BLANK FRUIT

I have been peeling oranges off my skin for weeks. The segments detach wet and bright like scabs. They remind me of my father: a homeless chalet on a beach, covered in orange stucco. My father is a reflective surface. My mother is sweet like marzipan left in the fridge and hardening to a tooth-disassembling crunch. My father left my mother, and because I have a tendency towards self-annihilation, I broke his nose for it, which was my nose. The day my father became a broken vein pulsing in my mother’s forehead, I lit the match of my tongue and became the same vein. Being a child, it is important to map your body according to two Pavlovic circles of a Venn diagram – where your mother begins and ends, and where your father begins and ends – the place where they overlap is you. 

My mother began on the left side parting of the sheet of my hair, trickled to form the bell curve of my left eyelid, and rapidly poured the two jugs of my breasts, which slopped over into my milky thighs, webbing fine stretchmarks where she/I had once elasticated and grown too big for my/our skin, she faded into the mist of my ankles, colour-matching the sick-pale skin tone of scars, into one lace ankle sock which stopped the verrucae on my left toe from spreading; which no one except my mother knew about, when she traced them across her own foot. 

My father, starting as bald line parting my mother’s hair along my scalp, rimmed my eyes with half-moons of baggage, making me look more dreamless than I was; tilled my ribs like freshly fertilised dirt, tagged my knees with his bruisy signature, and ended at the toenails which, once, had grown to face me as though wishing to turn back from the world and go inward, an aspect of my physical body I could actually relate to. 

Being two continents apart, my parents didn’t overlap at all, which left me with the unblended, idiosyncratic complexion of someone unfinished. In fact, being particularly lazy – a trait I’d inherited from once being a child with an aversion to completing homework assignments – It’s unrealistic that I will ever finish myself. Though I conscientiously apply myself to thinking about what I could look like if I did finish myself. I envied the children whose parents had finished them for them. Their faces, the shiny symmetrical faces of parents who strode hotel resort beaches with palms entwined in the handles of metal detectors, spading out the shiniest pieces of reclaimed trash to collage into the gleaming teeth of their children’s smiles, and the radiant flint-black suns of their obnoxiously raised pupils - targeted towards an optimism they shot glances at with a rangers’ precision to the heart of a deer. 

My own parents fished for my eyes in the trash canisters behind discount drug stores; my mouth accumulated from the chips their marriage made in half-glasses of water and wine; the missing chunks in bowls and cups. When I arrived, they would point and say, “Look at what you’re made from, all the parts that are missing from our life.”

When my father removed his pointing finger by removing himself from our lives, I was glad of the subtraction. One of those rare subtractions that confused me in mathematics, that added to rather than taking away from the sums value. Because every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction, when my father took himself away, I started taking other things to graft the skin of my body he had taken with him halfway across the world. 

For months I suffered temperatures. Extreme heat in the side of my body spread out over a lounger on his desert island beach. Pneumonia on the side where my mother kept plunging my hand into the freezing baths of her heart, telling me to pour more ice in until she couldn’t distinguish a horsefly from a storm. My hands were mottled with her numbness - blue and red, like an iced lake with the colours of dead barrier reefs trapped mirror-clear beneath it. 

On my father’s side, my body was so well thawed it coated the tiles like milk - a tripping hazard on hard floors and in all supermarkets. I dabbed sweat from only one armpit; used only that side of my body to lather my toothpaste, rinse my gums, and swim out to the middle of a lake with a column of stones lining my spine, like silk lines a winter coat, in my dreams. 

Over these months of extreme weather, my throat rotated easily between a faucet and a dry cough. The doctor, concerned, handed me a packet of seeds. “Plant yourself,” he instructed kindly, but I only grew worse. My stomach swelled thick like raised voices. My stomach sank, dragged down like a branch gravity was loosening the fruit from. My belly was eight persimmons falling. My belly was a black hole that dragged the weight of passing objects into its centre. The fallen fruit landed there, and when I taped a worm to the back of my tonsils and let it dangle down my throat like a fleshy pink inverse tongue, it coiled around eight orange suns and ate. And when it had finished eating, there were eight stones separating a milky pool of vernix at the bottom of my core. Stepping stones. I put my fingers down my throat and grabbed each one, pierced them with a toothpick, and put them in a half-full glass on the window sill. The sunlight did a cursory stretch each morning, and I waited for flowers of anaesthetic white to perforate the stone. 

