When the kale unfurled, its ruffled edges lost all of its curls. Still, it proliferated, becoming more powdered than green: whatever is left of its bitterness remains a mystery. The same could be said of how a lemon could ever come to term beneath the second branch of such a dwarfened tree, except that if a blade were to raze through its dimpled skin, then it would have caused one’s lips to pucker, meaning it may as well have been yellow.

 

*

 

Under the practised cover of a tantrum a child’s hand reaches towards an immature grape. There is no longer anything tentative in the way the vines snake across the overhead trellises, forming some kind of porous shelter from the sunlight that diffuses into the observatory. Somehow or other, the fussing child is lulled to sleep, by the illuminated suspension of dust motes, a makeshift mobile in mid-air; by the air itself, cooled enough to hypnotise even the most homesick of plants into birthing a beaded fruit, now nowhere to be seen.

 

*

 

No one knows when or how it happened: in the day, under the nose of an unsuspecting visitor, the ever watchful exit signs. When they eventually located the lost mandarin, bruised amongst the other fallen fruit, it was no longer possible to distinguish who was what, or when, despite their varying stages of rot. What was peculiar was how there was no smell.

 

*

 

The kale continues to stretch. Its veins, now taut as lifelines on a palm, have started to inch towards a petrified grey. And the legend of the blown rose that once crossed the observatory’s dome to perch upon the grape trellises on the other side may simply be just that: mere story. But when the ribbons on their pots have faded orange, the mandarins will continue to fruit as trees do: wholly unmolested.

 

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