It wasn’t really a tangerine – that’s what they used to call it, what his mom used to get when he was a kid, but a different variety, clementine, bred to have fewer pits. It sat in his hand, and he rolled it up to his fingertips where he held it for observation, the dappled orange skin, the dull sheen, brownish and discolored scars, and wondered was the virus there, had someone coughed or sneezed and touched its surface while it sat on the shelf at the grocer, leaving traces of mucus or saliva. And if so, he would, in holding and pealing, spread it to the fruit he put in his mouth.
Funny thing life, always trying to obliterate itself, through need or the various motivations for war, or some parasitic venture to reproduce and keep itself alive, while unknowingly destroying the very thing it depended on.
No one individual of the virus was an actual individual, but in its entirety, spread over the world, like so many similar life forms that live a life like a cloud, not one with feet and arms and a head, not leaves and roots, not even like a fog, but invisible like a mountain air coming off the slopes with some sort of volcanic toxin. But this creature was instead made up of uniform mechanical toy-like objects that screw themselves into cells to reproduce their RNA.
It was smooth in his hand, rough but smooth, and such a happy color, orange, like dawn, a color of joy. He pealed off the skin without washing it and plied a section away from the rest, felt its flesh, not unlike his own in some ways, and placed it into his mouth. The juice ran back along his tongue, the sweet tang, the pleasure of it.