Paradise Rot

by Jenny Hval

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.

I didn’t know then that the hiss and bubble from her mouth would soon be heard in other places, in ways I didn’t yet understand. An apple is never just an apple. Carral peeled a Honeygold, and long round coils of peel curled and fell on the kitchen table. I took a bite of a Bloody Ploughman. Even the flesh was red. ‘Bloody,’ Carral said. ‘Nice colour,’ I answered. ‘It looks sinful. I bet that was the apple Eve ate, you know, in the Bible, the forbidden fruit.’ ‘Might be. But I’ve eaten some too now. Does that mean you have to kick me out of your house?’ I held the half-eaten apple out to her. She burst out laughing and pointed out at the factory: ‘Does this look like Paradise or what?’

Through the drumming something else could be heard: apple skin against wood, rolling through the kitchen, back and forth, like eggs ready to hatch.

I love these descriptions - makes for a very visceral experience of the text. I am both enchanted and slightly unsettled.

Then I stroked her arms, her thighs, her belly. Together we filled each other to the brim and lay there slumped in an all-consuming doze, like gorged snakes digesting their prey.

‘You’re such weird girls.’

They whispered to me – Jo … Jo … Jo … Jo … – as if I was leaking into the room and dissolving, flowing from my own bloody crotch like black juice from a rotten apple core.

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.

a rotten, reeking Garden of Eden.