My hair began to cloud grey like thunder, then tooth floss white. My skin crusted into orange like a human left in the desert for months. I shed skin particles in microscopic satsumas. My hair was a beard of mould growing over soft, then hard, then soft again oranges. When I looked in the mirror I saw rotting. I waited two months for my symptoms to subside alone, and when they didn’t, I went to a doctor. Over the phone he treated me very efficiently with disbelief. I sent him a selfie of my condition, and he came back immediately with “OMG. Halloween?”. He asked to see me in person so he could assess the special effects my disease had been having on me. “We have to amputate,” he said sedately, “You have a ghost extending from your left index finger, it’s been untreated too long and is spreading into your left palm.” 

Once I had the ghost amputated, the grey in my hair receded until it was smooth and colourless. “You’re bald,” my mother said, shaking her head like a salt grinder and crying bald-tinted tears. “You used to be so beautiful.” I explained I’d had a ghost, that it was spreading through my body like an infection. “You used to be so beautiful,” she repeated, and shook her shoulders like a stubborn bottle of ketchup.

My skin faded to an unpeeled yellow, not quite the inside of a banana but its protective cover. In the mirror, I admired my new, sunnier hue. “Your baldness makes you look like a potato,” said my mother. But secretly, I thought I looked like the sun if she shaved off her rays. 

I noticed my body was expanding, rounding out past the perimeters of its usual grounds, disobeying the rules of my high-rise jeans. My mother said I was ballooning. So, I began taking long walks to the neighbourhood pond. I slipped off my elasticated hippy trousers, waded in to my waist, tilted my head back to the water’s gradient, and practised floating. 

I ate my meals fluorescent: porridge saturated with turmeric, thick rainbows between slices of red velvet cake I used as bread, vegetable curries tinged bright with tomato, cumin, chive, onion. Everything tasted fluorescent too. I noticed the extended halogen of my body. I was preparing myself to become a bright thing. I was preparing meals again. I was preparing to balloon, to float off into a better world; to be a thing in the sky people pointed to, named as star or bird or plane or superhero or unidentified flying object – my identity forged by my proximity to the sun. I would look down on ant-like people and know exactly how they saw me, the distance between us like a blueprint to how they were judging me. 

At the beginning of February, the hunger moon elasticated its lithe puppeteer hands and made me rise and fall like tears. Like the waves it controlled. Like breath after a run, I heaved in and out, fluctuating between clouds and rivers like a water cycle. When the month waned to a fingernail clipping where once its strong hands had been holding me up, I dropped like a pin in the map of a country I had copied and pasted from my fathers’ sparse postcards. My eyes shone mutedly with as much expression as they could muster from the scrap metal they had been invested with. My father was opposite me on a beach that had once been a black description in his intermittent letters. His eyes snapped open like a mussel shell boiled for cooking, their blue exterior showing only fists. His lips pinched together, pressing my skin red and blotched from where he sat, lounging. I wanted to be light, to float away. But continuing the metaphor demanded I be heavy in order to float. 

The story, it demands heaviness, and inconclusivity. It demands it doesn’t know where it begins and where it ends, where it overlaps with the truth, and where the truth merges into the body of a hole. The story demands to be human. The story does not know where it is going. The story goes to the doctor, and the doctor prescribes antidepressants for the story, and puts it on a waiting list for counselling, and prescribes antibiotics for the story's swollen finger. The story is allergic to penicillin. And the story has developed antibiotic resistance to the antibiotics. And the story would like to curl up and weep and end itself here, after the exertion of a long journey across the ocean to a part of itself that rejects it and refuses to take responsibility for what it has become. 

The story did not have the funds to attend a private school, to have its bitten nails blanched out with acrylics. The story has never encountered a guidance counsellor, loving parents, a story editing workshop or a personal trainer. Perhaps the story would have worked out if it had. The story wants you to know it had extenuating circumstances, it needs extra time in its examination, it has experienced a recent bereavement. The story was not born rich, it is neurodivergent, it has white privilege. It is sorry. It has selective mutism. It is, again, sorry. It’s supposed to be on vacation, but it can’t afford the time off work. It should speak to someone but no one cares. It likes jazz. Its favourite author is an obscure writer’s writer. The story is self-taught. The story grew up on free school meals. The story missed school due to medical appointments in combination with not wanting to go. The story has attachment issues, eating disorders, and has also been hospitalised, yes, psychiatrically. The story would like to stay with you, but you have finished the story. 

Eva Lewis is a neurodivergent writer and poet. Their work has been published in literary journals and anthologies including Broken Sleep Books, Ice Floe Press, Lemon Peel press, Aster Lit, Lesbians Are Miracles, The Fem Zine, Young Identity, Spread The Word, and others. They are currently working on a poetry pamphlet which will be published by Broken Sleep Books.