Now

The fruit flies started in the kitchen. They started on the tomatoes. We picked the fruit pink in a race against the raccoons, piling them on the counter. We wanted to wait: we wanted to eat them only once they quivered with blood-red heat. The flies didn’t have our patience. 

The swarms began in earnest when we brought in the peaches. A modest heap of bruised jewels. The little tree’s branches were no match for the squirrels and the deer, who pulled down the leaves and nicked the fruit and broke the slim, green twigs. One had a small bite taken out of it. On the sideboard, under a tea towel, it festered and wept. The fruit flies got one whiff of the rotting juice and went wild with multiplying ecstasy. 

Three bucks stood outside the windows like bronze sentinels in the dusk.

The kitchen’s odor turned sour. Spoiled fruits, vinegar traps, disappointment. The raccoons woke us by singing their strange, dry palms across the metal window screens, full of our same greed. We ate tomatoes vindictively, standing over the sink, flies dizzily approaching our open mouths, bathing in the rivulets of juice running down to our elbows. We smashed the insects inside our nostrils. We sat on the floor in the dark, speaking softly under their hum. 

Porch lights caught on all six of the bucks’ large, black eyes and shafted in our windows, illuminating tiny, careening bodies. We thought perhaps they could see the peaches.

The bodies of the largest tomatoes felt like babies. Heavy, tender and sleepy. They were warm and fragrant and they were so, so quiet. Holding a peach was like being able to bend time and hold your own newborn head, furred and dense and pulsing. We stood over them, picking up first one then another, testing their weight and heat in our hands, against our cheeks. The entire future encased in sweet, glistening meat. A soporific perfume dragged at our eyelids and oiled the minute passageways of our lungs. The fruit flies gathered, their wings kissing gentle in the folds of our ears, the webs of our fingers. They felt like angels. They felt like tears. We felt them speaking to one another in their noiseless way.

We took the screens from the windows. The deer leaned their sinewy necks across the frames. Something chittered, long and low. We all leaned against each other. We all ate and ate and ate.

__________

Kate Beall (she/her) lives and writes in Colorado, nestled between the mountains and the plains. Her work has been published in FERAL: A Journal of Poetry & Art, HAD, Identity Theory, and elsewhere. Find her on Bluesky at @katebbeall.bsky.social.