Paradise Rot

by Jenny Hval

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.

I’d imagined that I could feel something growing in my belly, something that wouldn’t become a proper foetus, but something much worse: a blackened, dead, and rotten fruit.