Writing Prompt: Under A Fruit Tree

Its writing prompt time! The last few posts have seen readers of 3! Three people reading the posts. One even had 4 people. Which means you can't all be Russian porn/disinformation bots!* Maybe it is my wife because she is so proud of me! Or, my co-workers who think I am so hilarious! Or, strangers lead here because they went to the SECOND page of Google results and this came up when you searched "bad takes" or "work crush" or "an essay on the Nick Cage file Fire Birds."

I turned the page and honestly got a prompt about vampires. I do not like vampires and there is already way too much purple prose on them so I batted my eyes to the next page and saw "A man falls asleep under a fruit tree. He wakes up to hear a hissing sound and he sees..."

Nelson had this horrible habit of falling in love with people on the Internet. The response to the pandemic only heightened this since there was nothing to do but consume. He found whimsy in the cutesy energy of the Tiny Kitchen Instagram account and how they made omelets for gnomes with quail eggs. And saving memes from all the subs and mains of Reddit to show friends and coworkers for the expected time everything would go back to normal. With podcasts he imagined how the casters looked and would then compare and contrast them to his expectations. And he had fallen in love with a single mom casting about living her life during the pandemic. Dana and the Distant But Close Mom Hour. She worked from home but she also had two toddlers so how do you manage that. And she had this struggle to balance between "Internet basic" and "woke" so one cast was about crafting tips and the other an interview with the ED of the LGBTQ center in Gordon Square.

And in one casts, deep into the endless May of the pandemic, she sounded beyond defeated. It was posted at 2am and he got the alert and listened and it sounded like she was broadcasting from under a blanket with a stuffy nose and a sleeve of cookies next to her. It was a nadir of a cast to purge negative feelings of trying to do it all. "I hate my sourdough starter, everyone. I don't need another living thing judging me and telling me, no showing me, how i fail it. I made crackers with it, folks."

Nelson's heart broke. He had found her on Facebook (He hated spending more time on it but what else was there to do) and imagined Dana without glasses, hair in a messy bun, and just hurt during that cast. He couldn't do anything but he ordered some books through her affiliate link and made sure to watch all the ads on the Youtube channel where she uploaded those version of her podcasts. 

He tried his hand at the bread baking. He would comment "Hey I tried your sourdough starter and it worked. Hang in there!"

It was a little monster. Feeding every day and rising and falling as the bubbles grew. Nelson went to an ornamental cherry tree he had in his yard. Another Twitter thread said you could catch more wild yeast that way. From under fruit trees and bushes. So he stretched muslin (Really an old paint towel) over the top and went under the cherry. There he read books never read from high school, reminded why he never cracked Crime and Punishment. Under the tree he feel asleep in the early June muggy heat. He had a dream where he imagined Dana, pushing back her Rivers Cuomo style glasses, and speaking into a radio mic like some ancient USO show that was interrupted by the shrill long coos of a catbird. Then it began crapping on him. A cold stream of bird diarrhea over his legs after he scrambled out of the way to miss crap hitting his head. In the panic he knocked over the sourdough starter. The wild active yeast glombed into the dirt and poured out through the frail muslin fiber. Then he channeled Dana, simply giving up, letting it feed the birds so as to not have judgments. 

* With the election coming in 4 months I assume some guy in Vladivostok flipped the switch on the server to do both