Paradise Rot

by Jenny Hval

They could return to themselves, disappear into their enclosures. I was alone again.

I suddenly knew nothing about myself, nothing seemed right in English, nothing was true.

Maybe it wasn’t the house, but me that was porous, I thought. Maybe I had to grow a thicker skin in this town.

When she chewed I could hear the sound of the fruit’s flesh dissolving into foam.

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.

Outside the house the world was dry and sharp and normal, and it didn’t quite correspond with what seemed to grow between the brewery walls: something moist, skinless and quiet.

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.