The Black Banana

I consider myself a pretty clean person. My room will sometimes get messy, and I'll admit I occasionally hold off on doing laundry for no reason other than laziness.

Which is why it came as a shock to find a black banana in the backseat of my car last time I cleaned it. I do not know how old the banana was. It was an artifact of a long forgotten lunch, a remnant of a bygone meal.

If the banana were a book, it would have been one of those enormous tomes of forgotten lore one must blow the dust off to read. I wish that were the case. I wish it was anything other than a sad, soggy piece of rotten produce with a mysterious white substance leaking out.

You know when you're in the middle of the clothing department of a thrift store, and the suffocating musk of old clothes overpowers your nose? The same stench radiated from this banana.

One of the big themes we're looking for with our issue one submissions, in addition to growth, is decay. The word used to conjure images of a failing civilization, of a rotting log, or a disintegrating corpse. Not anymore. From now on, when I think of decay, all I'll be able to think about is that black banana and wonder how it managed to escape my nose for so long.