with contact to her skin.

When she got close to the school house she slipped the coins into her pocket safely out of the sight of the other children, but she couldn’t stop her hand from grasping at them, rubbing them against each other, even where she couldn’t see them. The soft clink of metal on metal was dulled by the cloth surrounding it, but not silenced.

The other children stared at her, more blatantly than they had stared at Jorgi the day before. Instead of whispers, there were straight-up questions.

“Why are you here?”

“Hasn’t your Papa died?”

“Why aren’t you sad?”

“Are you even human?”

The questions quickly turned from concerned and confused to jeering and angry.

Aptly named, she was called, because she was nothing but a cold, wet Fish.

Fish had heard these things before, so they didn’t bother her much; besides she had her warm coins to bring comfort.

Jorgi was the one who heard them. Of course it was Jorgi. Always a nuisance, something had hardened in him over the last two days, and when the clinking of metal became too loud to be hidden, he whirled on Fish, a gleam in his eye.

“What have you got?” he demanded, and lunged after her when she refused to tell.

The coins spilled out onto the ground, pausing everyone for a breath before Jorgi threw himself off of Fish and towards the money.

This was too much. All of her gifts were being touched by people who shouldn’t even know of them, sullying what was such a magical, private thing.

She had Jorgi by the back of the hair before he could touch the silver. The lake was there, and she only barely held it back as she shoved Jorgi’s face again and again into the dirt.

She didn’t know how long it went on, but it was long enough for her mother to show up. Mama was still in her robe, hair in disarray as she pulled Fish off her classmate, screaming curses.

Of all days.

Of course Fish would cause such trouble. Now that Papa was gone she could stop pretending that Fish belonged in her house. Fish was always an unnatural, ungrateful thing. She shouldn’t be allowed amongst normal folks.

Fish stopped flailing her arms towards Jorgi as the rain of cruel coming out of Mama’s mouth washed over her.

A lot of it made sense. She thought, this was made to make me feel bad. Mama’s trying to make me feel bad. But she failed.

Fish didn’t feel bad. She felt liberated. Like all the excuses were gone. There was no reason to protect any of these people any more.

She stopped trying to hold the lake back.

 

 

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Host Commentary

I so often start these intros by saying it’s my privilege to present a story for you today, and I do always mean that; this is a position and a responsibility I take seriously, and I never forget that it is a privilege. But today I really, super, mega mean it: today it is my absolute privilege to present episode 900 for you, a PodCastle original for our Disability Pride & Magic month, and one that genuinely stopped my breath when I read it, because it is such a personal gut punch. It’s the perfect story to mark a centenary episode like this, as it encapsulates so much of what we try to do here: it’s about showing an underrepresented narrative, illuminating a marginalised experience with a story, about trying to engender empathy through fiction and using our little platform to forcibly bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice. So I am honoured to present today’s story for you: SOUR FRUIT by Gillian Knox, narrated by Karen Menzel.

It is worth saying, because I really don’t say it often enough, that 900 episodes does not happen by magic: it is not mana from the heavens, a gift from the universe where each episode pops into being on a Tuesday. It takes a lot of folk a lot of time and care and graft to keep the castle flying, from the slush readers to the masthead to all the admin involved in the engineering decks of the mothership at Escape Artists—and, of course, our authors and narrators. And we are mighty, mighty proud that we manage to pay everyone involved in the endeavour—a token fee, sure, nothing like what’s fair, but there’s vanishingly few short fiction markets that manage it at all.

Being able to do that means making the work a viable option for marginalised folk who might otherwise not be able to justify it vs. something else that might make them a bit of money, make ends meet and scrape through another month; which means that being able to pay folk allows us to broaden the kind of people who can participate in short fiction publishing, the Black and queer and disabled types who are held back by the systems we live in and are more likely to be living on lower incomes.

And broadening the staff means broadening the perspective means broadening the stories we select, helping publishing break out of its feedback loops of white, middle-and-upper class Anglosphere staff unconsciously favouring white, middle-and-upper class Anglosphere narratives and making that the dominant form of story-telling—and as I’m telling you all the time, stories are how we shape the world.

And for 900 episodes, all that has been possible thanks to our donors, who almost entirely keep this whole thing rolling—we’ve run maybe one carefully vetted ad a year, tops? It’s pretty much all donations, and more than 90% of what comes in via them goes straight back out to our creators and our staff, especially now we’re a 501(c)(3) non-profit and we get access to all the cheap pricing for the admin tools we need.

