7/14/2018 Days By Isabella Esser-Munera Ben Seidelman Days In the hospital, I am fed until I sleep. I eat. I eat until I sleep. I dream. They bring me my colored pencils, markers, paper. I don’t touch them. Ma waits. She tells me a stories. “There was a little girl,” she says, “locked in a tower.” “I know this one,” I say, staring up at the ceiling. I’m thinking about how all ceilings are the same. “Shh,” she shushes me. “It’s about me, and you.” She says, “There was a little girl fighting an ogre.” “Does she win,” I ask. “Yes,” Ma replies, “Don’t you want to know how?” “No,” I say, and shut my eyes. Ma pauses. Then continues. “There was an old woman who had never seen animals.” “Where did she live.” “In a place where animals can’t survive.” “So the city?” I interrupt. “The city has hundred of animals,” Ma corrects me. “That’s not true.” “Let me finish,” she says, wearily. But Ma doesn’t complain. Ma brings me fresh vegetables and soup, “instead of the crap they serve you here,” and I smile because I know this isn’t helping me, this sort of selection. But I’m grateful. She brings a bowl of cherries. They’re fresh, and good. I remember picking cherries, Papa holding out a hat. Filled with gleaming rubies. I tell Ma a story. “Once, there was a world full of cherries. A planet of cherries,” I clarify. “Only cherries grew on trees.” “Okay,” Ma says. “The people took very good care of their cherries,” I continue, spitting out a seed in my palm. It is as sleek as an acorn, peeled clean by my tongue and teeth. “They loved their cherry trees.” “Did they eat the cherries?” Ma asks. “Course,” I say, waving the thought away with my hand. “But not all of them. They were moderate. They planned out how much to eat, how much to chop down, when to rotate the planting to new soil.” Ma smiles. Because she sees how I have, over time, come to understand farming. “Then, there was an attack.” I let myself chew for a Maent, enjoy the soft, tart flesh. “It wasn’t a loud one,” I say. I watch Ma’s face. She looks back at me calmly, sitting on the chair. Her back is to the window. She listens, hands pressed over her jeans. “A subtle one,” she says, slowly. “A sneaky one.” We smile at each other. “Yup,” I say, delicately spitting another seed onto my palm. I drop it onto the napkin, take one of the wipes Ma has brought for just this occasion. “It happened at night. In the shadows. The cherries were disappearing.” “Ohh,” Ma says, leaning back. Her dark hair tucked behind her in a clip. “The planet was being invaded.” “The whole planet?” “The whole planet,” I confirm. “Remember, the whole planet was all the same, just filled with cherry trees,” I remind her. I am smiling, and Ma frowns. I feel a sense of delight start to creep over me. I think she understands. I continue, tearing off a cherry stem, popping the fruit in my mouth. “The thing was, the cherries weren’t cherries. They were rubies.” “Rubies?” I nod, chew. Spit. “There was a prince,” I tell her, swallowing, “Who decided to save the cherry trees.” I wipe my hands. Ma nods slightly. “Again, it was sneaky.” “So they didn’t fight,” Ma assumes, jumping in. I nod. “Correct. They didn’t fight. The prince waited by the fields, by a young tree that was just--just bursting with life. And it got dark.” I roll a cherry in my hand. It’s so round, almost a perfect ball, deep red. I drop it back in the bowl. I feel Ma control her expression. I’ve just made it dirty again. “Sure enough, he sees someone come. He’s shocked. The alien looks like a person.” Ma tsks her tongue sympathetically. “The alien knew he was there. She said--” “It was a she?” Ma interrupts. “Yes,” I say, irritated. “Very Adam and Eve,” she remarks. “She sits on the ground,” I continue, ignoring her. “She pats the grass next to her, leans on the tree.” I bite into the cherry finally, to refresh myself. With a mouthful in the pocket of my cheek, I carry on. “The alien says, ‘This bark makes for good chairs, don’t you think.’ ” ‘They do,’ the prince confirms. ‘And the leaves,’ the alien continues, plucking an oval from over her head, ‘they make the shiniest playing cards.’ She displays a few in her hand, fanning them out in her fingers. ‘Yes,’ the prince says. ‘And it’s fruit,’ she says, and the alien turns to look at him. ‘What is the fruit for?’ ” Ma is rapt. I continue. “The alien opens her hand. She already had one there. ‘What is this?’ she asks the prince. ‘Life,’ he replies, ‘A cherry.’ Ma smiles. “So then,” I say, heat rising to my face. A plan is hatching now. My heart hammers. “The alien passes him the cherry. And starts to unbutton her shirt.” Her smile drops. “ ‘You’ve never seen skin before?’ The alien laughs at the prince.” I am determined to finish. “Because her skin,” I roll a cherry around in my hand again, swallowing, “her skin was reflective. It was a mirror.” “Mirrors just reflect light,” Maa says, as if to stop me from continuing. I realize she’s afraid. I bite into another cherry and smile, feeling the juice gather in my gums. It’s something I would have said. “Yes, but the prince didn’t know there was a way to bend light, to see differently. So when he looked at her chest,” and I laugh, this line suddenly funny, my mouth coming open, the flesh of the cherry, the chewed up pieces starting to gush out as I smile. I look out the window, swallow, taking great pleasure in the texture down my throat. I swallow the seed too. Grin. Ma now looks uncomfortable. “When the prince looked at her chest that was a mirror, he saw the cherry was a ruby. ‘You have been eating,’ the alien tells the prince, with great condescension, ‘treasure.’ ” “And the prince leaned in closer. He saw his face,” I pause, letting myself linger, “He saw that he was a princess.” Ma blinks. “Are you saying...the prince was a monster?” “I never said he was a monster,” I chide her slowly, “only that he was a prince.” “Not like the princess and the frog?” “No,” I say, now panicking. “No?” “No.” Ma is silent. I take another cherry. There’s only a few left in the bowl. Blood-red pearls, three of them in a porcelain clam. In my hand I squish it, in a fist under the sheets. Ma doesn’t see. “And the prince wanted to reach into the alien’s body, take out the ruby. He saw how it had a different shape, how it was unbreakable and bright.” I swallow. The juice is sticky in my hand, I can feel the tear, coming apart into pieces. “Did he?” Ma asks. I regard her. “The alien said, amused, ‘Do you want this?’ Swept a hand over her chest, her body. Seductively.” Ma holds my gaze. I look away. “ ‘I do,’ he said. And the prince reached out for the ruby.” I pause. “But he killed her. He had the cherry in his hand, but he took the ruby he saw reflected in her chest. And never again could he unsee the cherries again as rubies, sure he would choke and die. And when he looked at his hands, all he could see was the alien’s hands, feminine and silver. He felt her everywhere, unable to undo that guilt.” I stop. “What a story,” Ma says, finally. I take my hand, wipe the guts of the ruined cherry discreetly into the wipe, clean my hand. “He starved. The cherries kept disappearing, he had whole fields of them, but couldn’t bear them, couldn’t eat them. And his people, begged him to do something, unable to keep up with the sudden disappearances all over the world. Even though they could see he was dying.” “It’s not over?” Ma asks, appalled. “So finally one day, the princess took off all her clothes.” Ma says nothing about the character change. “She stood out on the balcony. She bared herself to the people. The aliens were no devils. They were only wise. But. Everyone only saw a prince. So. She...ate a cherry.” “It saved her?” “It killed her,” I respond, shortly. “She choked on the ruby.” Ma’s face doesn’t change. “Now the story’s done.” Ma’s arms are crossed. She’s unimpressed. I sink back into the pillows. Again, I study the ceiling: all the marks, the color fading at the edges, rows of squares. “You are just,” Ma says, looking at me, “like your father.” “Where did you get these,” I say. It occurs to me suddenly that cherries are out of season. “Everything’s international now,” Ma says. I feel my heart break at this, a crack dropping through my chest. “You’re right,” I murmur, and hearing my voice say it aloud breaks me further. I swallow the cherry. All my confidence and spite begins to crumble away, become brittle. I feel like crying. I spit just saliva into a napkin, trying to get rid of the taste. “Just like John.” Ma is at the window. She looks out. “You both have such imagination.” I watch her. I still want to hurt her, somehow. “Dad didn’t have an imagination,” I say. “He took photos.” “Yes, Eva,” and Ma turns to me now, “He took photos. Exactly.” “That’s not...you don’t create anything with that.” But Ma is shaking her head. “No. You can’t take photos or draw a picture unless you see something there.” “What?” Ma looks at me, almost pleading. She sits again. “You see stories in everything. Every object or face. Everything.” She picks up the last cherry from the bowl. “This is just,” she says, “a cherry.” I look at it. I see the lighting from the window frame it, see the curve of its shape, how it is imperfect, lopsided. The gleam of my mother’s nailpolish, her soft hand, made smooth by cream, the notes of it eeking into the creases. The angle of her arm, the entire composition of her figure over the rectangles of the room. It’s not just a cherry, I want to insist. But then I understand what she means, because this is it, this is my problem and hers: I always see too much, she never sees enough. And I remember what she said, one afternoon long ago: “I worked for this. Your father was just talented.” “You are both of us, Eva,” Ma says now, as if she can hear me. There is sadness in her voice. “You have your father’s eye, and my…” She smiles bitterly. “My discipline. My little ruby.” She puts the cherry down, just as a woman appears in the door. We turn to look at her. “This way, honey.” The woman smiles. My mother rises. The three of us stand in the room. It is time for therapy. We will talk about food, relationships, bodies. Histories. Families. The stories that we tell ourselves, that I told myself, that Ma told herself. Outside, beyond the hospital window, all of Kansas City is spread out around us. Dizzying, pulsing with color and life. ![]() Isabella Esser-Munera teaches English to fourteen year olds and is an advocate for children everywhere. Her work has appeared in Faded-Out magazine and Maudlin House. She can be found on twitter as @esserisst, and is currently working on her first novel. Comments are closed.
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