Peaches

Peaches is flash fiction. Peaches is a life in five-hundred words. Peaches is impulse, regret, curiosity, anxiety, and nostalgia, it is delicious and peachy, ugly and cruel. And, it’s forthcoming in the Fall issue of Petal Projections - lookout.

Peaches

I stand in front of the soft peaches that are lined up outside the highway harvest market, not stacked and pretty and pyramid shaped, but more like heaps – hills of sweet juicy flesh, just like the ones in my neighbour’s wagon the day I helped him with his paper route. We were eleven and spent the afternoon toting around fallen globes of stone fruit collected from underneath a nearby tree, a squishy ripe pile of pink, giggling and slurping and catching each other’s eyes before it started to rain.

I reach out and stroke the furry skin of the peaches; it’s like grazing velvet. I feel my mouth pucker with dehydration from having had too much wine last night, and now my teeth long to bite into the pastel orange orb under my fingers, and have the skin burst over my tongue and the juice drip down my face. But then I remember my tender mouth, the way it used to bleed from the fuzzy peach candies I’d buy at the corner store when I was a kid, gobbling them until I was green, teeth aching, cheeks pinched and raw. The same candies I was eating that night in the 7th grade at the playground, when we played truth or dare, when I pressed a kiss onto the lips of a boy I’d been lusting after for months; the skin-on-skin contact added to my sugar-fueled queasiness and made me feel guilty, empty.

The smell of exhaust sweeps off the highway and into my nostrils, and I think about how little effort it would take to lift up a pretty little peach from the pile and bring it to my lips, have the spongy flesh break under my teeth, let the thick nectar trace its way down my palm and my wrists towards my elbow. And so I do, I snatch the peach and take a bite and I notice that the fresh veins running through the meat are much different than the ones in the canned peaches my mother made every year (and probably still does), and I wonder how long it’s been since I’ve spoken to her, my mother, and now my upper lip is beading. I close my eyes, yearning to dive into a clean pool of water, ice cold.

While I ache for reprieve, I stand and sweat, with sticky warm fluid crawling around on my skin, mouth stinging from the sour harvest juices gliding over my canker sores, distracted by the memory of those messages I sent last night – the ones full of intentions, words, pussycats, peaches, and eggplants, and I become tickled by a revolting neediness that sends pangs of anxiety through my chest and wrists.

I breathe in and realise I’m squishing this peach up against my face, perhaps in punishment, so I peel the flesh away and look at the bite mark where I’ve been sucking; it looks like a gentle bruise, light around the halo, dark pink at the center. A thick damp breeze brushes through my hair. Dark at the center. It hurts.