Josephine Paige Uson

Celestial Fruit

The Earth is grounded. There are those who rarely draw out Earth on a three-dimensional, true scale figure. Instead, they focus on giving area to the map rather than the beauty of the planet's depth. There are layers upon layers of grit and bones, all churned into the ground that we walk on, and at the very center, lies a blood orange that melts everything around it. Out of the kitchen window of the house, the horizon burns and blurs into a straight line.

“My favorite tree does not have any fruits on it yet,” my mother says. She’s peeling a local orange layer by layer. “If I could grow these, I would.” She says this about a lot of plants–blueberries, strawberries, orchids, roses–but for all the respect she commands, the harsh and desolate dirt of Waianae will not listen to her. 

I watch as she takes care to peel from the top of the orange, so that the fibers are not ripped, but rather fall away with the skin itself. The scent lingers long after the orange splits open. Each piece is thus shared: she eats one, passes a second to my father, gives a third to me, and saves the last for my brother, who is at school. She puts the remainder in the fridge and when my brother gets home, he will smell the citrus and know that we thought of him.

But for now, my mother moves on to pulling away any fibers that have clung onto the flesh. My father, well versed within the sun and family, cuts open a caimito. He has spent hours taking care of the garden, fending the leaves from pockmarked fates and vengeful Mynah birds, but here is the labor in its final form: a star apple. It is one out of 50 plants that have found a home in my parent’s garden.

The lilikoi plant, with fruits dotted like constellations amid the overgrown vine, sits atop the shed. It grew and grew, and we took the fruits and turned them into breads, and jams, butter, smoothies, and juice. It overtook the roof like a chia pet project, spiraling into little coils and leaving behind a home for caterpillars, butterflies, and geckos. Cutting the caimito open reveals an inner solar system, speckled and sweet. There are too many seeds for us to grow, so we dry them out and share them with family, allowing them to grow their own meteors. 

I watch, as patiently, hungry, and intently as I can. The fruits and vegetables from the garden taste different than those bought at the stores. The stores do not share the scraps with their chickens, tortoises, or dogs. Our chickens have taken a liking to the mulberries and scraps of papaya. They also peck at the grubs that ruin our soil and in the absence of threats, the skins and stems left from the fruits pucker, ripple away, and start the whole process over again. 

“They always pick them too early. These don’t ripen off the tree,” my father remarks, mostly from disappointment at the bought fruits, mostly too himself, but mostly for a lesson. He’s right. The store-bought ones are always watered down with little to no sugar. They live in frigid aisles of forged perfection. He continues discerning the differences between our fruit and the rows of ready-to-buy produce. 

I listen to him talk about plans for the garden, even though I don’t like to get dirt beneath my fingernails. I can always borrow a pair of gloves. The ones in the backyard shed are older and worn, but still protective against dirt and grime. The last time I used them was during a particularly bad summer in which the shiny beetles buzzed through the air. In a bumbling flight, they left behind larvae that destroyed our first batch of sweet potatoes. Assessing the damage, I began to realize how resilient the potatoes were.

“Sit on the stool. They dug into the dirt pretty deep,” my mother sighs and continues, “We’ll be here a while,” she tells me, rummaging through the tool box. “Just take the trowel–yes, the small shovel–and scoop out any larvae. Dad said to keep any potatoes you find for composting.” 

I nod and begin digging through the soil. My father is busy securing a tent onto the budding mulberry bush. The birds have taken a toll on the previous harvest. My mother is beside me and I am beside myself with disdain for the grit of sandy soil. At the end of the day, the dirt was piled onto one side of the planter and all the potatoes were gone.

Since that summer, my parents have taken it upon themselves to refurbish and rearrange the order of the plants. The old area has been dug up and fitted with new potting soil, of which the grass has graciously taken to growing back over. Our chickens patrol the garden for any insects. The sweet potatoes are in another section, farther off to the right, next to the caimito. 

 It’s taken root, my mother informed my father as she closed the garden shed. The caimito sits in a faded black, plastic pot that is for mere aesthetics now–and to keep the dirt in one spot–but it doesn’t matter because if the little mound falls it will just pile onto the hill it grows upon. The soil in the backyard is shallow, she says. She doesn’t know what to do to curb the branches from reaching the concrete. I suspect the roots will taste the dryness of the gray rock and be reminded of space. 

The caimito is a celestial fruit. They are tiny meteors whose descent from space is interrupted only for us to plunge them deep into the soil, reaching to the molten core of the Earth. If we bury enough, we think that the roots will envelope the core and protect us from falling into the inner sun. 

True, the rings of a tree will tell its age, but only after you cut it down. The real time lies in the sugar of its crop. I see the speckles of the nebula tinted skin, the stem shaped like a cane despite the trees' relatively young age. Six years. In human age, the tree would have learned to speak and feel and empathize. In lieu of communication, it provides for us the fruit it bears.

We hold the starfruit, the caimito, the lychee and say, “Here, a star.” 

