BooksBarbecue
Back Paradise Rot
Chapters (26)
  1. Cover Page
  2. Halftitle Page
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright Page
  5. Contents
  6. Milk and Silk
  7. The Chest
  8. The Shadows
  9. The Apartment
  10. The Apples
  11. The Fruitpearls
  12. The Double Sleep
  13. The Moonlip
  14. The Spores
  15. The Brewery
  16. Pym
  17. Seasnails
  18. Prune Skin
  19. The Honey Mushroom
  20. The Lighthouse
  21. The Storm
  22. Goldapple Stems
  23. Eden
  24. Black Fruit
  25. Under the Sea
  26. Epilogue

She held the bag while I put the apples in it, yellow-brown and red, soft and wet. I got them from the cupboards, the mezzanine and from the kitchen bench, I picked up the apples that had fallen to the floor and rolled along the floorboards. A sticky dark-red Bloody Ploughman got stuck to my hand, and I thought about Carral’s comment about Eve and the forbidden fruit; imagining I was cleaning up after the Fall.

In the compost outside the apples looked like jewels in a jewellery box. I closed the container carefully and sat on the lid. Carral smoked a cigarette on the stair. She smiled groggily.

‘Sorry I got stressed out. I don’t like rotten things.’

I looked down on the compost lid underneath me, as if to make sure the apples stayed there.

‘It’s been a while since I lived with someone.’

‘Is it weird to share again?’

‘It’s fine, it’s just kind of new. The apartment feels … different.’

‘Smaller, perhaps?’

‘Maybe. Or just unfamiliar.’

‘It gets crowded quickly,’ I said. ‘With all those apples.’

She laughed and put the cigarette out under her shoe.

We leave the front door open. The fermented smell disappears over the doorstep, mixes with rain and wind and the tram’s whining progress. All that’s left is the trail of brown juice on the bench and seeds between the floorboards. But my dreams are full of apples, and in the dark my body slowly transforms into fruit: tonsils shrinking to seeds and lungs to cores. I dream of white flowers blossoming under my nails, as if under ice. Then my nails break, opening up like clams and in the finger flesh there are little sticky fruit pearls.

The Double Sleep

The Double Sleep

THE SIGHT OF HER startled me. I couldn’t quite believe she had been sitting in the same room for half an hour without me realising. It looked like she was sleeping, but maybe she’d been sitting there with her eyes closed, listening to the sounds I make only when I’m alone: the sound of my fingers scratching thick pubic hair, lips slipping apart in small sighs, the elastic in my underpants snapping against my skin as my hand slides free. Carral sat on the mezzanine stairs, only a couple of metres away. She supported her head gently on the railing, silent as furniture. Eyes closed, lips pushed together. Not a muscle moved. Not a joint clicked. I quickly closed my flies while I looked at her. Her head kept nodding. Her collarbone protruded each time.