Fruit Jam
Such sweetness, such spoils
Article by Anonymous, art by Kanitta Cheah
After we fight, sharp and messy and viscous like poison through the veins of our tiny apartment, my mom brings me carefully cut slices of apples and pears. They are silent offerings left at my closed door. I nibble on these dainty slices throughout the day, letting the sugar sweeten my bones. I stack plates of fruit and we choose to not speak about the bitterness.
–
My ex and I fight six nights a week. On Valentine’s Day, I heat jam on a blackened stove top. In goes cinnamon and pear and stolen raspberries. The pot trills with resentment. We fight again. The compote, scooped out into a dainty jar, ripens and rises and eventually spoils in the corner of his mini fridge.
No amount of soured fruit is enough.
–
A girl leaves me a jar of jam on the counter for breakfast. Over toast, I count marmalade seeds and idly ponder her sweet, red, strawberry breath.
–
I grasp Delia's wine-colored jacket. My vodka cran shakes as we sway. I hover close to her mouth, stained dark red, and I wonder if it’d explode like a cherry if I took—
a bite. In my sleep, I grit my teeth.
–
A girl feeds me candied almonds in the warm, velvet insides of her room. Sinking into the familiar smell and neutral decorations, falling into her beanbag, I think of pomegranate seeds and prophecies. I think of my best friend’s cake in the tenth grade, layered richly with dipped almonds, and the chocolate resting at the corner of her mouth. I think about picking those almonds with my pudgy fingers.
Her room smells like a candy shop. If I sunk my nails into her pinkened skin, would they emerge cotton-candy sticky?
—
I watch my roommate, sink her teeth into a tiny peach. When I concede that I’ve never had one, she presses one into my hands, disbelieving. The fuzz gets on my fingers and in my hair, becoming an itch under my eyelid, but I go in, teeth first. It breaks apart in my mouth like a flood.
—
The girl kisses a boy. I slice an orange, discard the peel, and eat the pieces, one by one by one. The citrus stings my eyes and my fingers scent orange. I save her a piece.
—
I fuck a girl for the first time in the dingy restroom of a club. She is tall and into it, and I try to steer the panic away as I ask her what she wants, profuse and out of breath, again and again, and again. Sober, I ruminate on my own constructs of queer virginity and the prudence of wanting to have done it with somebody I love. All I really remember though, sober, is her flushed face, and the sound of a pomegranate being crushed open.