Apropos of nothing, here's a creative writing assignment from 2000, when I was just sixteen years old. Apparently, I loved metaphors almost as much as I hated oranges. Enjoy.

Looks can be deceiving. Having never eaten one myself, I assumed the object in my little plastic baggie would be a nice, tasty fruit, not a disgusting alien infestation. But I was wrong, terribly wrong. A more devious disguise was never conceived.

At first glance, the orange appeared fairly run-of-the-mill and not at all revolting; I would even go so far as to say it was even mildly attractive. It had pleasing, full, round body that I never suspected was actually just bulging from the teeming pulp-maggots inside. Its pocked skin was like thin, rubbery leather, and made the cleanest, fullest ripping sound when torn into bits. After drawing the disgusting tumors stemming from the navels out of the flesh where they were rooted, I peeled back all of the orange’s skin to reveal a lovely sight. Little did I know what these eight satin balloons held within their taut walls! The way they all came to inwardly-pointed tips reminded me of a gaping leech’s mouth. They looked like soft pillows, until one of these putrid sacs burst open and issued forth its slimy embryonic fluid. Away from the open wound, the rest of the orange remained dry; white peel membrane clung to the naked ball like ancient cobwebs, tightening and sucking the moisture from the surface. The membrane appeared cloudy like mold around the fibers that looked like veins netted over the eight orange sacs. Out of curiosity, I drove a finger into the ruptured sac and found it felt strangely like the artery of a cow’s heart I had slipped a finger into in a fifth grade science class. The inside was smooth except for the bloody, pulpy fibers. There wasn’t any actual blood inside the orange-chamber, but I couldn’t help but feel that the juice that spilled forth was some living being’s life fluid in some respect. And minutes later, I proved myself right.

I kneaded the ball in my hands until it loosened like a baseball glove does; the joints moved much more freely and the squelching noise it had been making--like water in the bottom of my boot--faded away. As I tore the sacs away from each other and watched their skins cling together, I was reminded of the way my hands stick to one another when they’re covered in glue and pressed together. But once they were separated, I made a move that led me to discover a truth I was not prepared to see. I burst the satiny casing to reveal a disgusting infestation! These sacs were choked with glistening, plump, alien embryos in tubular shapes like the fat bubs on the ends of kelp! It was the nauseating feeling of turning over a dead animal to find it bloated with slug-like maggots. Such was my sudden illness at discovering this obscenity. My mission became, Kill them all! and with that objective, I set forth to rip them all apart. I squeezed them all until the little pods exploded like bubble pack and mashed the horrible capsules into pulp. I did not rest until every one of those foul maggots had been murdered, and in this way I may have saved the world. You may thank me by never letting another putrid orange within a five-foot radius of me ever, ever again.