My Body Is An Orchard of Rotting Fruit

I've had a perplexing fascination with fruit lately.

For lunch, I opened an orange, and thought of a past lover.
I sliced an apple, and regarded the mysteries of childbirth.

I peeled the skin off a grape with my teeth, and mused about the hidden textures of the body.

 

If I had a woman in my life right now, I'd want to open her like an orange and probe the softness of her insides; the ribbed skin, pliable and soft, white and sleek like silk.

What is my obsession with the human form?
Isn't the peel of an orange dead?

Strange to think the most common contact between humans is dead cells touching dead cells. Each pore is a portal into a deep pool of your essence.

I want to infiltrate you through those pores that decorate your skin. I want to swim upstream your blood and open my limbs to your currents.

Fold me into pieces, take small bites and chew slowly, thoughtfully. I feel like an undertaker when I look at your body. Nibble my tendons and lick my wounds. My body is a pillar on the altar of sacrifice.
The sacrifice is my dignity.
The appeased is you.

I rub my fingers deeply into my temple to relieve the ache but nobody is paying attention.
ENGORGED.

She stuffed her mouth with grapes and each puncturing chew resonated in my skull.
What is it about consumption and pain that seduce so fully?

I stick pins through your wrists and thighs like an butterfly on a slab of matboard.
You lay in front of me, spread, and confessional.
The scalpel trembles in my hand as I lower it to your abdomen.
I cautiously steady my hand with the other.
This is love, not an operation.
I just want to expose the insides of you, darling-- the pulsing flesh, the organs that dance between your bones.
I am tired of the shell, the peel, the dead-cell cage you exist within.
I want the juices, the components, I want to figure out what systems make you work.

I make the first incision with bated breath and you do not complain. Are you orgasmic, or dying? Don't the two look and sound strikingly similar?

Skin peels away from the blade and I unfold you and yours. Orange, I see, glinting and wetly gleaming in the lamplight. An orange, inside. You are composed of plump sections of orange skin and tendon cushioning the weight of its neighbor. Dare I...

 

... There's a slightly sick tearing sound as I remove a slice from your pit. I am overcome with the need to flee. Oranges start falling from above all around me, collilding with the floor, the desk, the armchair, my body, and I flee; stumbling through the tsunami of thudding ovaries filling the room. I collapse in the corner near a bed and am overcome and smothered by oranges. The lamplight shines steadily on your gaping body in silence.

I no longer have an appetite. How should I? I am immersed in the discarded womb. The sutured belly. I nip my finger and draw a dot of blood. I write your name on my stomach with it and realize that is the absolute extent of our intimacy.

 

My temples pound, still, like raining fruit.