The Bananas™ Barcode

Content warning: Death, refugee experience, starvation

Suspended in their trees, sheathed in their plastic membranes, the Bananas™ went about their business. So, too, did William. He approached some, hanging from a sizeable stalk, and extended the pole of his measuring tool. He parted the blue plastic cover and noted the width of a random Banana™. Not quite plump enough. Not yet. He readjusted the plastic, ensuring that all the Bananas™ were covered again, protected from insects and the world. He tried to think of the plastic bags as shower caps, but given the size of the Banana™ stalks, capable of weighing upwards of sixty pounds, he couldn’t help but picture other things as he continued his work. Staring out across the field of trees and their giant hanging blue membranes, William couldn’t deny it; the growing Bananas™ looked like a forest of dangling body bags. 

He walked atop dead leaves and branches. As he crunched along, he didn’t need to glance down to know that some, perhaps many, of the branches he stepped on were left by him, had been chopped with the very machete he kept tied to his waist. He thought of the countless times he and his coworkers had fanned each other with the giant leaves, given them a brief and new purpose, enjoyed their breeze, before dropping them on the ground, where they would decompose and nourish the soil of the plantation. 

William watched the Bananas™ through their thin protective bags, snuggled together in their neat rows. They arced skyward. The part most people held while eating the fruit pointed up toward the sun, almost as if the Bananas™ grew on the branch upside down. They appeared to William like stacks upon stacks of ripening bear claws, thick and angry, hungry to slice open the sky. He thought about bears and looked down at his shirt, a gift from his wife, Mary. A reminder of where she waited for him. Emblazoned on the cotton and stained by his sweat was the old California flag, the one with that great brown beast, now extinct. 

His boot struck something soft that gave against his weight. Whatever it was, it continued to bob lightly on his outsole. He lifted and parted the leaves with his other foot. 

Resting against his boot was an arm. A small arm, the arm of a child. He completed the movement of his foot, brushing more leaves aside. In an instant, he found himself locking eyes with the face of a dead boy. William wanted to look away—felt so desperately the need to turn away—but didn’t, and didn’t know why. 

He heard footsteps behind him. Instinctively, he shuffled the leaves around and reburied the boy in his shallow grave. He didn’t think it over, just did it, then turned around as calmly as possible. 

He saw Carl, his coworker, barreling forward between the trunks of the trees. 

Carl obsessively rubbed his shaved head, pulled his taut skin back and forth on his tattooed scalp, a tick to occupy his hands. With him, Carl carried the shoulder pad and foam cushions required for harvesting the Bananas™. Two LED lights pimpled the sides of Carl’s neck, one glowing teal and the other glowing burgundy, a custom light job for his Mouth™. 

William wondered what colour he would choose for his own Mouth™ if he had the money to spare. No specific shade came to mind, but he liked the default colour of clay well enough. As he considered this, he became conscious of his own Mouth™ implant and cleared his throat. He could still remember when he had first installed it, had let the thin silver machine burrow into the side of his neck. One-size-fits all, no surgery required, just as advertised. His esophagus tightened as he remembered the sharp pain of the device drilling into him. He swallowed, but he couldn’t get the sensation to go away.  

The boy had looked so young. 

William took a step away from the boy’s body as Carl approached.

“Why’d you walk so far away?” Carl asked with a whininess William hoped he would lose by the time he exited his twenties. 

“Zoned out,” William said. 

“You jumped a little. What, did you think I was a CR, sneaking through the trees?”

“Climate refugees have never made it to the farm,” William said, mostly trying to convince himself, to deny what he’d just seen. 

“Looks like you found a good one,” Carl said.

William stood frozen with a placid face. 

Carl moved past him, completely avoiding the body, and went toward a nearby Banana™ stalk. 

“Want to measure it?”

William did not want to. He felt ice cold, despite the heat and humidity of the day and the sweating of the earth, but he extended the measuring tool again and noted the girth of one of the Bananas™. Yes, ready for harvest.

They proceeded. They partially peeled the plastic membrane, let it dangle like a half-shed skin. They wedged the foam cushions between the rows of Bananas™ to reduce bruising and secured the shoulder pad onto Carl. 

Carl positioned himself below the hanging Bananas™ while William drew the machete and readied to chop it down. 

“How come I never get to use the machete?” Carl asked. 

“Because I’ve been doing this longer.”

He aimed for the stem of the stalk, made sure he would hit it before he wound up to swing. The Bananas™ enveloped most of his vision and, thankfully, his thoughts. Just before he cut the bunch down, he admired their waxy outer skin, their greenness, which would ripen artificially via a harmless gas once packaged and stored in their designated shipping containers. And then there was the single strip of black and white on the Bananas™, the organic barcode, which would stay the same two colours throughout the Bananas™’ lifespan. 

William severed them from the tree. They did not fall, but rather slid onto Carl’s padded shoulder, as if the fruit fell with agency and intended grace. He helped secure the Bananas™ and made sure they were safely nuzzled on Carl’s shoulder. They walked side by side, away from the hidden body. Carl waddled, one hand latched around the stalk, the other outstretched to maintain balance. William watched Carl carry the Bananas™ with delicacy, just like he had taught him. Carl would be ready for more responsibilities soon. 

They navigated the plantation by memory. Within minutes, they reached the metal trolley system that cut through the farm. A track of seemingly endless silver archways gleamed in what sunlight made it through the canopy. Cables were strewn through the archways, and chains suspended from the cables. 

William hung the Banana™ stalk on one of the chains attached to the track, then stepped away. Carl followed suit. 

The Banana™ bunch swayed, then settled. Countless bundles of the engineered fruit dangled in every direction. William didn’t bother to approximate the yield of their harvest. He simply knew he needed a drink. He only slightly dreaded that the drink would likely be with Carl; most of his dread remained some yards behind them.

An alarm buzzed. William stepped away from the track, as did Carl. Somewhere out in the unseen distance, the solar powered Mule™ attached to the end of the cables turned on, and its wheels began to move. The assembly line of hovering Banana™ stalks floated down the track, the chains and the cables clicking satisfyingly like a passing train. 

“You want to get a drink, man?” Carl asked, as he did almost every day, as if on cue. 

“Yeah, Carl. Sure,” William said with a gulp. The sensation of his Mouth™’s presence inside his throat had yet to fade.

BARTON AIKMAN is a graduate of the 2019 Clarion Writers’ Workshop and earned his MFA at California Institute of the Arts. His work has appeared in Southwest Review, Bourbon Penn, and the anthology A Dying Planet. He lives and writes in Los Angeles. You can find him on Twitter @BartonAikman.