The Souls of Moldy Oranges

Now that winter has started, moldy oranges from the nearby orange tree rot outside my kitchen window. More and more fall upon the tarmac every day, experiencing different stages of decay.

Cars run over them; toddlers point accusingly at them from their strollers; and there they remain, white and blue and barely even orange any more.

But we still call them oranges, because that is the dignifying thing to do.

Except we don 't completely do that for humans – when humans die, they become corpses, then skeletons, then souls, then ancestors. It's hard to remember scary ghosts and piles of bones once did what we do – laughing, tripping up the stairs, and dreaming at night.

Imagine if inanimate objects could haunt the living after they’ve passed: every section of the world would mourn and seek revenge for humans’ eternal industrialization, ever since Eve took the first bite out of the forbidden fruit.

Humans would have lived in fear for their entire existence. The amount of inanimate ghosts would have outnumbered every living being.

But in truth, oranges have so few properties, except for being orange, that they can still be called oranges long after they've died. But when a human dies – like an astronaut or an artist – they are all collectively called corpses. Not the astronaut corpse and artist corpse. (Or artistic corpse?) They are just corpses. In the same way, oranges do not become the orange corpses, orange skeletons, or orange souls. They are still oranges, whether they bloom in the summer or turn ice-blue in the winter.