Gerard held the banana in one hand and unpeeled it with the other. The skin came away with a slight whisper of wetness. Looking at the grainy off-white body of the fruit with its thin threads of brown running from bottom to top, he thought of turds. But turds could never be as uniform as this, never so perfectly shaped. Turds were a mixed bag, never knew what you’d get til you turned and looked. Then they could be anything.
He placed the banana in his mouth, sank his teeth into what he imagined would be enough for a twenty or thirty second chew and, as the taste and texture combined into what he deemed a delightful slush, he wondered why he did not eat more of these.
‘They’re good for you, very good.’ His mother said. ‘Full of vitamins and minerals.’
Like she’d know.
The purity and mildness of the flavour released in Gerald a tranquil mood. He mused over what he liked to call “the moment-zone” - the time that existed between the firer pulling the trigger and the bullet hitting its target. Distance, velocity, meteorological conditions, would all come into play. But in a way that was not the point. It was the inevitability of the destruction that awaited, the calm, the unknowing, that was the essence of the moment-zone. Even if it were a can on a rock. Once that trigger was pulled that can had entered the moment-zone. But what if it were a man about some mundane task, Joe Blogs putting out the bins say, you’d line him up, the cross of the sights just over his left ear as he stared into his wheely bin wondering who had invented such a contraption all the time having no idea that, courtesy of your finger on a trigger, he had entered the ‘Moment Zone’.
‘Are you going to sit there all day?’ This question comes from my mother. It’s followed by mini avalanche of niggle ‘… you might have all the time in the world to sit around but some of us don’t. Now would you mind getting up off that couch while I clean this place up, it’s a mess. Not mine either I might add…’ and on it goes.
Wonder how she’d fair in the Moment-zone?