I am thirteen years old, and I am trying a Rambutan and Longan. They were gathered from my aunt’s tree and placed in a plastic bag. In return we gave her a portion of the lilikoi harvest. The names of the fruits are mordant and unfamiliar as they strum from my voice, but I understand the taste. The Rambutan looks like lychee if it forwent the spikes and grows its hair out too long.  The Longan is shaped like a coconut and it tastes like a flavor long gone from my childhood. They both taste like lychee and I am reminded that even the stars feel the need to intertwine time, so they are not alone. 

If you look at a star through a telescope, it burns red around the edges. The smell of citrus and passion fruit lingers behind like a meteor trail through the Earth's atmosphere. It spirals and flares out and if you were to taste it, it would be reminiscent of the juice, but only of that near the rind–the effervescent bite of pineapple and the bracing before the sour fall. 

Somewhere I am still in Jennings catching bugs and peeling lychee. I know time is a concept, but I am not aware of how fast it will go. I left my watch at home because it only slowed me down. All I know at this point is the flutter of wings and the drag of my net through the air. As far as I am concerned, I have all the time in the world–until six o’clock when I have to go back inside for dinner. But until then, I sweat through the sun and chase the dragonflies with my brother. They soar past and buzz incessantly beneath the netting. We will put them in a little insect cage until they inevitably escape from our clumsy child grasp. 

We have time to mark and make meaning of the order of our lives. At a certain point someone created the concept of time and in doing so, made the past more meaningful and the future heavier. If time is flat and linear, I can’t go back. The best I can do is create webs. Pieces to harken back, to tie oneself together, clinging like fibers and pulp. Children are not wrong with their naive sketches of two-dimensional worlds. If you fold the paper in half, you create this wormhole time travel phenomenon. The fruits, grown, falling from branches too ripe, or not ripe enough, are pockets of time. We consume it, integrating the body and mind. We fear that if we do not partake in it, it will detach from our web, our branch. Somewhere, if I reach out now for 7.99 a pound of lychee or the monetary equivalent of twenty-something years, my hand will touch soft snow, crisp grass–the winter’s bittersweet way of partaking–to my father’s extended hand, holding a lychee. He has already peeled it for me because my hands were too numb to hold on. I was four then, already developing a hobby for biting off more than I can chew. My mother will later attest to the fact that I ate mangoes, apples, cherries, strawberries, and anything else that was not still green. They captured the memories in a digital cage, and they haven’t escaped our minds since. I am not there anymore. All I feel now is through the phantom morsel that all pictures can provide. All silence, no bite. 

The caimito won’t last very long in the fridge. If forgotten, it will develop a frostbitten taste, too far from sweet. Besides, the caimito is cold anyway from the AC. The house is alien to it after thriving in the heat of the sun. It will not ripen off the tree. To pick fruits is to acknowledge the flow of the time stream and the unwillingness to go back. Hands clasp beneath the rushing current of the faucet as we open the fruits, checking for ripeness. We are not sure if it is good to eat, having been hoodwinked by the mirage of the sun and the impatience when promised the taste of sugar. Pandora’s box meets Schrodinger’s cat. Regardless of the blemish free surface or the crackle of the branch, the real test is the taste. Too soon and the fruit is desiccated and overpowered by the latex. Too late and the result is a bitter and mushy texture. We are comforted in our wrong choices that at least these will go to the compost bin. At the table, my father is using a spoon to par out the seeds while I go get bowls for all of us.

It is a fruit of the present. My father cuts it into thirds. It doesn’t reveal its signature star, but it will taste just the same. The sacrificed vanity has no effect. It’s not an overpowering flavor, more subdued and peaceful, like the feeling of holding a fistful of smooth river rocks, the sweetness enduring but not cloying. As I gingerly scrape the last of the meat from the rind, I am careful not to get too close to the edge for it is bland. A perfectly ripe one would be edible all the way down to the edges. The inside looks like how I believed the Earth’s cores should look like. None of the hard core of the apple or the rough grain of the nectarine’s stone. There is no single pit, no individual core, just a round of seeds protected by layers of flesh–a little bit of the Earth for everyone. 

“Are you finished with this?” I ask the table, facing even the empty seat. With a nod, they all pass me their plate and their rinds and peels and stones. I pour the contents of the plates into the trash and the rinds, hollowed and devoid of flesh, core, and cosmic whispers, fall flat. 

Josephine Uson is a writer and an avid reader from Waianae, Hawaiʻi. She writes mainly creative nonfiction, spinning love of life through words. She has dabbled in fiction writing and enjoys a good fantasy read. Some of her biggest author inspirations are V.E. Schwab and Tamsyn Muir. She is currently attending the University of Hawaiʻi at West Oʻahu and is majoring in the Humanities with a concentration in English. Josephine aspires to apply the skills she has accumulated during her writing journey. On a good day, you can find her curled underneath the passion fruit donned trellis, feeding the chickens and reading some of her favorite books. 

Photos by staff