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

‘We have to get the bins in,’ Carral said when I returned from a trip to Aygros. ‘They’re gonna fly away.’

‘But it’ll stink.’

‘We’ll put them under the stairs. There’s not a lot, just some in the compost, and it’s sealed pretty well.’

The wind almost knocked us off the stairs. Carral carried the bins, and afterwards we each took hold of an end of the coffin-like compost container holding the old apples. The smell of rot on my hands was faint and familiar, and when we put the container down under the stairs I remembered how, when we’d dumped the apples in it, I had imagined we were cleaning out paradise. I got a sudden urge to open the compost and look at the apples. Carral sat on the lid, and I sat next to her. Her arm was near mine. Her skin was soft, softer than I remembered, as if she was rotten too, a fallen Eve. Under us I could hear the apples rumble. Not a real sound, but a sort of internal buzzing, like how you can imagine hearing nails and hair growing or buds opening.

Goldapple Stems

Goldapple Stems

I WOKE UP DURING the night and saw that the bathroom light was on. Downstairs I found Carral sitting on the bathroom floor with a fistful of yellow hair in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other. She jumped when I opened the door. On her head were several bald spots.

‘It just came off, I woke up and there was hair everywhere …’ she whispered and sank into a pile of hair, crying. I sat down next to her and stroked her cheek. Her head jerked. A yellow lock of hair stuck to my hand, warm and soft, almost liquid.

‘Do you want me to help you?’ I asked, and twisted the scissors gently out of her hand.

There really was hair everywhere. Some locks were cut, but others looked like they had just come loose and slipped down her shoulders, gotten stuck in the folds on her nightshirt or on her arms. It looked like she had hair growing all the way down to the floor, where it fastened. The bathroom mushroom’s white eye glared at us.

‘I’m starting,’ I told Carral, who nodded silently, and then I rested the scissors close to her scalp and cut. The locks of hair fell down in my lap like peelings from a golden apple, and as I was cutting more and more from her naked head, I noticed that I was crossing a line, that I gleaned and gathered something painful from her that didn’t fall to the floor, but that braided itself into my body from hers.

When I finished she had only millimetres of hair left, her scalp having become a glistening white button mushroom.

I stroked her head. ‘You look lovely,’ I said. ‘Like a Buddhist priest.’

Carral was completely silent.