by Patrick Adkins

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Jay lived in a slumped beige duplex just past the Watershed Glen train tracks—a place that looked like it had been built in one frantic day and forgotten the next. Mold ghosted the air vents. The front step clung to the doorway like a scab—too tender to tear away without drawing blood. Inside, a secondhand couch sagged under the weight of mildew and old bourbon. Jay had never tasted liquor that cost over thirty dollars, and even then, it was expensive in the way an oil drum is expensive—by volume, not value. Morgan, his girlfriend, sold weed from the bathroom vanity, calling it “small-batch botanical work” like she was distilling artisanal gin. But there was nothing small batch about it. Morgan got her weed from some old redneck who lived off Pauli’s Creek, and she always smelled like sweat and linen after every re-up.

Jay dropped out of Tideland Coast College twice—once for not showing up, once because he forgot he was enrolled. His memory wasn’t bad, just badly applied. He had a habit of drifting, sealing himself off from the world, its clutter, and the parade of assholes pretending to search for answers. Most days he lay on the floor in busted cargo shorts, watching closed-captioned cooking competitions. He didn’t cook. Barely ate. But there was a strange comfort in watching people pretend food mattered—like those assholes again, only these had found the answers, crushing them into pesto or shaving them into consommé, feeding envy into every crevice of Jay’s molars.

Morgan kept the machine wheezing along. She’d vanish for hours and return smelling like spearmint, sweat, and car upholstery. She once handed Jay a joint she dubbed Savannah Fog, promised it would “reset his perception.” He coughed for ten minutes and felt the same—just wetter. Jay didn’t think his perception needed any sort of calibration, but then again, maybe that was precisely the issue Morgan was talking about. So Jay just sat there. His cargo short seams bursting with ambition, and his lungs—heavy with intention.

Then came the clementines.

It started one limp Sunday at the Old Ashe Market, a half-collapsed farmer’s stand behind the ruins of a bowling alley off Highway 601. Jay had walked there on instinct, afraid if he didn’t leave the house, he’d dissolve fully into the upholstery or be swallowed by his cargo shorts, hands first. His phone was dead. Morgan was hosting a “Meditative Edibles” seminar in what had been a Chinese buffet. That’s where he saw them—clementines in a dented bin, left too long in the sun. Wrinkled, concave, their skin puckered like drowned hands. A few were split at the seams, leaking pale juice that pooled in the corners of the metal like sweat in a fever dream. Mold had begun to spider across their rinds—green-gray and delicate, like frost with a secret. One was almost beautiful in its ruin, furred over with a lacey bloom that seemed to pulse gently in the heat.

He stared, not in disgust, but with a quiet ache, as if the fruit had whispered something only he could hear. Something about being forgotten. Something about softening slowly while the world sped on. He felt it twist in his ribs. A kinship. He took two. No one stopped him. Nobody wanted them. At home, he placed them in the bathtub. Not tossed—placed. Gentle, like they were sacred or broken. He sat on the floor, half-pulled the curtain, killed the light. The fruit didn’t glow or hum or rot in fast-forward. It just was—softening, dimming, becoming. And that was enough.

He went back the next week. Stole five, then ten. By September, the tub held a heap of sunburned ghosts. Some sagged open. Others wept syrupy tears. A few bloomed with fine green mold, delicate as lace. The air turned syrup-thick—swampy and sweet like perfume worn too long.

Morgan eventually noticed.

“You running an experiment?” she asked, folding a hoodie that didn’t belong to her.

Jay shrugged. “I’m keeping track of time,” he said. “Sort of.”

She nodded, handed him a bowl of her bathroom weed, and asked if he wanted to try float therapy in Grimwood. Jay felt like telling her he had been floating and that he just wanted to be grounded, but just as he was about to express this, he was interrupted by a hollow knocking on the door. Mr. Wheeler. The other half of the duplex. Mid-seventies, maybe more. Always in a faded fishing hat, always cradling a plastic pitcher of sun tea, even on cloudy days. He knocked slow, like he was checking for a pulse.

“You growing rot in there?” he asked one Tuesday.

Jay shrugged. “Sort of.”

“Did the same. After Nam. Kept peaches in a cooler till they split like hearts. Needed to see something that didn’t lie.”

Then he turned and walked off, slow as a sentence you don’t want to hear the end of.

After that, Wheeler started leaving things on the porch. A cigarette lighter with a dolphin sticker. A cassette labeled STORM SERMON 1993. A crumpled lily wrapped in foil. Jay left clementines in return—always soft, always bruised.

Then he found the one.

Tucked behind a box of collapsing squash at the market. Small. Firm. Flawless. No bruise. No puncture. It sat in his hand with the weight of something that knew it had been found. He placed it atop the mountain in the tub.

And waited.

A day. Then three. Then ten. The others rotted as usual, sinking into themselves like wet lungs. This one didn’t blink. Didn’t sag. Held its shape like a lie. Jay started waking with orange shadows beneath his eyes. Quit watching the Food Network. His dreams swam with pulpy suns, sticky hands, citrus pulp pressed like communion wafers against his tongue. Morgan said he whispered in his sleep: “It hasn’t died yet.” And “I think it’s waiting.”

Then one morning, a note slid under the door. Crinkled. Orange-stained. Neat, narrow handwriting:

Don’t trust what stays the same.
The man next door once buried something that wasn’t fruit.
—W.

Jay stepped out, watched Wheeler kneeling in his hydrangeas, whispering into the dirt. He didn’t ask. Didn’t want to know. That night, Jay told Morgan he was leaving.

“Leaving Watershed Glen?” she asked. “Or, like, leaving?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Both?”

“Okay,” she said, flicking lavender paint across a rolling tray.

As he passed Wheeler’s door, the old man was digging again. Elbows deep. Humming. Jay didn’t stop. Didn’t look back. But he heard him—Mr. Wheeler, muttering into the soil:

“Some things rot. Some things wait for you to rot instead.”

And Jay kept walking, unsure if the fruit was a miracle or a trap—
but knowing, finally,
that it was time to go.

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Patrick Adkins was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina. He now lives in
Aiken, South Carolina with his wife, Dr. Chloe Adkins, and their son, Ambrose. His
writing often blends the familiar and the surreal, exploring the strange edges of ordinary
life.