We literally could not do this without our audience. We need your support, and if possible your donations: recent… changes to the US government’s priorities and approach to arts funding have shut off a revenue stream we were really hoping to tap into, and budgets have been getting tighter recently, and if a few more of you sign up to donate monthly at patreon.com/EAPodcasts you would not believe the difference it would make and the distance we will make it stretch.

Doing that gets you access to the EA Discord where we natter about the episodes each week, and a bunch of other stuff listed there. If you want to donate as a one-off, you can do that via PayPal, or other methods all listed on our website front page as a series of buttons down the right-side; and if you’ve got any questions at all about supporting us, you can email donations@escapeartists.net and we’ll get back to you with whatever answers you need. For those of you who support us already: thank you, thank you, thank you. For those who can’t afford to but spread the word to their friends, so we can grow that audience and grow the segment of people who can donate: thank you, thank you, thank you. We wouldn’t be here without you, and we do love being here.

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…aaaaand welcome back. That was “Sour Fruit” by Gillian Knox, and if you enjoyed that then go seek ye out Volume 9 Issue 3 of Lamplight Magazine, with the story “Juglone” in it; but beyond that I’m afraid that you, like me, must wait for other markets to catch up to the self-evident brilliance on display in today’s story, and publish more by Gillian. I hope we’re not waiting too long.

Gillian didn’t send us any notes, today, but I don’t think they’re necessary anyway: I think the story is the notes, because this is so incredibly grounded in the autistic sensory nightmare, and the social rejection, that there’s nothing more could be said that the story didn’t say. I almost don’t know how to approach this outro, because the story hit me so hard I don’t know where to start.

Part of the problem with discussing autism, and being autistic, is I’ve only ever been autistic; I’ve never been neurotypical to comprehend the ways in which my experience of the world differs from that assumed baseline, and how it differs, to explain it all. The new Murderbot series on Apple TV, which is great and is leaning hard into the autism angle, has a moment in episode two where SecUnit is asked “What’s it like to be you?”, to which it can only respond “I don’t know what it’s like to not be me… so I can’t say what it’s like.”

And that’s not unique to being autistic, that’s a problem anyone has—describe the colour “green” without simply listing objects you know to be green, but in such a way that you can know, definitively, that your subjective experience of the colour you know as green is the same as someone else’s—but the burden of having to explain our experience of existing inevitably falls on us, as the minority. Here’s a more pertinent example: I once asked online if neurotypical folk could describe the experience of listening to someone talking to you in a crowded, noisy room, like a pub, and it turns out that’s a thing that most people don’t really have the words for, or is something so automatic that you struggle to pin the concept down in mere language. The closest someone got, I think, was describing it like a camera lens focusing: all that other noise is still there in the background, and its presence adds texture, but you’re focused on the person talking to you and it’s no effort at all to make it out. Whereas for me, and it took me oh-so-many years to discover this wasn’t how most people experienced the world because who off-handedly offers their opinion on their subjective sensory experience of the pub in case anyone around them has it different?, for me it’s like a 2D black-and-white line drawing of a Where’s Wally puzzle: everything is of equal importance, and no one thing stands out in any way either through focus or colour or proximity or size. I hear all the noise equally, and equally loudly, every conversation around me and every scrape of a chair and clink of a glass and chime of a gambling machine and the only way to pick out any of what the person in front of me is saying is to concentrate intently on lip-reading as a contextual clue to match with whatever snatches of sound swim up through the torrent, and piece that together with a best guess prediction of what they’re likely saying, and hope to all the gods I’ve got it right and not just responded in a way that’s a complete non-sequitur. It is stressful and exhausting and it is like your anxiety is water on a stove, steadily building to a boil, pressure and steam waiting to burst over—or like the sound of a rushing lake, even.

And from the outside you’d have no idea. The only clues you’d get, if you were paying close attention, would be noticing my shoulders relax as we step outside and the tension can ebb away; or notice how I increasingly decline to meet up anywhere I know will be noisy like that, even if, for so much of my life, I didn’t get why it was such a struggle.

