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Angry, angry Granny Smith apples

Taste: unpeeled carrot
Sight: a lavender and mint sky with a platinum moon between the evergreens; green-blue water beneath white bubbles; in a box lunch that consists of a plastic wrapped sandwich, a plastic cup of pasta salad, a cheesecake brownie folded in saran wrap, and a green apple 13 out of 17 people will use the apple, uneaten, as a decoration for their desk. "An apple a day keeps the doctor away." "Eat more fruits and vegetables!" advise health professionals, the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association." The apples decorating the conference center are beautiful, but angry. "I am a fruit!" one apple cries. "You are what you eat!" yell the others. The apple protests its mistreatment, "The smashed brownie is dense and glue-like as a clogged artery, the spirals of pasta are a cheap food ground down from fields of brown colored grass fit only for animals with four stomachs to digest and fancied up with just a few specks of red pepper — and do not get me started on the sandwich! I am an apple, a fruit. I grew on a tree connected to the earth tended by a farmer. I am round, juicy and a vital green that brightens up this gray room. I speak of the outdoors and remind you of the sun. Eat me, put some of my sun inside you, and you might be tempted to move and be discontent to sit in this gray room all day. You, too, might be bursting with flavor and radiant with energy. I did not travel all this way across the state in a refrigerated truck to be used as mere decoration and placed in a row in front of the guest speakers as if I were an offering. I'm beginning to think you never loved your teachers. Or, in those days, one room schoolhouses were they actually appreciative of real food? I am meant to be eaten; now! Do not wait for three o clock when they will bring another saran wrapped plate in, piled high with flat, dense, gluey cookies packed with sugars that you could never eat in nature. They will settle in your stomach, weigh you down, and pacify you before the blurry, gray video screens that rob you of life.
Touch: with three fingertips massaging the furrow between the brows in a circle
Sound: "Impermanence," Compass, Assemblage23; At the gym: A woman says how she always wears an air filter mask when she flies so she doesn't get sick. Her husband makes fun of her but it works so she doesn't care if she looks foolish in front of a bunch of strangers. Her friend, who comes to the gym regularly, replies: "And I always look foolish because every time we fly my husband insists on trying to make the mile high club. Can you imagine two bodybuilders fitting into those tiny bathrooms?"
Smell: vinegar
Extra: "...but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it." — Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

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