Rotten Fruit

Thoughts of you were mixed when I learned you weren’t a globe. You were more like a pear. A rotten one. Did you remember that you ate my soul? Those hungry teeth fell out a-knawin’, into a green tornado. You were like a tornado, I remember. You made my hair crazy the morning after. You made it hard to breathe. “Your mother is intolerable.” I hate you because you’re always right, and not in a self-righteous way. You’re softly right, all the time, and spherical. I bought a porcelain angel, one of those little round babies with a words to live by inscribed. It broke and you spoke, and I was your Judas thereafter. But still you were a globe – swallowed in a tornado then, maybe, but round. I didn’t notice it at first. You fell off the roof and a bone splintered. I made a joke – a joke! – and you cried in public. A small little chip we thought we could cast in plaster. I bruised you in bed. You were malleable. A harsh laugh was all you gave me when my pride snapped in half, and I realized after days of sunshine, moonlight reflection in irritable silence you were more like a pear. A rotten pear. And long ago you’d devoured me whole.