Pomegranate Anatomy by Diana Dima
1000 words, 5 minutes reading time
Issue 2 (Spring/Summer 2023)
Calyx
Amar’s cheeks were smooth, his voice soft. His sweetness was unsettling like summer nights. When I first saw the ornate, padlocked box on his shelf, I should have asked more questions. But he’d found home in the folds of my body, and nothing else seemed important.
He had no family, and I had none I liked. We rented a small townhouse on the corner by the fruit market. Every morning the vendors’ shouts would wake us, and we’d go looking for the best, the biggest fruit, fresh off the backs of trucks, flesh still warm with the sun of their homes. Amar would cradle passionfruit in his palms and speak to it, lift the plums close to his ears, run his hands over the cherries. We’d bite into big fuzzy peaches and let their juices run down our chins.
Amar never touched the pomegranates. If I ever bought one, I’d take it home like a dark secret and eat it when he wasn’t there.
•••••••••••••
Soil
We didn’t have a garden and Amar resented it. He often went walking before dawn, and I’d find him in the park, without shoes, his long brown feet buried in soil. The neighbors talked. There were doctors’ appointments and friends with casseroles and even a phone call from my mother.
Amar said it was the town, and the house, and the dusty air that made him ill. We had no money to move, but we spent weekends in the forest, lying on the grass, sometimes with our clothes off. It was the only time he breathed easy. He curled up against me, buried his hands in the softness of my belly, touched and tasted me like fruit.
Later, he started bringing the soil home. He covered the bed with wet, black lumps full of earthworms. We took to sleeping apart.
•••••••••••••
Seed
I worried when Amar left the house, though this became rare. He dozed restlessly most afternoons. One day, I placed a cup of tea on his bedside table and saw, on the floor, a key. It was small and ornate, like the box he had moved into our closet.
I held it in my palm for a long time, until it grew hot and slick with my sweat. Before Amar woke up, I walked to the park. I found the oldest oak and dug between the roots, my fingers clammy, my nails black with soil. People looked at me funny, but I didn’t care. I buried the key and pressed the earth around it. This way, I thought, whatever the box held would never part us.
•••••••••••••
Aril
With time, Amar’s words grew sharp, his moods sour. Age will do that, I suppose, and being confined to his bed most of the time. I brought him plums and peaches from the fruit market, and he found fault with them. I brought him wildflowers and forest mushrooms, and I think they made him sad. He said I should stop making a fuss.
My mother agreed. She paid me a visit, and I thought we might talk about why she’d left me all those years ago. Instead, she said she worried about me. Was I not too young to care for someone this way? Did I even know what I’d got into?
I told myself I wasn’t like her. I wasn’t going to leave. But I saw her face in every mirror, felt her sharp bones under my skin.
•••••••••••••
Pith
Amar no longer left his bed. His skin drained of color, became translucent and chitin-hard, latticed with veins. I found him twisted in his sheets one morning, searching the drawers of his nightstand, his fingers shaking with the effort to move. He asked if I’d seen a key.
I pushed him gently back onto his pillows. I told him he’d get well, and we’d walk again to the fruit market; I spoke about the scents of mangoes and persimmons, until sleep softened his face and untangled his frown lines. But when he woke up, he begged me to find the key. He wouldn’t tell me what was in the box. He only squeezed my hand with brittle fingers, calling me his apple, his sweet pear.
I slept next to him that night. I wrapped him in my warm soft limbs, rounding his edges, filling the hollows of his body. His chest rose and fell with laborious breaths.
In the morning, I went back to the park and dug out the key. I took the box out of the closet and unlocked it. Inside lay curled the dark, dry peel of a pomegranate.
•••••••••••••
Rind
When the peel closed over Amar, he sighed with relief. I wasn’t there to see it, but I heard it from the kitchen and rushed in. I found a pomegranate on the bed. It looked so small. The outside hard and odorless, yet shining with the promise of its insides.
You can tell, just by looking at a pomegranate, that it will be special. It will be hard work and gone too soon, its taste so particular you can never really remember it. Yet even knowing this, you won’t be able to resist it.
•••••••••••••
Memory
I buried the pomegranate in a community garden not far from the house. I thought Amar would have liked this best. It didn’t feel right to hold on to it.
After that, I walked to the fruit market. The morning was cold, but scents mingled warm and bright in the air. I tried the overripe plums, with their soft places and sickly-sweet smell. I bit into the pears, their smooth flesh like surrender in my mouth. I ran my hands over the pomegranates and brought one home with me.
When I cut it open, memories tumbled out, each bright-red seed a sweet or bitter hour. I ate them slowly, rolled them on my tongue. I tried to remember their taste.