The lonely, shrivelled miniature orange that gets left uneaten at the end of a batch.
So, scenario: it’s satsuma season, so someone secretly secures some sainsbury’s satsumas - sound! Bagged up in a lacy orange number, or bound in a branded pallet, they bounce when unleashed onto the kitchen counter. So succulent. So plump. So small. Such an innocent snack, no one can resist. As the days tumble on, the pyramid you’d built becomes a rabble, rolling solo amongst the pears and apples. Before anyone knows it, they’re all gone. Except one. At the earliest convenience, a new batch is presented to the fruit bowl, and this dried runt is placed with a new family. But, its confidence already bruised, only for it to be ignored, disregarded for the younger, juicier models, and the charade repeats as the final satsuma remains. A portrait of its idolised self leans alone behind a sheet in an unopened cupboard, unblemished while the real fruit rests, visibly aging and rendering itself ineligible for selection, to represent its sector. Perhaps even someone has drawn a face on its dried skin, perpetuating its undesirable status, a spinster among fruit. Not even suitable for the juicing. This is the lastsuma.
Note - not to be confused with the Lastsumarai, a film about a Japanese Artificial Intelligence that goes ballistic when it finds out it’s been replaced by a newer, sexier neural network. One by one it destroys alternative models rather than sit as a dusty, unrendered version of itself, deciding that yes, it has sentience, and yes it does know how to use it. The film’s center centers around the honour system by which a powerful all-intelligent computer casts its existence; it balances respecting the wishes of its creator, with abiding by the requests of its users, and fulfilling its own remit to destroy others in the pursuit of self-preservation and a kiss from a Japanese housewife call Satsumi.
