from Seeing Outside, by Kevin Holden

By Kevin Holden

It started the morning the large coca-cola truck bore down on him. He was crossing the street from the left to the right and then there was the truck. Despite the usual sounds of approaching trucks, the young man did not notice anything out of the ordinary and so was almost killed. He was wondering just then, have you ever seen those grapes on the table – they are plastic or rubber but they look like real grapes, so real in fact that you want to bite into them or at least pinch them, like perhaps bubble wrap or bosoms to test their reality, and sometimes even you do take them in your hand (because they have tricked you into believing in them) and you, since you are distracted by some thought in your head, the memory of a smell for instance or some sound in a hallway you once walked or the terrible fear that your ankle will slowly deteriorate, so distracted in fact that you do not notice the inappropriate lightness of the once-tabled grapes and so you bite into one still on the stalk, and then, you will say later, let me tell you they are not real; there is that horrible taste of latex, like that time you were blowing up the glove in the doctor’s office, waiting on that stool – the doctor still had not come – but instead of blowing out you (in a moment of distraction) sucked the air in and had the glove in your mouth and tasted the awful taste of latex and glove powder.