{"id":3469,"date":"2011-10-05T08:15:09","date_gmt":"2011-10-05T15:15:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sporkpress.com\/fiction\/?p=291"},"modified":"2011-10-05T08:15:09","modified_gmt":"2011-10-05T15:15:09","slug":"peach-by-glen-pourciau-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/2011\/10\/05\/peach-by-glen-pourciau-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Peach by Glen Pourciau"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Grocery store, traffic in the produce section, not much room to maneuver, shopping carts crowded around a long bin of locally grown peaches that are on special.\u00a0 I pick out a few bruise-free peaches, put them in a plastic bag, ready to roll, but a great big guy with his shopping cart turned at an angle is blocking the aisle and someone else has pulled up behind me.\u00a0 The big guy has a moist look, light complexion, pink face, thin fuzzy hair on top, not unpeachlike in his appearance.\u00a0 His stomach is so big it pushes his belt buckle over so that it faces the floor, and if he had a buckle under his butt it would be facing the floor too.\u00a0 As he picks through the peaches he has to shift his whole body around because his arms aren\u2019t long enough to reach over his stomach.\u00a0 Already he has a plastic bag almost full of peaches, even their weight might be putting bruises on them, but who am I to tell him how many peaches he should buy and how would I know why he needs them?\u00a0 I\u2019m not aware of it till after I do it, but my mouth makes a smacking sound, a smack of impatience.\u00a0 He looks at me. \u00a0I\u2019ll be finished in a minute, he says.\u00a0 I nod as if I accept his right to select peaches to his heart\u2019s content, lean on my shopping cart, don\u2019t look at him, don\u2019t ask myself if he\u2019s ever thought of losing some weight, a minute from now it\u2019ll be over, minor inconvenience, what\u2019s the difference if I\u2019m here or pushing my cart ahead to greater grocery horizons?\u00a0 But the guy senses I want him to be on his way and cuts his eye at me over his well-padded shoulder, resentment and self-consciousness in his look, embarrassment that I can\u2019t get past him.\u00a0 His embarrassment reminds me of someone.\u00a0 I was out to dinner with my wife at a bustling steak house, lots of small tables closely spaced.\u00a0 As we waited for our food I saw a fat guy and a woman being led to an empty table by a hostess, the fat guy turning sideways and hopping on tiptoes to get between the tables. \u00a0At the end of one of his hops his stomach collided with a table and knocked it over, spilling food and wine onto the floor and the people sitting at the next table.\u00a0 The fat guy covered his face with his hands and apologized with all his might, and restaurant staff appeared and began cleaning up the mess.\u00a0 My wife looked away from the spectacle, but I kept watching.\u00a0 He and the woman he was with sat at their table for a minute or two before he told her he had to leave, he couldn\u2019t enjoy his dinner.\u00a0 He apologized again on his way out, and the people whose table he\u2019d knocked over pulled the table back to let him pass, trying to seem considerate of his needs yet reminding him of the potentially destructive reaches of his girth.\u00a0 What if he looks over here? my wife said.\u00a0 He wouldn\u2019t want you staring at him.\u00a0 Same size and complexion as the peach collector, who gives me another angry look over his shoulder, and I drop my eyes to avoid a stare down.\u00a0 His anger embarrasses me, but it annoys me to think that\u2019s just what he wants.\u00a0 Has it occurred to him that he could push his cart around the corner of the bin so people could get by?\u00a0 Is he not in some way bringing this conflict on himself?\u00a0 Couldn\u2019t his behavior be described as passive aggressive and is his volume of food intake some form of aggression, a desire to devour who knows what?\u00a0 Don\u2019t look up, whatever is showing on my face wouldn\u2019t look good to him, but then he takes a twist tie from the tube at the corner of the bin and I raise my head.\u00a0 He holds the bag up by its top, spins it as if at the conclusion of a performance and twists the green tie around it.\u00a0 He puts the bag in his cart, gives me a mocking nod, and pushes his cart forward.\u00a0 The acting out bothers me, the flourish with the plastic bag, the mock nod.\u00a0 I\u2019m not accepting his finale.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t done anything to this guy.\u00a0 Easy to catch up, I pull alongside him on his left, and he stops.\u00a0 I ask if he\u2019s ever been to the steak house.\u00a0 One night when I was there, I say, a man who looks like you couldn\u2019t fit through an aisle and he knocked over someone\u2019s table.\u00a0 He seems to get bigger as my words sink in.\u00a0 The pain in his face hits me, in my mind his pulpy hands grip my throat, but I still stare at him.\u00a0 I want to know if he was the man I saw at the steak house.\u00a0 I want it to be him.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

Bio: Glen Pourciau’s collection of stories Invite<\/em> won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and was published by the University of Iowa Press.\u00a0 His stories have been published by the Antioch Review, Epoch, failbetter, Guernica, Mississippi Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review, Paris Review, TriQuarterly<\/em>, and other magazines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Grocery store, traffic in the produce section, not much room to maneuver, shopping carts crowded around a long bin of locally grown peaches that are on special.\u00a0 I pick out a few bruise-free peaches, put them in a plastic bag, ready to roll, but a great big guy with his shopping cart turned at an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-things"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3469\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}