Fruit Fly

By Anna Dunlop

Dear Reader,

Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Joyous Kwanzaa, or Happy Holidays if you’re woke. In honour of the final Tea & Oranges newsletter of the year, we have a very special treat for you. Think of this as Da Hong Pao Tea and Sumo Oranges. For this newsletter, our editor-in-chief Anna Dunlop has written a prose piece called “Fruit Fly.” It is ripe with metaphor, capturing the internal feelings that accompany yearning.

2025 will be a very exciting year for Tea & Oranges. We will be releasing our first print anthology within the next couple months, and have a few other surprises in store. For now, keep reading & writing! We hope to see your work featured in Tea & Oranges in the new year.

Sipora West, Chief-of-Communications

The scent of citrus permeates my fingers. A fruit fly mocks me. Flying around my room, taunting me each time it comes close enough to kill it, but withdrawing before I can catch it.

The pest rots my mind, reminding me of things I should have left behind long ago. 

The breaking of the skin of the orange, the touch of your hand upon mine. The juices running down my arm, the sound of your voice piercing the silence. The release of the citrus scent, the feeling of your heart beating against my chest. The taste of the clementine on my tongue, the warmth of your breath on my neck. 

I broke apart the orange, piece, by piece, willingly offering you not only the fruit, but pieces of myself. You were the first to accept so graciously, with no malice, aggression, or haste.

I could never rinse the juice off my hands. I could never kill the small pest, no matter how close I got. The sweet stickiness will soon grow to be a hindrance, much like the fly has grown to remind me of everything that is no longer. The juice runs down my arms and through my veins, the juice has become a part of me. My being forever altered by the partition of my heart into small pieces, having given half to you to devour.

Even when it is within reach I could never bring myself to kill the fly, the ichor from its corpse would only mix with the remains of the nectar on my hands, the nectar in my blood. An immortalized stain of my obstinate desire. I know well enough that I could not handle the physical reminder of the death I continue to grasp so tightly in my hands. 

I love that pest. I love that fly. I love the way it looms over me, despite my begging and griping and hoping that it may leave and never return, I’m unsure I could ever truly cope without it pestering my mind. I find comfort in a haunted house, a ghost remains in place of what once was, a ghost stays, lurks, lingers. The fly stays, lurks, lingers, awaiting a meal made of the ancient ambrosia I have been too stubborn to clean up. Always there in the morning to remind me of the mess I’ve made.