Rotten Fruit
By Jessica Powell
She is face down on the table as the hospital machine whirrs closer, and she thinks: she could lose them, these things that she carries, and it would not matter anywhere near as much as she’s told it would matter, though that may be because her breasts have never mattered much to her.
The needle goes in, a prick then a squeeze, a liquid to numb her body. She feels pressure, then the sound of something mechanical approaching. She thinks: enough with these tests, just chop them off already.
Other women, her friends who have been through this, speak of a loss of womanhood, of self, the carving of their body a reshaping of who they are. They have become a person with a dead self who trails behind them. A chest as smooth and flat as a coffin.
But her? She wasn’t anticipating this, but she also wasn’t surprised by it. After all, it had to happen to someone, so why not her? And maybe if this is the bad thing that happens to her, then it won’t be something else.
Because at her age, there will certainly be something at some point.
She is old enough now to recognize that the decline has begun. Although people may call aging many things, like “wisdom” or “experience,” she feels it most pointedly as a decline, a decay, a decrepitude that sets in as the world flays you in layers, like an animal stripped slowly of its hide. Eventually it will reach the bones and then start scraping away at those too.
Cut them off now, why don’t you, she says in her head, but her mouth is pressed to the table and there is really no point, because this is just a test, an analysis, the next step that will lead to the step after that, the endless stairs that will eventually lead to a landing of some kind. But for now, there is only so much a needle can do. Though she races ahead in her mind, and imagines that needle, a thousand pricks, microscopically close, puncture after puncture that together form a nick, a nick that then lengthens to become a line, a line that then extends itself into a slice.
The machine whirs again, and she anticipates another prick, imagines a knife like a fingernail, peeling her like an orange. But nothing happens, and then it is over with, and the technician is cheerily commenting about unseasonably warm weather.
An hour later she is touching fruit at the grocery store: grapefruits, oranges, grapes, apples. She holds them before her; cradles their tender skin in her hands. They are all perfect because people don’t want to see or buy things that are misshapen or bruised. But she can’t help but wonder: where do all the dejected fruits go? Chopped from their tree, hauled off in a truck. Is there a pile of them somewhere, a sinking pyramid of rotting flesh? What must it be like for a mango in the middle of the pile, the smell of death steaming from below?
“One can always hope,” says her husband on the phone. She has called him from the grocery store. They are speaking of scallops, which the butcher believes are sold out. He has sent his assistant to the back to double check.
“One can hope, or one can pick an alternative to what is offered,” she replies, wishing they could cut to the chase.
Her husband is an optimist. He must believe in the existence of the scallops until the last possible second, because believing in the existence of the scallops is the only way for him to live. If he didn’t, how could he rise from their bed each day? And when he discovers, as he surely will in a few moments, that the scallops are indeed sold out, but could I offer you some sea bass? he will reset, and convince himself that in fact he had always wanted sea bass, and what better life could there be than a life in which there is sea bass for dinner that evening?
Her, on the other hand, she would rather walk out of the store and starve than wait for bad news. She tells the butcher that there is no need to wait to hear back about the scallops. She’ll take two filets of sea bass instead.
The butcher sharpens his long knife, and touches the blade briefly against the bass, as if speaking to it, warning the flesh of what’s about to occur. As if the dead fish doesn’t know. At this point, it probably wants it all done with. How many times do we have to do this? It wants to ask. Finish the job, it screams at the butcher through its empty black eye.
The bass doesn’t yield smoothly in the butcher’s hands. It’s more of a zig zag, a hacking motion against the sinews of its body. But finally the two filets are cut, then wrapped in brown paper. A piece of tape holds the body together.
“There are no more scallops,” says the assistant, emerging just then from the back, but she hears him only distantly. She’s already walking toward the register, holding some other being’s flesh in her hands.
Two fish filets, a basket of citrus, and a chocolate bar travel down the conveyor belt, a ding of recognition as the scanner matches a part to its whole. Down the belt, into the bag, into the bag and into her car. From her car and on to their plates. All of it easy and painless.
Her husband sets the crumpled napkin on his plate and rises. A column between the dining table and the kitchen obscures all but his arms as he washes their dishes at the sink.
She hears the disposal run and then it’s done. A plain white plate goes into the dishwasher.
A moment later her husband is behind her, hands cupping her shoulders. She feels a flicker of irritation, for she doesn’t need anyone’s comfort. I don’t care about my breasts, she says firmly. Nor do I, he says. But when he wraps his arms around her, his chest feels hard and smooth against her back, and she begins to cry.
About the Author
Jessica Powell is the author of the novel, The Big Disruption. Her short stories have been published in The New York Times, WIRED, VICE, Alaska Quarterly Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco and can be found on X (RIP Twitter): @themoko.
