A/N:  I've been super, super busy, but I got this inspiration and had to write it down before I forgot it :0)

            The first time she had an orange she was young, and it was summer.  The round, swollen fruits rolled across the counter above her head.  The plain white bowl rang out and rumbled to a spinning stop, and the fluffy cat leapt unabashedly to the floor and stalked away.

            She stared up at the clumsy, irregular balls as one tumbled into the shimmering sink, one clunked against the microwave, and a third balanced above her head on the linoleum edge of the counter.  Heavy, the orange teetered on the ledge, until a wisp of air conditioning tumbled around it.  The fruit fell.

            The little girl reached out her pudgy hands.  The fruit slapped through her timid grip.  Thump!  Juice spurted out from the mangled peel, spraying across the bottom drawer and the little girl's bright white socks and sneakers.  She began to cry.

            "It's alright, Gracie," soothed a beautiful voice from above, and the girl's mother turned away from the stove and bent down.  The light from the window glimmered around the woman's heart-shaped face, illuminating wisps of mousy hair escaping from her bandanna.  "We still have two more.  Would you like to try one?"

            When Grace was a little older (she was a big kid now), she learnt more than the citrus tang of sweet juices welling under her tongue and dripping down pudgy cheeks.  Cycles had spun around, unraveling under hot sun and dripping icicles, and now Ms. Fitzhugh's entire third grade longed to split its pencils in two and race out into the sunshine.  Doves cooed through the warm air, singing of long summer evenings to come.  The fresh air smelled of mown lawns and thunderstorms.

            "Are you sure this is a good idea?" whispered Grace's friend, nervously glancing to and fro at her lookout post.

            "It'll be funny!" whispered Grace, on tip-toes, reaching into the fridge.  Her fingers grasped in the cool air for bumpy smoothness, and she pulled out one, two, three oranges.  She passed one to her friend.

            "Let's go back out and hide them," giggled Grace.

            It was not too much later that Grace might have learnt something.  She understood why no one laughed when she threw the orange, though it was not her fault.  She understood why Elsa's mother stormed across the street demanding an apology, though she didn't mean to.  She did not understand why Elsa had not cried, had deliberately wiped the juice from her eyes and walked away, though Grace was "sorry."

            It was clementines that Grace had with her lunch every day in Paris, curling off delicate orange peels and sweeping them into the wastebasket beside the table.  The sweet citrus hovered on her tongue as she strolled down the boulevards, ran across bridges, and laughed in warm, dark cathedrals.  Clementine mist hung imperceptibly beyond the fabric of reality, caught in the cobwebs at the peaks of Gothic arches.  Grace loved Europe, and Europe embraced the young girl with blonde curls and embarrassing braces.

            But clementines were small, and they were sweet like candy.  They were not large; they did not have the tangy edge that a thick, round orange did.  If a clementine fell, it would not thump.

            Grace brought an orange with her to school one day in her junior year.  She usually packed a little Tupperware box of blueberries, or grapes, but that morning the only fruit left in the fridge was a solitary orange.  It sat in half-shadow and half-light of dawn.  Grace, who was in a hurry now, grabbed it and stepped out the door into a frosty otherworld of glimmering streetlamps and windy snow-specters.

            Safe in the babbling, warm cafeteria, her nail bit into the thick hide of the orange.  It peeled back a swathe of the orange's rind, revealing the mere thin skin separating Grace from tangy, sweet juice.  Grace complained about the geometry test, and her friends told her that Mark was dating Samantha.

            Grace did not connect any of these happenings.  She did not even consider them happenings.  Much more happened in Grace's life, and much more will happen.  Only when these trivial elements are parsed out, separated, cut away from her being, do they have meaning.

Life is a glorious story without a purpose.  Stories, or good ones at any rate, are inglorious lives with a purpose.  — Anonymous