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All That Fruit

Maybe it was all that fruit. Maybe it was a thing with me and big brown eyes. Perhaps destiny perpetually ticks within us and some would call it conscience. Perhaps my conscience was kissing you. In the supermarket our eyes eyes met and out of nowhere; I was kissing you. It was like you said, "Something I was only kind of watching watching myself do." Before your son's knuckle shot roots of pain through temple to tailbone, I could hear my wife screaming. Only at that moment did I remember her at all.

In the morning my head felt like a toothache. Wife comes into room; I smile faintly and don't say a damn thing. Maybe last I'd only been drunk and had wild dreams. That and slight amnesia. When I look at her face I see a thousand kilometers of ice-shelf and I understand that while I had been unconscious she has been evicting me from her tender parts. The face of my existence irrevocably altered. A soap opera continues on the television, is has no sense of decency, no mercy.

* * *

I've thought I've seen her a thousand times. But this time, this time. This time I died. I did not make it, could not survive. And I was so goddamn sure it was her. Really that was my only choice. It would have to be her or I die. Couldn't be another of these fakes, these strumpets. These women who turn around and look a little frightened. These women who are not HER. HER, burning HER; me laying awake at night and hating the sick-green desperation pumping through my once strong and noble veins. Couldn't take it. Fool. I am a damn fool. A damn fool who believes like a fool, kisses like a fool, and foolishly believes that kisses like that- that kisses like that are an act of conscience- conscience that perpetually ticks within us Y en español algunos llamarían destino.

Of course she was wearing black, the woman I thought you were was wearing black. She had long, black, shiny hair like you. She walked like you. I walked after her. She didn't see me coming, she kept walking. So I kept walking, and she crossed the street, so I crossed...so I felt the car in my ribs then I looked at my elbow; it was bleeding, bad. The rest of me was smeared, before I knew it, I just smeared away.

Before smearing away; I stare out at all my organs laying glistening like a thick rain, like the waxed coat of the Red Delicious. I think of all that fruit, fruit, long-ago fruit. I remember that shit about destiny and turn to asphalt.

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