‘You really do bruise like a plum.’
We sit on the carpet, his broad thumb tracing an arc over the mottled patch of blue on my thigh. I can’t register this as an attempt to be wistful, poetic, or even funny. He isn’t trying to pay me a compliment or criticise the shade of discoloured flesh that he knows won’t be his to glimpse by the time it’s pure again. No, this is simply an observation: well-intended, misremembered, but not mistaken. I will eat his butchered proverb, clumsy like his thick hands or the way he spits a little, sometimes, when he talks. I’ll chew it up, mangle and mythologise it, a memory of his face or the feeling of not knowing what I want. I’ll twist it around my tongue until it’s blemished like the surface of my skin.
I’ll withhold it like a mystery, a heavy stone at the pit of my stomach to bring up and gnaw at every once in a while. We will know what counts, the stone and me – two solid lumps encased in aging flesh we don’t have eyes to see. Of course, he is right - I am detached from the sweet desirability of a peach. Detached from juice and youth and innocence, consistent and loaded with soft fuzz, heavy euphemism, a smooth curve that a plum will not echo. Unripe, I harbour bitterness and anger. Sheets of darkening rind spread between bump and bruise; tough, plum-skin hides fluently what would swell and tarnish a peach.
Perhaps he knows that beneath my flesh, my fruit is tough and purple. It’s easy to guess that I may cover something soft with a sticky film of mauve, hardened like a crystal from the sweetness of a peach. He could peel this flesh – boil me down and macerate me from the outside-in. I could shut my eyes while my jammy damson pulse is parcelled into glass jars and pushed neatly to the back of his cupboard, screwed shut tight to preserve, to fester or to last. Maybe he would rather take a mandolin to me and store me like a stack of dewy coins inside a pocketbook.
I should ask him to delight me through consumption. Â After all, I was grown to be eaten. Designed to feel the teeth of someone else pierce peel, allow myself only a moment, reward another with sharp taste and an ugly, shrivelled stone to be discarded. I can feel the toxic mass hardening inside me, protected by pallid flesh like a capsule for bearing bruises. Â
With a little effort, I could be regrown. Cultivated in the same way, with milky blossom turned to mulch, falling away from a single, swelling fruit. As the vessel for the pit inside, ambiguously natural, I will harbour it until there is nothing of me left.
He removes his hand from my thigh, and I realise for the first time his lack of hunger. While he may not threaten the stone at my centre, neither will he shift earth, to let me live on after I rot. The mind of a man who will consume me with a misremembered proverb does not guide a hand that could squeeze a sallow juice from my calf, or twist that broad thumb in, to break plum skin.
So for now, I will stay here, somewhere between a plum and a mislabelled peach.
Â
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