by Lindy Biller

In the beginning we were figs. Teeth broke our skin, sinking into our flesh like a knife into softened butter. Our mothers ripened and then rotted into sweet, sticky pulp. We tried pomegranates next—leather-thick exterior, hundreds of rubies clustered inside, like the bubble nests my betta fish used to make, when I was little enough to think a fish poking its head out of a tiny ceramic lighthouse would make me happy. His fins were like tattered green lace. I named him Hercules because I’d just seen the Disney movie and fallen in love with Megara, Meg for short, but Meg didn’t seem like the right name for a boy fish. Mom asked the teenage worker if we could add a girl fish, too, but he said it was too risky. Male bettas are aggressive and territorial. Females need to be removed from the tank immediately after spawning, otherwise the male will kill them. The worker added, his arms crossed judgmentally, that bettas shouldn’t be kept in a fishbowl—they needed a filter, a heater, at least ten gallons of conditioned water for swimming. Mom laughed in his face, thanked him for his expertise, and bought a snail to keep our fishbowl clean. A mystery snail, to be exact, compact and adorable, sort of a dusky blue. Mom and I named her Luna, after the moon—but how did we end up talking about fish? This story is about fruit, about the time we were pomegranates, and men sliced through our thick skin with a paring knife, dug their thumbs inside and split us open, our mothers ground to husks between their teeth. We tried being persimmons, but the climate was too harsh. We tried apples, even though we should’ve known better—who hasn’t heard the story? What were we trying to prove?

In the end, we become apricots. Soft, butter-sweet. At our center, a hard brown stone, and inside the stone, an almond-shaped kernel laced with cyanide, containing all the basic ingredients for life. Our little seed is so well protected that sometimes it dies inside the pit without sprouting. This seems an acceptable risk. We dot the mountains and hillsides, our pink-orange blush a warning. I know better than to think it will all be smooth sailing from here. Hercules was home three hours when he killed Luna the mystery snail, came at her again and again, until her little snail foot released from the curved glass of the fishbowl, until she lay like a large, dead stone in the bed of blue pebbles. Maybe more space would’ve helped. A nice, bubbling filter. Mom flushed Luna, washed her hands, and went on making a peach crumble for my father—syrupy insides bubbling up, brown sugar crust burnt around the edges. While Mom scooped the charred bits off, I listened for my father’s heavy boots outside the door, the hunger of his breathing.