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Julie Wong
Persimmons
My mother always said that when men wanted something, they destroyed it. When she said men, she meant my father, but when it came to Yulan, the boys at school were more of the same. She was the kind of pretty that caught in your teeth. Pristine, with a polite, placid smile and eyes like sugar burnt to the pan: too hot to touch and sweet-bitter-brittle under your tongue. The boys didn’t know what to make of her silent stares or her shiny Mary Janes, so they stuck wads of gum under her desk, pelted her with orange peels, snapped the jaws of their scissors at the glossy ink of her hair in search of something tangible to hold. For that, I couldn’t blame them. Sometimes I wondered if she was real at all, the way she left nothing behind. Not a satin ribbon or an eraser shaving or a fleck of dead skin. She never ate, either, just sat there primly at lunchtime with her dainty ankles crossed, turning the pages of her paperbacks one twist of her wrist at a time. The girls hated that, and hated how sweat never beaded on her forehead or her cupid’s bow, how, instead, her face flushed like a pale white peach, that lush, watercolor pink dusting her cheeks in the September heat. The girls cried rhinoplasty, bleaching cream, said she wore whalebone corsets beneath her blouses just to whittle away her waist like wood. I knew I was supposed to think the same, but I had all my father’s weakness for beauty and none of the knack for destruction. I didn’t want to ruin Yulan, didn’t want to kiss her knees to the dirt or break the proud slash of her posture; I just wanted her to fix me, to bleed the apathy from my heart and fill the arteries with light instead.
✧ ✧ ✧
I never bothered with big rebellions, never paid much attention to the dares shot back and forth across the classroom like paper airplanes, but I took the long way home that day, walked a block and a half behind Yulan and kicked stray pieces of gravel into the lines of the pavement to keep my distance. Her gait was slow and even and didn’t so much as flutter her skirt, each pleat pressed into rigidity around the slender lines of her legs. I followed her past house after house of slate-gray roof tiles and two-car garages and glass that glared with sunlight until she turned, a rigid right angle of a motion, and walked up the concrete path to the gate of a proud wooden fence. By the time I stepped onto her driveway, she had slipped inside and closed the gate behind her, leaving me alone with her fence and my thoughts and the dare rattling in my head like spare change. From where I stood, I could see the persimmon tree in her yard, its fruit full and yellowing, strung across the spindly branches in knots of twos and threes. There was a sparrow perched on one of the highest boughs, tilting its head in small, fluttery turns, and I thought of the one I found sprawled on my freshly trimmed lawn in fifth grade, a broken wing pinned to its twitching side. I must have watched it for half an hour, waiting to feel something: horror, or pity, or at least some compulsion inside me telling me to help. When nothing came, I knelt and scooped it into my palm, staring into the tiny black beads of its eyes, the little jerks of its body tickling my skin with its feathers.
I put it back down and grabbed the shovel from the shed.
My mother found me a few minutes later, blood splattered in dots on the white of my socks and sneakers, the bird unrecognizable beneath the weight of the metal I’d crushed it with. She knocked the shovel from my grip and dragged me back inside by the wrist, spent an hour scrubbing my hands raw with soap, near tears, asking God what was wrong with me. She hadn’t seen the joint of its shoulder, the proof of its pain; she thought I’d inherited my father’s kind of wanting and enjoyed killing it. But even as she tried to wash me clean, all I could think of was the moment before everything went away, before that pain fled into stillness. I didn’t want to die, but I wanted the epiphany. I wanted to know what it was like.
So I lifted the latch to the gate and pushed it open, slinging my bag onto the grass. I walked up to the tree and grabbed the trunk like the nape of a neck, digging my foot into the dark gray bark, pushing myself up to the next branch and the next. The limbs thinned as I worked my way higher, the leaves waxy on my arms, the orange flecks in my periphery narrowing to the persimmon hanging directly overhead beside the sparrow’s stick-thin talons. I strained upward, my fingertips closing around the soft underside, plucking it from the stem—
And the branch snapped beneath me: the air falling through my hair, tugging at my clothes; the twigs lashing hard enough to draw blood; the fruit breaking off and tumbling down with me. I held out my free arm to catch myself as the ground rose to meet me and felt something in my right wrist pop to break my fall. I lay there gasping, my wrist throbbing distantly, the persimmon clutched in my unharmed hand.
Before I could catch my breath, I heard the door unlock, heard the hinge as it opened and the clack of heeled shoes on the deck. I turned my head in time to see Yulan step down onto the grass, her brown eyes soft and golden in the shafts of light drifting through the branches. I passed the fruit to my good hand and pushed myself up and waited for her to ask what I was doing. Why I was lying here, littered with scratches, her persimmons pulped beneath the weight of my body. Instead, she knelt and took the fruit from my hand, her cool fingers grazing mine. I willed the ligaments of my wrist to restitch themselves under her touch, but the dull ache stayed as she lifted the persimmon to her lips and took a bite. It was the first time I’d ever seen her eat. I stared at that bead of copper in her mouth, unsleeved of its skin, bursting bright and tart between her pearly teeth. She swallowed, then slotted those graceful fingers around a half-buried seed and pulled until it lay dark and thin in her palm.
“For you,” she said, and I took it without a second thought, letting it sink down my esophagus like a coin into still water.
She stood, and I saw the indented pinpricks the ground had left on her delicate knee. The breeze whispered by, rustling the broad leaves, teasing the hem of her skirt. I glanced up and found the sparrow watching us. Utterly motionless. Unafraid.
✧ ✧ ✧
When I went to school the next day, they asked what happened to my wrist, why it was swollen and bruised. Some of them had persimmons gleaming on their desks as trophies, as proof they’d gone to her house and crept into her yard and taken something for themselves. I said nothing, but I thought of the copper glint in Yulan’s mouth, the seed glistening in my throat, the blood draining from my mother’s appalled face. I smiled, crossed my scraped legs at the ankles, and waited for the tree to grow from my ribs.
Julie Wong is an undergraduate student at UCLA. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and was a poetry finalist in the Rising Voices Awards. Her work is published or forthcoming in ellipsis… literature and art, Full House Literary, Ink & Marrow, Pinhole Poetry, The Turning Leaf Journal and elsewhere.
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