For the first few days, she’d pretended to take interest in the fruit, weighing them in her hands like she’d seen the women do. Palms up, waiting for the citrus to divulge their juiciness and sweetness like gods. After a while, though, she had stopped bothering. The Fairprices were large and the staff busy. The unremarkable scene of a girl deliberating over her choice of oranges is everywhere the same. And so the folk went about their business, and the girl continued standing in the fruit aisle, between the bagged oranges and the loose ones. Most of the shoppers stepped around her body to get to the apples, or onions, or on their way to the milk. This is the closest she would get to being part of a supermarket display, she thought, though it would also have been possible to disguise herself as a fruit promoter, or some variation of a standee.
For a week she did this, replaying the utterly mundane life she intended to live. Every once in a while, at the fruit bins, she would find herself beside a couple or a mother with a child in tow. For about five seconds she would allow herself to wonder what the three of them looked like. A trio of housemates. Colleagues, perhaps. Spinster aunt. Errand friend. When she did this, she would close her eyes and listen, allowing the ordinariness of lives to pass over her own like a blessing.
Are these organic? Nah, I don’t feel like peeling them. Can we really finish this many? Mummy, Mummy, mummmmmy.
After they had gone, she would pick up the nearest orange and round the corner towards the checkout. The walk back to her flat took six minutes on a good day, during which, orange in hand, she pitted the imaginary against the ugly, the vapid and deeply necessary business of living. On entering the flat, she would set the day’s orange down on the counter next to the one from the day before, marking on the waxy skin with a biro what it is those strangers must not have said.
I want to break the window in our bedroom. The children have learnt to fly. Yesterday, I looked into the canal at bedtime and felt the moon move across my skull.
The act made her feel feverish. Her cheeks and the tips of her ears burned. There was a distinct humiliation in the way she failed to replicate pedestrian life. She briefly considered the adjacency of her actions to thievery. Once, she stood in front of the bathroom mirror and held the day’s orange in front of her face. She closed her eyes and pretended, hard, to disappear. She thought she did, but it was merely a spell of vertigo.
That night she dreamed of the moths on the bicycle racks outside her childhood home. She was convinced that the winged things were in fact mirages of dust, for when she dragged her thumb across one it would revert into a pile of silvery dust.
Upon jolting awake, it occurred to her that she needed the Fairprice to take the oranges back, all of them, though the first two had already started to mould, white patches rising and spreading over the biro ink. This, she decided, would be her reverse Turing Test. While brushing her teeth, she held the oranges up to the bathroom mirror, one by one, as she had before. She gargled and spit in the sink. She had gone unnoticed thus far. She would go to the Fairprice tomorrow. Then she’d know for sure.
On the ninth day she brought the oranges back to Fairprice in a two-gallon ziplock, the largest she could find. She needed to believe in something. In herself, in magic, in whatever it was – largely nevermind, and primarily anyways – in the same way she believed the blue is the sky, and in the east will rise up with the sun, and yes – this, like any day in the new life, must swallow itself whole, tail and all. She needed to know if it had worked.
I’m afraid these cannot be returned, Miss. We do not accept returns on food items except those pre-packaged, with an intact seal. Store policy.
She felt a sharp sound rise from within her throat.
The humidity clung to the residual cold on her fingers as she stood at the loading bay, watching the deliveries come in by the shrink-wrapped carton at dusk, as she was sure they did at almost every hour of the working day and then some more. She clutched the two-gallon bag of words she’d stolen, spread variously over the oranges, and felt the passing of the day to its minute, and whatever was left of the era’s tenure, straining up against an extraordinary amnesia.
She must return to the very beginning of things. Before bicycles and televised apologies. Before migraines. Before she felt the need to cut her finger open on a jagged leaf. She decided right then and there in her sticky corner of the urban tropics, that some lies were small enough not to kill her.
She would make up her life from scratch.
Laura Jane Lee is a poet, teacher, voiceover artist and children’s author based in Singapore, via Hong Kong and Scotland. She is a Bread Loaf alum and a Brooklyn Poets Fellow, an awardee of the Sir Roger Newdigate Prize, and was shortlisted for the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize and the Bridport Prize. Her work has been featured in festivals in Rotterdam, Berlin, Brisbane and Singapore, as well as in Cordite, Ambit, Gutter and Bellingham Review, among others. Recent works include “flinch & air (Out-Spoken Press, 2021), and the children’s book, “What Makes You Brave?: Orangu and the Tutu Kueh” (Armour Publishing, 2026).
