by Cassie Keller Cole

Death
The forbidden fruit was an avocado.

I don’t blame Eve for yielding to temptation after she felt the soft green under wrinkled skin. It didn’t glow with the soggy white light of an apple or pear. How could she suspect that it would bruise?

Water
The avocado tree is a subtropical evergreen in the berry family. It produces about 120 fruit per year. The bark, leaves, skin, and pit are filled with a fatty acid called persin which is poisonous to animals. Scientific evidence implies that avocados evolved with the giant ground sloth, which is now extinct. Biologists hypothesize that the sloth would swallow fallen fruits whole. The pit would begin to sprout while inside the sloth’s stomach, and when the sloth excreted it, the avocado tree would grow lying in the dung. The avocado has little need to evolve further since humans grow new plants from old branches; the fruit continually develops upon grafts—rarely starting fresh from seed. Trees can grow from a pit, but require four to six years after maturing before willingly bearing fruit. The pit must be handled gently; legend submits that it protects the fruit from darkening after fully ripe.

Blood
As children, Wesley and I went to church together each week; I never noticed him. In junior high, we both worked on the newspaper; I have one hazy memory of him. When he finally spoke to me during his senior year of high school, I blundered in my usual confidence, stuttering. He didn’t hold my hand until six months after I considered him my boyfriend. After a year and a half he asked permission to kiss me.

We were married on August 22, even though I try to resist fairy tales: it was my grandparents’ 55th anniversary, my parents’ 27th : I never understood why the story ended with the couple living happily ever after. Isn’t that the beginning?

Spirit
Avocados do not ripen until harvested.

I imagine Eve holding the fruit like a large egg cupped between her palms. She caressed it with her fingers, examining knowledge of good and evil with a neutral eye. She must have carried it with her, incubating it until soft. Instead of slicing it through the middle, she peeled a piece of skin from the top, unwrapping the fruit until it, too, was naked.
It melted between her knuckles as she lifted it closer to her lips. At first, she just licked her fingernail, almost unconsciously. She had been contemplating the avocado for so long that she could barely distinguish it from herself—or who she would be, ultimately. Eve weighed mortality on her tongue, slowly realizing her potential motherhood. Closing her eyes, she swallowed and willingly fell so that she could teach others to walk. She wanted to hold something more substantial than an avocado, cradle her own fruit.

Birth
As a child, I grinned when peopled asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. Not the president, a singer, or even a figure skater—although I had considered all of these. “I’m going to be a mom,” I announced. A bewildered expression was usually the response, as if I had not answered their question. Now, years later and newly married, I’m less certain about my once quick answer. I thought my mother and my grandmothers were unshakable. Now I wonder if they feel as vulnerable as I do.

I panic at the prospect of motherhood, stumbling over my emotions. What if I can’t bare children? What if I’m not a good mother? What if I’m not glad to become a mother? Even as I hunger to begin my family, I feel too human to mother.

In the first month of our marriage, I asked Wesley to sooth my anxieties. I circled my conflicting feelings about motherhood, hoping he would explain them to me with his immovable logic. He thought about it for almost a week, then said, “I don’t think either of us will ever be ready to be parents, but eventually we won’t be able to resist children based only on our fears.”

At night, after we murmur about the future, I imagine the heft of the avocado in my palm.

Living Soul
The word avocado did not reach the lips of English speakers until the late 1600s. Known as the alligator pear, a fruit resembling its dangerous namesake, its skin gave warning. Avocado is popularly derived from Spanish: aguacate. Its history traces back to the Aztec word ahuacatl, “testicle,” because of the fruit’s shape. The avocado originally symbolized fertility: fruit of the loins.

In the dictionary, the word avocado settles near avocament, a Middle English word that shares Latin roots with advocate. Advocare: to call and sometimes to distract. As a noun: to have a calling.

When I bite into the earthiness of an avocado, the slightly nutty flavor distracts me until I focus only on its heavenly weight in my mouth, heavy as the word advocate. It drifts on the outline of my soul, that realm of familiar infinity hinting of justice, mercy, support, a plea that intercedes for my failings, my fallings.

Dust
Eve and Adam left Eden by the sweet execution of their innocence; inspired by parenthood, the butter-smooth texture of it lingering on their tongues.

Wesley cannot understand my craving for avocados. My stomach twinges for another sliver of paradise, however brief. When the green shades into black, I have no qualms about eating bruises. I scrape the inner layers of skin, savoring the fruit.

Then I lick the pit.

 

 

Cassie Keller Cole is a writer from Kuna, Idaho. She has been published in Inscape and has work forthcoming in Hotel Amerika. She will graduate with an MFA in creative nonfiction from Brigham Young University in 2010.