None of us have seen a sunset in months. All summer we’ve never stopped to take in any of those glorious coneflower-colored sunsets. The kind of sunsets we’d pull the picnic blankets out of the trunk for. We used to set up right in front of the hole in the fence, the only breach in Heaven’s gates. We would lay out in the pink air that smelled like sun and carefree souls, and we would take turns slinking through the fence. Each one of us always came back with a t-shirt full of smooth, round grapes. 

We didn’t realize how much we missed the sweet grapes from Heaven’s Vineyard until they patched the hole in the fence last summer. We were thieves and we were scoundrels, but we didn’t use up any of our sins on stealing money or killing people, nothing wild like that, we spent ours on grapes. 

You don’t know joy until a grape the color and size of a tennis ball falls at your feet from the vine. Biting into its cool, glossy surface, even the hottest July afternoons didn’t seem so bad. Crouching among the vines, the world became a sweet and colorful place. We ducked through the tangles of life-bearing branches with wandering minds and hearts set on our forbidden fruits. 

I was never the best at spitting seeds. Some could shoot them out like a speeding bullet, aiming for birds and sometimes people. I only participated in shooting at things twice. I missed both birds by a safe distance. Most times I held my own in normal distance competitions, although I still don’t have anything to show for it. In reality, nobody cares how far you can spit a grape seed. 

We would park the cars close to the blankets, and always leaving the doors open, cycle between the same few staticky radio stations and my Cortex cassettes. After eating our fill in grapes like a band of Egyptian pharaohs and princesses, we’d lay out and dream. That was us, backs to the picnic blankets, eyes to the stars. That was then, when all we knew was our little pocket of California. To tell you the truth, I haven’t eaten a single grape in over a year… we took the picnic blankets for granted. 

A message from the author.

The five short paragraphs that make up “Grapes” were originally written for an English assignment. I see it more like a concept rather than a complete story . It encapsulates a larger story and condenses it to something more like a sample of stylistic and thematic ideas. If your confused after reading, I’ll clarify. To me “Grapes” is mainly about growing up and taking magical parts of ones youth for granted. I believe us teenagers who are in school have similar feelings to the speaker of grapes when it comes to reminiscing about an era that seemed so perfect compared to the present, even if we didn’t see how special that time was when it was happening.

The just of the story is a teenager entering young adulthood is reflecting on what has felt like the last carefree summer in his life. Most of the time, he speaks with plural nouns such as “we” and “our”. This is because I imagine, although not so clearly represented, there to be a whole group of young people that visit the vineyard together and sneak through the fence. They treat it as a leisurely activity, a getaway.

“Grapes” is filled with biblical allusions if your keen enough to spot them. Heaven’s Vineyard, the location described by the speaker, is like the teen’s own Garden of Eden. If you don’t know, the Garden of Eden is a bountiful and pure place where Adam and Eve first thrive in the Bible. In “Grapes”, instead of the of Adam and Eve being exiled from the Garden, the teens are sneaking into the vineyard and stealing grapes that are harvested for profit, and eating them for their own pleasure. This is where the statement “but we didn’t use up any of our sins on stealing money or killing people, nothing wild like that, we spent ours on grapes” comes from. What the teenagers were doing was illegal. It is up to you, the reader, to determine how much in the wrong these young people were for stealing grapes.

The lesson in the whole thing is, don’t take times of joy and leisure for granted like the speaker and his friends did. Hold on to every breath of fresh air and every ray of sunshine, because before you know it, they’ll be gone.