{"id":996,"date":"2019-03-28T01:57:48","date_gmt":"2019-03-28T01:57:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/?p=996"},"modified":"2019-03-22T01:11:03","modified_gmt":"2019-03-22T01:11:03","slug":"mail-order-fruit-by-carly-e-husick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/2019\/03\/28\/mail-order-fruit-by-carly-e-husick\/","title":{"rendered":"Mail Order Fruit by Carly E. Husick"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Carly E. Husick is an MFA candidate at the University of New Hampshire studying fiction. Her favorite activities include watching Queer Eye on Netflix, binge reading YA novels, and playing with her new baby nephew. She has most recently been published in Gravel Magazine, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, and FlashFiction Magazine. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n


Mail Order Fruit<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            At\nseven her favorite food was apricots. She liked the way the tiny fruit fit in\nthe curve of her hand, even then. There was something about the lightness of\nthe fruit, the juicy gush and sticky rush of that first bite that made her\ngrin, as if the tart aftertaste were lifting up the edges of her lips. Her\nmother kept them in a glass bowl that looked like curving translucent palm\nfronds supported the mountain of apricots, their fuzzed backs rolling against\none another like the hills of the valley they lived in. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

            At\ntwelve her mother packed plastic baggies of dried apricots for her to bring in\nher lunch bag to school. She\u2019d tried bringing the fresh fruit but it often got\nbruised by lunch time, a soft brown spot mushing against her teeth when she bit\nin before hitting the gnarled walnut of a pit at its center. The dried apricots\nlooked, to her, like shriveled tongues and their insides tasted of velvet, soft\nagainst her mouth, smooth and rich as though filled with preserves. Her mother\nkept the dried apricots in a glass jar by the stove, the wrinkled flesh of the\nfruit piled high next to the Kosher salt. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

            At\nfourteen her mother met a new man and on the weekends she was shipped a town\nover to stay with her grandmother who had a floral wallpapered kitchen and a cuckoo\nclock that looked like a black cat. On the hour the cat\u2019s tongue would dart out\nof its mouth and its tail would sway with the seconds. It bellowed like a\nship\u2019s horn instead of dinging and sometimes, on Sunday afternoons before her\nmother came to pick her up, she would follow the tail\u2019s trajectory and nearly\nfall out of her seat at the blaring of the hour. Her grandmother made fresh\napricot jam, slicing the fruit and boiling it down in a grey pot on the old gas\nstove, adding sugar by the cupful. She ate the jam, pale orange and quaveringly\ngelatinous, on scones her grandmother baked fresh every Friday. It sat rich and\ntart and sweet all at once on her tongue and the cat wagged its tail and stuck\nout its own tongue as though asking for jam. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

            At\ntwenty-one on a trip with some girls from her college she tasted apricot-wine.\nThey were deep in the valley surrounded by vineyards, grape vines crawling up\nthe hills around them. There were four of them, all taking the same history\ncourse at the local university, and they stood leaning against the butcher\nblock bar while men in white button downs served them quarter cups of wine to\ntaste. The apricot-wine was a pale blush color with little bubbles of\ncarbonation floating through it like clouds. When she took her first sip of it\nshe swore that she\u2019d been blasted back to seven when she bit into her first\napricot and was met with an explosion of sweet unexpected flavor married with\nthe smooth furred texture of the apricot\u2019s skin. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

            At\ntwenty-three her mother had signed her up for a mail order fruit delivery\nservice that sent a carton of apricots to her door at the beginning of every\nweek. At first she kept pace with the fruit. She ate it fresh, she boiled it\ndown into jam, baked it into muffins. But when her mother got sick and she was\ncalled away from her small home, on the edge of the valley, to spend stretches\nof time in the hospital fetching ice chips, she fell behind. A neighbor, who\u2019d\nbeen given a key for just such circumstances, brought the apricots into the house\nevery week and set them on the kitchen counter to rest. These apricots never\nseemed to go bad as they had in her lunch bag as a child, they instead stayed\nperfectly round and sunset-colored, piling in the corners of the kitchen,\nspilling from what had once been the utensil drawer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

            When\nher mother died she brought home the glass bowl shaped of palm fronds and\nfilled it with the fruit. She set the glass jar that had once held the dried apricots\nnext to her own Kosher salt and filled it with the peach-colored globes. The\nfruit spilled from her cabinets, filled the entirety of her dishwasher, and\ncarpeted the floor like a round-topped shag rug, soft against her feet. She\ntried calling the mail order company, tried telling them that her mother was\ndead, there would be no more payments, no more fruit, but the apricots\ncontinued to arrive. Each week a new carton of them appeared on her doorstep\nand she\u2019d carry them inside. If they\u2019d gone rotten she might have considered\ngetting rid of them, but they stayed tart and sweet and tense at first bite the\nway they should, and she couldn\u2019t bring herself to throw out the fruit that\nstayed, somehow, just as she liked it \u2013 on the cusp of ripeness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

            At\ntwenty-four the apricots began to taste sour. It wasn\u2019t just the ones that\nfilled her kitchen, and now dining and living rooms. She\u2019d thought of that as\nshe brought the fresh ones into her home and bit into them to find the fruit\u2019s\nflesh gravelly and sour and so she\u2019d gone to the market and bought a singular\napricot. She\u2019d wrapped it in the cellophane bags that were kept on a thick roll\nby the fruit displays and paid thirty-five cents for it. She hadn\u2019t even waited\nuntil she got home to sink her teeth into the soft flesh. It tasted rotten.\nCloying and muddy. It tasted almost of death, the way her mother had smelled in\nher last hours \u2013 musky and rank and yet somehow unbearably sweet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

            At\nhome there was another carton of apricots waiting on her door step. She kicked\nit away instead of scooping it up, as she normally did. When she opened her\ndoor she had to put her weight behind it and with a great heave she cleared a\npath in the maw of her home, a wedge devoid of apricots. When the door closed\nbehind her with a creak and click that reminded her of the bellow of her\ngrandmother\u2019s cuckoo clock, she squinted against the dark to see the distorted\nshadows of her home cast onto the bumpy surface of thousands of apricots. They\nwere everywhere. They coated her walls now, climbed her kitchen counters in\npyramidic piles, they peered out of the crevices between her couch cushions and\nfilled the gaps between her books. They sat in her kitchen chairs and lodged\nthemselves in drawers and cabinets and appliances. They filled her sink. Still\nholding the cellophane bag from the market she first sat and then laid down on\nher kitchen floor. The fruits popped and burst beneath her weight and she felt\nthe front of her shirt grow wet as they bled. She pressed her face into the\nrounded tops of the apricots and, closing her eyes, pretended she was skin to\nskin with her mother, feeling the soft fur of the apricots as the silken down\nthat had once coated her mother\u2019s cheeks. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Carly E. Husick is an MFA candidate at the University of New Hampshire studying fiction. Her favorite activities include watching Queer Eye on Netflix, binge reading YA novels, and playing with her new baby nephew. She has most recently been published in Gravel Magazine, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, and FlashFiction Magazine. Mail Order Fruit             … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pa867U-g4","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=996"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":998,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/996\/revisions\/998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}