Fruits

The effect of natural produce gone wrong, of monstrous apples and rotting grapes the size of eye-balls in a marshy, clayey land, where footprints get smudged in without remorse, is like the call of the Sirens. The sense of plenteousness and decay, of plentous decay, therefore, has an odour like a rotting carcass, which throws us off and pulls us in. Then the image of moving down the clayey slope to approach a shallow trough where dozens have left their seeds to grow, seeds the size of mango pits, but more elegantly shaped and faintly purple in hue, breathes in some measure of normalcy because of the industry involved. I’m doing something, you say to yourself, not merely ambling by the roots of mammoth trees, which are dirty and covered with cobwebs, where piles of grapes dandle on the clay, and just walking, just surveying these fruits, and getting caught up in its orbit.

The seeds, they feel waxy, and look accordingly shiny, as if the pulp has very recently been peeled away from them. Holding one in your hand, watching the scores of others laying on the ground, defying efforts to be buried, makes you want to dump it and run away. Never return to this clayey place, where the ground holds on to your feet, where fruitfulness has decayed, where nothing new grows. But still, you make a hole like one a rat would’ve made, and push the seed in, trying to cover it up with the excess clay. Before leaving the place, however, you submerge the land in water, such that the holes are filled and the seeds push up and bob up and down.