My mother never ripened. When she was young, they bit into her and stopped the natural ripening process. After they’d spit her out, she stayed green until she began to rot. At the end of her life she was…
In the play Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire, a character describes grief by saying, “It turns into something you can crawl out from under. And carry around—like a brick in your pocket. And you forget it every once in a while, but then you reach in for whatever reason and there it is ‘Oh right. That.’”
That line has always stuck with me. I dog-eared the page in college and still refer to it sometimes. I think the bruise in “My Mother the Nectarine” is like that brick. Mostly you’re okay, but it still hurts sometimes.
This story came out of a time in my writing when I was asking myself, “What is a story?” I found that flash fiction was a perfect vessel for that exploration. The simplicity of the form allows for a huge range in the content.
Alan Ginsberg once said, “The only real measure of a haiku is, upon hearing one, your mind experiences a small sensation of space.” “My Mother the Nectarine” is, of course, not a haiku, but it comes out of that tradition of simplicity and space.
The simplicity is obvious: the whole story relies entirely on one metaphor to tell the tale of two lives, grief, family trauma, aging, and the way these things manifest in our bodies. It is so compact that the title became a necessary part of the story, adding the texture, color, and fragility of the nectarine.
The experience of space may be less obvious, but I hope the reader finds it in this line: “Just don’t press too hard on the tender brown spot. It still hurts sometimes.” Those two sentences hold everything that the bruise means and they reveal a secondary story—that of the relationship between the narrator and the person they are addressing. It’s a small thing that I offer, but it means a lot to me and I hope it can mean something to others.
MEGAN HAEUSER is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara and has recently relocated from Los Angeles to San Luis Obispo. Her short fiction is forthcoming in Salt Hill Journal, and she has had a play featured in the Fertile Ground Festival of New Works in Portland, Oregon. The writing she is most proud of is a series of short stories for her niece and nephews about a band of cousins with superpowers.
