Butterfruit
Demree McGhee
She chased the slightest cool breeze in the air with her sweat slicked nose, lifting her body up and feeling her legs rip away from the plastic covered couch. Her mother pinched her knee and told her to stop fidgeting.
The relatives only spoke to Tess when they thought she was doing something wrong. But how could she do anything wrong when she was forced to sit perfectly still and sweat next to her mother until she evaporated into the air? It wouldn’t have made a difference to the relatives if she did disappear. Every time she tried to speak their cackling laughter ate up anything she had to say.
But they could hear Archie just fine. It was his eighty-ninth birthday. He held a crumpled up tissue in his hand that he used to wipe his watery bug eyes every few seconds. He sat bundled up in a sweater and a cardigan, a crisp white shirt buttoned up to his hanging leathery neck, despite the fact that the flowers on the coffee table wilted in their vase and everyone else pulled at the collars of their shirts to let the damp heat escape their chests like a split baked potato.
The relatives threw their voices across the living room, but the moment Archie twitched his wrinkled lips to let out the high whimpering whine that was his voice, everyone went silent. Then they’d roar and laugh again like they understood him. Tess could not understand Archie when he spoke, his dog whistle squeak, and she instead had to piece together the conversation based on the responses from the relatives.
They only seemed to talk about the beauty of the house. They pointed out pictures, cases of jewelry, silver spoons, the rings on Archie’s hands, and asked him how much it cost.
As Tess was forced to listen to their ogling in her forced silent heat haze, teased by the soft trail of air that filtered through the room and disappeared before she could enjoy it, she found the house uglier and uglier.
It was all low stucco ceilings, pale yellow wallpaper, thinning cracked book spines, dusted coated edges of brown stained portraits of dull eyed dead people. Rusty ancient things like a letter opener or a magnifying glass that looked like a snow globe cut in half.
Her mother’s favorite item in Archie’s house was a case of crystal elephants behind a glass door. Different shapes and sizes, frozen in the midst of lifting their trunks into the air. Tess thought that they looked cloudy and tacky. They were pointless.
Archie, in all his meekness, held a power over the room. When new relatives arrived, they all lined up to give Archie an awkward kiss or hug, with an awed hesitancy beforehand that made Tess think of peasants lining up to a king. They spoke to Archie with levity, but the moment someone had to get close to his physical body they became small and stilted. In his chair, he seemed safer to be around. Like the sun, they all leaned towards him, and like the sun, they did not want to get too close.
When Tess had first arrived, Archie had still been getting dressed. She had walked towards a faded yellow recliner but before she had even turned to sit, a relative had grasped her shoulder and said severely, “Don't sit in Archie’s chair.” At Tess’s look of horror, they had all hollered while her face burned. But as the relative turned away, Tess spotted the pitying look in her eye, as if the chair was a lesson they all had to learn somehow.
Her freedom came when all the relatives coaxed Archie away from his chair and guided him into the sitting room to open his presents. As they went away, packed together like a slow moving marching band, Tess unstuck her self from the couch and ran towards the breeze, following it to a cracked door near the back of the house, close to the kitchen.
In Archie’s backyard, the grass dampened her ankles as she breathed in the gust of air that kissed her forehead. Tall bushes of pink bottlebrush and blushing roses curled around the edges of the fence, where small garden figurines hid amongst the patches of clover. A thick tall tree grew in the corner. Its sprawling branches and twisting vines reached over the edge of the fence, heavy with a round yellow fruit.
Tess’s breath caught in her throat at the sight of it. She walked forward, in a trance, and reached up to grab one. Rain water rolled off the swollen round flesh. As she plucked it, the branch stretched down and snapped back up into the air. Tess squealed in delight as more fruits toppled down into the grass.
Tess took a bite, a chill went through her teeth, but the bite in her cheeks and sweet taste across her tongue made her hiss through the discomfort as the juice ran down her arm.
She ran inside with the fruit in hand to find her mother, and she found all the relatives in the muggy sitting room. A dim yellow light in the corner lit up the way all the relatives hooped and hollered, surrounded by more ugly things, as Archie shuffled back and forth in what must have been dancing. The relatives moved around him, singing and swaying.
She held the fruit up to her mother. “What is this?”
Her mother did not look down. She jutted out her hip and knocked Tess into the body of another relative. She steadied herself. “Do you know what this is?” she asked him.
