Justin Favreau wondered how he always attracted bad luck. Whereas his friends immigrated from France to the verdant coast to find lucrative jobs in equipment engineering and businesses importing fine wine, he only managed to land a job as a fruit picker. Grapefruit.
He was sick of grapefruit. He had been picking grapefruit for ten years now, and had nothing to show for it. Unless one counted eye cancer. His eyes had bled and he thought it was from working in the sun for thirteen hours a day. The orchard’s owner’s doctor, a kind man, gave him a blood test for free. He had eye cancer, and didn’t have the two thousand and fifteen dollars to pay for the surgery to remove the cyst before it destroyed his vision.
Paid below minimum wage and with practically no savings, Justin’s only hope lay in the Picker-of-the-Year competition. The orchard owner, Mr. Pritchard, paid a fifteen hundred dollar bonus to the picker who picked the most grapefruit by weight at the end of the season. For the last three years, by dint of long hours and little time for leisure, Justin had won the little spending money that he used for nights on the town to get drunk.
Except this year, he had competition. Henriette Le Mieux, a rival grapefrruit picker, hated Justin for blowing the grapefruit quota out of the water every single day and making Henriette look bad. Worse, Henriette came in second last year, and the year before that.
But in the last year, Henriette’s orchard started producing heavier, juicier grapefruit. Justin could not for the life of him understand why Henriette’s assigned trees performed so much better than his. Henriette knew though. Henriette, after losing two years before and because he knew he could never work as robotically and deliberately as Justin, injected his grapefruit with fructal steroids. The steroids grew bigger and bigger grapefruit, reducing the number of grapefruit Henriette picked in order to catch up to Justin by weight.
Today was the last day of picking before the season totals; Justin and Henriette were neck and neck in the weight tallies. Henriette, would not take a chance, no, not this year, when he badly wanted new overalls and a little mamacita in town by the name of Juanita. He would make sure that Justin would not beat him again.
Today, Henriette brought a special tool to the orchard: a titanium spork. He had practiced with it for weeks on end, perfecting his technique in the late hours of dusk before lights out in the pickup bed of his truck. He climbed the ladder opposite of Justin, preoccupied with chucking grapefruit into the basket below at a demonic pace. Henriette called out, “Hey Justin. I have a gift for you my friend,” and he stabbed a steroid-enhanced juicy grapefruit with his titanium spork.
The acidic juice of the citrus fruit splashed into Justin’s eyes. Justin flailed his arms and screamed a gnarly scream as he fell off of the ladder onto the grass below, supine next to his half-filled wicker basket of grapefrruit. Try as he might, Justin could not see through the burning sensation of his blurry vision and retired to the bed of his pickup truck for the rest of the day.
Henriette gleefully added two hundred more pounds of juiced grapefruit to his final tally.
The next day, Justin went to Mr. Pritchard’s office for the final tallies. Mr. Pritchard said, “Justin, you’re a hardworker. I wish I had ten more like you. I’m sorry old boy, this year Henriette beat you by fifty pounds.” Dejected, unable to pay for his surgery or any diverssions, Justin went to town and blew the rest of his meager savings on whiskey shots. The next morning, he woke up on the dirt floor outside of the saloon.
He ran back to the orchard but was over an hour late. Mr. Pritchard called Justin into the office. “Justin…for someone who’s as late as you, I take away half their day’s’ wages, you know that?” Justine nodded, dead inside. “But today, I have some good news for you old boy. Turns out some of Henriette’s grapefruit were a bad bunch. A few crates rotted before we could even ship them out to the supermarkets. We recalculated how many grapefruit shipped, and you won by five pounds old boy. You won the money. You’ve earned it.”
Justin ran to the doctor with his five hundred dollar paycheck and his fifteen hundred dollar bonus, just enough to pay for his eye surgery. The doctor x-rayed his eyes one more time for prep. He pulled Justin out of the waiting room to look at the developed images. “Well I’ll be darned. Justin, in this image, it looks like your cancer has gone into remission. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say it looks like the growth burned away.”
“What do you mean, monseiur?” Justin asked, wide-eyed.
The doctor replied, “You won’t be needing eye surgery.”
