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All Seasons Sweet
by Mark Taylor
EXCERPT
Peaches came in a hundred engineered varieties, each insipidly perfect.
There were the big brands, a dozen names with three or four lines each, all vying for the same profitable middle ground of flavour. There were the specialist makes, for customers with refined tastes or acidic peach salsa recipes or a desire to seem unusual, all ultimately owned by the same two omninationals as the market leaders. There were the indie synths, crowdfunded on the promise of bringing back that real peach taste you remember, with pitch videos showing gorgeous juice dribbling in gorgeous rivulets down gorgeous chins, and long blog posts about the benefits of including the pit. The few indies that made it to market rarely reached a second crop. Those that did, sustained by sunk-cost-chasing backers who kept insisting they could taste the difference, grew until they caught the acquisitive attentions of an omni. Once the buyout became official the backers would drift, betrayed, to a new small-batch strawberry line. Rarest of all, there were the custom synth services, preserve (and conserve) of high-end restaurants, the ultra-rich, and the occasional enthusiasts’ group buy, which tweaked everything from moisture level to fuzz length so you could be disappointed just the way you liked it.
Leo had tasted them all, alone and with cream and in Tatins and chutneys and cobblers. He had spit out his first peach at the age of two and never looked back — until, at the mid-March wedding breakfast of mutual friends, he was seated next to Amelia. When the beetroot salad was served, she was an acquaintance, whom he had met a few times but never really thought about . By the time of her monologue about the intolerable artificiality of the peach melba, her obsessions were his obsession. He caught the bouquet and presented her with the single naturally grown rose from its centre. …
… Read the complete story in our anthology Broken Ground.
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor is a writer and learning technologist based in Manchester.
