I am chewing on a pen when he walks up to me and smiles and he’s got the most beautiful olive eyes I’ve ever seen. A bit too tall for my tastes, but he’s got that whole walking-up-to-a-girl thing down just perfectly. You know the walk I’m talking about? Well, maybe you don’t, maybe you’ve never seen it, but forget about it. It’s not important. The important thing is that he looks strange – out of place, out of time – like he probably shouldn’t be in this juice bar on the corner of 13th and Magnolia. He looks like someone out of a dinosaur’s wet dream. I wouldn’t be able to tell you what was so strange about him; it wasn’t something you could really pin down. Clothes that were a few seasons behind the curve, or maybe ahead of the curve, these things are cyclical anyway. His eyes remind me of a violent upheaval; a nightmare shut up into the twin coin-lockers set into his face.

“Can I help you?” I ask him.

“Yeah, can you make me an orange smoothie?”

“Sure,” I can hear myself thinking, even thought it comes out of my mouth as a sort of unintelligible half-mumble.

I turn around and start looking for the ingredients. God, if there’s one thing you’ll let me do perfectly, just this time, let me make a perfect orange smoothie. I open the bone colored cabinets under the counter and get two oranges. I get milk from the fridge and ice from the freezer compartment and dump the milk and the ice into this blindingly neon-green blender by the sink. My hands grab an orange and go to juice it and the orange does the strangest thing – it slips right through my fingers and falls apart into eight perfect slices. These little slices shatter into sixteen when they slide out of my hand and hit the countertop. The pieces tumble to the floor, shattering again into perfect halves as they strike the tile floor.

Speechless, I go to juice the other, too shocked to clean up the first shattered orange. This orange suffers the same strange fate. Eight slices fall through my fingers to the counter. I try to catch them as they fall, flailing my arms like a coked-up valley girl, but I’m not able to hold on. Some melt in my hands like icy flakes in a late spring flurry; others fall right through my fingers, slipping out of my grasp like wet soap. I grab more oranges from under the cabinet. These oranges fare no better than their fellow citrus. All of them split and slide one after another right through my grasping hands, eventually shattering into pieces too small to make out. I get the impression that they are separating all the way down to the individual atoms that made up the oranges, splitting down to the lonely quarks and perhaps farther than that. Elementary particles are nature’s wallflowers.

The gorgeous man behind the counter seems confused, but keeps smiling. For a brief moment his teeth look like fangs, glinting in the orange and red afternoon halflight; shining like an insane cartoon wolf. The bell on the door to the juice bar rings and he is normal again, the fleeting fevered hallucination becoming an uneasy memory.

“I’m sorry, but the oranges keep falling apart.”

“Well, I suppose that can’t be helped, can it?”

The way he says this causes a shiver to slide up my spine.

“No, I suppose not,” I say, embarrassed at my failure.

“Does this happen often on your world?”

“No, not usually,” I say, confused by his strange question. Maybe he’s just foreign and his English slipped. He did have a barely noticeable, unfamiliar accent.

“Well, what would you suggest?”

“How about a banana smoothie?”

“Banana.”

“Yes, banana.”

“Is that something you would eat with a spoon?”

“Well, no, not usually.”

“Then, what is banana? If you don’t mind me asking, that is.”

I look at him strangely, but he seems completely geniuine. Maybe they don’t have bananas where he comes from.

“Bananas are a fruit too, like an orange. They are yellow and long and you have to peel them.”

“Like an orange, but they are not round?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

He looks puzzled, but somewhat reassured.

“Well, they’re different in that they’re soft and mushy when you eat them, not all juicy like an orange.”

He looked more puzzled now.

“But this is a juice bar, is it not? Why would you stock a fruit that is not juicy?”

Actually, this makes a lot of sense.

“I’m sorry, that was sort of rude of me,” he quickly apologizes. There’s that smile again.

“Sure, I’ll have a banana smoothie.”

None of the bananas fell apart, and the smoothie came out perfectly. I was quite pleased with myself, though still somewhat disturbed by the shattered oranges. I found it really strange that this pretty boy didn’t know about bananas. I got curious.

“So, where are you from?” I ask, attempting to sound flirtatious as I ring him up.

He looks me dead in the eyes.

“Another planet.”

I stare at him blankly and chew on aforementioned pen for a second.

“Well, in that case meet me tonight, nine-thirty, 1774 Camellia St. There’s a party you should be at,” I reply.

He just smiles again, puts on a pair of white-rimmed sunglasses and walks backwards towards the door, eyes locked on mine. He stops before reaching it and says “I’ll consider it,” before turning around.

The sliding glass door opens and he steps out into the humid, blood-drenched afternoon sky. I switch on the store radio and “Burning Down the House” by Talking Heads starts playing. People on the sidewalk outside pass by the windows in single-file. The juice bar is almost empty except for a few weird souls, all drinking fruit juice from the same beige and red one-hundred percent recycled paper cups, sipping life to the beat of the music. The television hanging from a jumble of wires above one of the tables is running the afternoon news silently. The female news anchor mouths the words to the camera, a mute trapped in a vacuum. The story is about a candle factory that caught on fire outside of Denver. The fire has spread out of control and is now heading towards a residential area. Helicopter footage shows flames creeping up on McMansions and swimming pools, closer and closer to people’s culminated lives and dogs chained up in the backyard, barking at the fire but the fire’s not listening. I am gripped by the extreme irony of the moment when a car bomb goes off outside and the windows explode inward with a scream, broken into a million glittering stars as the afternoon light refracts through the pieces.

Car alarms go off all at once in a cacophony of noise as the ground vibrates with the pressure of the explosion - an impromptu concert in the streets. People are screaming and running to and fro; blurs of white and blue going in all directions at once. Everyone in the bar who hasn’t been knocked unconscious by the blast is staring at the fire raging outside. There is a man lying on the pavement in front of the juice bar. His right forearm is missing, now just a shredded stump oozing red and black blood. He is writhing on his back, pushing himself along the concrete with his rubber soles. He is screaming too, but like the lady in the television (and now a story about corruption in the city council, green pleads guilty, four murders this week, details at nine) he is just mouthing the words while “Burning Down the House” continues to play, louder than the chaos outside, louder than the ringing in my ears. It is all I can hear, the rest of the world is a just a tiny smudge in a spiral galaxy that’s slowing down every day. I realize that we’re all riding a carousel that should’ve been stopped a long time ago, before the first man ever beat another one to death for taking his fruit.

“People on their way to work. Baby what did you except? Gonna burst into flame!”

I stand there, chewing on my pen and watching the ragged man. The scene plays itself out over and over again in my head, in slow motion at first and then quickly, filled with jump-cuts like a French New Wave and I am wondering what dress I should wear to Johnny Taragon’s party tonight.

“Some things sure can sweep me off my feet.”