He hardly glanced down at her. “Oh, what is that—a lemon?” He put his hands on her shoulders and moved her away. Tess went to weave herself back into the fray of relatives, but the bodies and breath churned the stifling air, and a gust of heat pushed her back out of the room.
She scowled and felt the heat rise in her belly. She stomped back out into the backyard and stared hard at the fruit in her hand. It couldn't be lemon. A lemon bit your mouth and did nothing to apologize, a lemon was wild. A lemon didn't allow her teeth to sink into its rind. She crouched over the fruit until her forehead touched the part that she had bit into, wet against her forehead. Then she held it in the air and yelled, “Butterfruit!”
A few birds jumped at her outburst and escaped to the trees, but no adults came and told her to stop yelling or moving, so she threw it in the air and yelled her new name for the fruit again, emboldened by her loneliness. Butterfruit, for how easily her teeth sank into it.
She gathered the fruit on the ground in a circle around her feet, and ate the rest of the one in her hand, chucking the seed into the bushes. When the seed clinked off of the body of a garden gnome, she crawled over and seized three of the figures. A garden gnome, a squatting frog, and a leaning mariachi player. She set the three of them in front of her and forced them to watch her eat. She leaned back in the cool air and dug her free hand into the grass so that wet dirt caked up in her fingernails. Grey clouds rolled along in the sky, so that the sun could not reach her. She savored the sweetness of having a crowd witness her greediness, like cruel king. She reveled in the joy of discovering her own beauty in this house, a bright and cool relief in a fading muggy prison, that no one else wanted but her.
She ate until her stomach was round. She walked back into the house, a butterfruit in her hand. The heat hit her hard in the threshold of the backdoor. She wanted to gauge how close her mother was to leaving. Being the second youngest person in the house meant that she was often left out of the conversations about how Archie used to whoop the older relatives as children.
But when she turned the corner into the sitting room, her mother seemed to fit right in, grinning with the other adults as they gathered around a large painting looming over a teal couch. They spoke loudly. Archie was gone.
“I’m getting this one,” said a relative. She splayed her hand across the surface, thick globs of paint recreating a choppy sea. “No one else even look at it, because it’s mine.”
“If you’re getting this one then I want the picture of Auntie Judy.”
“Wait, I wanted that too.”
“There are probably more pictures of her around here somewhere.”
Another relative grabbed one of the many bells that lined the top of the empty fireplace. “I want these.”
Another relative called, “What the hell you want those for?”
“Might be worth something.” He shook the bell hard and the ringing matched up with the laughter of the relatives, bright and sharp. Her mother put her hand over her mouth, delicate and shy. She said, “I still can’t get over those elephants.”
“Well, I sure as hell don't want them.”
Tess slipped beneath the crowd, unnoticed. The rest of the house stood silent and empty. The only sound was the relatives’s laughter echoing through the halls, growing distorted and distant as she crept further away. In the living room, a fly clinked around the yellow overhanging light that lit up Archie’s stale face. He sat like a life sized doll left behind by a child, looking small in his own clothing. His mouth hung open and his bug eyes stared unmoving at the wall, while his arms draped over the armrests of his chair as if his sleeves were filled were straw.
A sick feeling rose slowly in Tess’s stomach. She stood still, breathing heavy, until Archie sputtered and blinked. He wiped his eyes with his little handkerchief, then looked over to Tess. He smiled, all small yellow teeth pushed close together, black in-between. Tess smiled softly and raised her hand to say hello, but Archie’s eyes fell on the fruit in her grasp. He pointed with a shaky finger and said, in his shriveling voice, “Those trees still grow peaches.”
Tess’s face turned pale. She sprinted out of living room, through the sitting room, elbowing the adults out of her way. She burst out the backdoor, feeling the water from the grass splash onto her bare legs. She fell to her knees. The fruit rolled out of her hand as she stuck her fingers down her throat. A crowd of relatives gathered at the front door, crowing with concern and confusion. Her mother rushed to her side and Tess felt the scratch of her fingernails against her neck as she held back Tess’s hair. The tears and snot dripped down into the grass, mixing with the golden pulp.
© 2020 Demree McGhee
About the Author
Demree McGhee is an English student from San Diego. She has work featured or forthcoming in Lucky Jefferson, San Diego Poetry Annual, Free State Review, and Sweet Tree Review. You can see other things she's written at demreemcghee.com.