we were at our friends’ house on friday night and it was getting late and we were starting to make less sense and their baby was getting fussy and then steve said, can i take this tangerine? i want to take a picture of it. and then he took three of their tangerines, which were getting old and they admitted they probably would not eat. i tried to not let him take them, because already they were sending us home with beautiful meringue bowls that she made that day and she had wrapped them in wax paper and put them in a cardboard box, and the last time we went over they gave us a butterfly display that they received for their wedding years ago and did not want. steve put the tangerines in his sweatshirt pockets and we said goodbye. and man did those tangerines get photographed. they really are stunningly beautiful, and we ended up sticking plastic things in them and wrapping them in rubber bands, not because we wanted to make art or even because we thought of photographing, but because we were in the kitchen and jack was there and weird things like that happen when there’s a seven-year-old in the house with an engineer’s brain. and then steve was deconstructing the kitchen and all this tarry stuff was underneath the tile, probably full of asbestos. and when he moved the kitchen table, one of the tangerines landed on the ground. then the sun came and hit it squarely just as i walked into the kitchen and so i told steve to take a picture. we do this a lot, one of us will comment on something beautiful and the other will say well then why don’t you take a fucking picture. and i had already taken my picture for the day, so this is what i said to him. the photograph, to me, is a painting. the brushstrokes on the wall and on the floor, the random splotches of color, the bold light, the random stripe of blue, and then that circle of ungodly orange.