Stone Fruit

Posted on September 1, 2006 in Adolescence

What had been one with the branch now lay on the ground, rotting, compressing, stinking.

I found no pleasure in the ripening of the peaches. Every summer, as the flies buzzed around the base of the tree, I gathered rotten fruit and threw it in our squat black garbage cans.

“Rotten peaches,” my brother would singsong at me from the seventeen-feet-away back porch. “Rottin’ in the summer sun.”

“That’s not a real song,” my mother said, standing beside him.

“Yes it is.” He showed her the lyrics. “Rotten peaches,” he sang some more.

I looked at the pile that gravity had heaped at my feet. Over all of it was the yellow brown fuzz. Beneath that was the yellow brown pulp. It glistened. When the fruit was especially putrid, you might see the stone inside.

“Rotten peaches.”

My mother didn’t like my progress. She came out and threw a few, always selecting those which still possessed an intact skin.

“I don’t see your problem.”

Then she left me with the gooey ones, the thoroughly dead, the cadaverous ones.

Robbie laughed and chanted his song again. Why not hurl one at his face? Because I would find myself face down in the summer’s missed and rejected harvest.

“Rotten peaches. Rottin’ in the summer sun.”

Now the tree’s less than a stump, a rotting root or two in the ground.