Because it’s not just about the fact it’s difficult to understand a conversation, it’s… being autistic and existing in the world is like having an imp perched on your shoulder, continually jabbing you in the face with a sharp claw to interrupt your every thought and moment—though this is based on an assumption that getting interrupted so constantly would escalate anyone’s anxiety and frustration, and I don’t even know that. You can’t get rid of this imp, no-one else can see the imp, and at best all you can do with it is make sure you’re stood somewhere that it’s not going to pester you too much. But if you’re somewhere crowded, somewhere with bad acoustics and too much reverb, somewhere with sudden loud sounds that will cause you actual physical pain in your ear drums, a honest-to-gods stabbing sensation, and too much colour and too much movement and unspoken, unfamiliar rules on how you should be behaving and hard floors that are hurting your feet and the temperature high enough to make you feel sick, that imp is going to jab you for every one of those things that make it uncomfortable, and that jabbing is going to interrupt you constantly and force your thoughts to keep switching track, pestering you like a small child constantly asking you to get up and do something for them every time you sit down to try and do your own thing, and that frustration builds and builds and builds and then, well, here’s the thing: I’ve noticed a tendency in contemporary special education to describe it as “becoming dysregulated”, which I hate for how medical it sounds, and I hate because it seems to be used out of fear that “meltdown” is somehow rude and demeaning when it is, in fact, perfect. A nuclear meltdown is a runaway chain reaction, when the balance has been knocked off kilter and the interaction between everything has become self-sustaining and self-building and there is, by the time you’re at that point, nothing you can do to stop that momentum and that pressure build up. The moment to act and avert was before it was a meltdown; by definition, it is only a meltdown once it is too late to stop.

And that is an autistic meltdown. If you know you’re autistic and understand that the sensory environment is like an imp on your shoulder, jabbing you in the eye, then you learn to recognise the signs and understand that it’s the environment that’s causing you this stress and that you need to remove yourself from the situation: go outside for some cool air and quiet, and it is terrible that there are times in my life where the reason I’ve been a smoker is to have that excuse, because “it’s too hot and loud in here” is not an acceptable thing to say. But if you don’t know that about yourself, don’t understand…

And honestly I am taking so many words here to describe something that Gillian’s story has already taught you so much more elegantly. I can’t speak to their intentions in writing it, but to my interpretation? There’s no lake here. Not at all. Not a real one, not a magical one. No, the lake that Fish tries to escape, that sound that surrounds her, from a low shush-shush of waves on rocks to a roar, a roar in her ears… that’s just autistic anxiety. The constant, inescapable background noise of our lives, that we’re always trying to hold back. Finding somewhere quiet, and alone, and grounding—like, say, a tree in a field in a forest—might dull the noise, but it’s never truly gone. And when everything in your world is off-balance and you don’t understand how or why, which is, let’s be honest, what life is as a child, and people are pestering you and judging you and taking your silver dollars, then the lake is swollen, and rising, and wanting to burst out and wash over everyone and everything around you and wash it all away, and it is all you can do to fight it and hold it back—

—and for whose sake? For everyone else’s. Because a meltdown is a release. It is a necessary emergency pressure valve. It alleviates all that built up tension and stress. But it is also, in society’s eyes, a deeply shameful thing, a dangerous thing, a scary thing; someone who would react that like that is to be feared, not even pitied, let alone understood and empathised with. When you have a meltdown, no-one thinks about what an awful burden of pressure you must be under to have gotten to this point, to no longer have had the strength to hold it back despite knowing the social consequences; no, they only think about how it scares them, and makes them uncomfortable and feel unsafe because this is uncharted territory and they don’t know the rules of the situation—and oh, what an irony that! So you bottle it up and you fight it for their sake, so you don’t make them feel bad around you, because it’s struggle enough to get even an iota of acceptance, and doing something as gauche as allowing yourself to react naturally and necessarily to the stimuli around you is sure to burn that narrow rope bridge that connects you.

So I get it when Fish stops fighting, here. When she lets the lake burst out. I get it because I’ve been there, so many times in my life. When you decide—though that may be giving it more conscious involvement than is true, but nevertheless—when you decide that you’ve had enough of thinking about people who don’t think about you, about putting their needs over yours when they never show that same kindness in turn, about protecting them from the consequences of their behaviour and their attitude towards you. When there’s no reason to protect these people any more. It is liberating. I get it. At least, it’s liberating until the next day, when you have to face everyone again and the opprobrium surrounds you like air pressure before a thunderstorm, and becomes yet another layer of oppression, of pressure, building up to the next meltdown even as it makes you more determined, more frightened, of losing control again. Which means it is, essentially, just a constant escalation throughout our whole lives from which we can never escape, because even if we leave people behind we still carry their judgement with us, when we’re awake in bed at 3am reliving the moment over and over and over.

There’s no neat wrap-up from me, here. No call to action. Just… go back through the story again, please, now you have context. Take it on-board. Because it’s telling you, so much more eloquently than I ever could, just how hard it is to be autistic, and we could really do with a few more people comprehending that.