A Spiraling Ode to Lost Fruit
By Naomi Gage
“In spaces like dreaming there exist the birds. They float out like light.”
— Dryads & Saints, Mia Thorpe
The old woman cannot stop thinking about raspberries. She is sitting very still on the seat of the train car, and her window stare is unfocused, lips apart. Not the raspberries one finds these days—hard pinkish little drupelets, whitened and bitter. Raspberries as she had in her youth, red and fat, delicate to bursting, with a ruminative flavor that approached, for her, a certain kind of holiness. She has always associated fruit, apples of course, and cherries and now raspberries, with divinity. There is nothing she likes so much as buying fruit or vegetables and arranging them on her kitchen counter. The sun would fill the room, striking her exquisitely positioned lemons or pears so that some obscure aesthete’s chord inside her hummed with satisfaction and delight. Now her arms are weak, and she cannot carry as many bags of fruit as she would like. But every Sunday she still travels by train to the market. It is hard, these days, to find real produce; one has to travel far.
Across from her the young woman sits, reading a book, although frequently she glances across to ascertain that the old woman is still calm, seated. The young woman is called Anna, and she wears a long brown skirt and a cardigan. It is her task to ensure that the old woman makes it through her Sunday train rides unscathed. This is made more difficult by the fact that the old woman cannot remember Anna’s existence. At first Anna would jostle the old woman’s arm gently, and say, hello Mrs. Thorpe, Mia, it’s me, Anna. Don’t you remember me? I’m here to help you. Can you hear me? It’s Anna. But gradually Anna has begun to feel a kind of discomfort, and more than that an acute embarrassment at this whole procedure: her increasingly desperate voice, it’s me, Anna, and the gray look of fear and incomprehension rearing in the old woman’s eyes. A paranoiac’s anxiety has seized her, and she fears what others in the train car must think.
Anna has begun to have upsetting muddled dreams in which she is shaking someone, it could be anyone, saying it’s me, don’t you remember me, and the person looks at her in horror. The identity of the person frequently changes, varying from night to night. Sometimes it is her own absent mother, sometimes her best friend. What remains constant is the look of uncomprehending fear in their eyes, a look that fills her with despair and a bleak certainty that she does not truly exist.
When Anna wakes from these dreams she walks to the kitchen, where she drinks a glass of water, sometimes takes a piece of fruit from the refrigerator and eats it slowly, in infinitely small bites so that the taste vanishes before she brings the fruit to her mouth again. This preoccupation with fruit is something she and Mia share, although they have never discussed it. It is worth noting that Anna has never tasted the kind of fruit that Mia dreams of. She is of the generation that Mia pities, the generation that has only ever known the subpar raspberry, clenched and astringent.
–––
Anna turns a page in her book, lifts her left eye to check that Mia has not moved from her seat. Her method now is of the covert stalker: she follows Mia like a shadow through the market, pacing slowly, her hands in her skirt pockets. If Mia stops to buy something, she pauses a few stalls away and lowers her head as if regarding a slice of peach or a head of cauliflower, narrowly watching.
She prefers the way it was when Mia had her memory. Train rides with Mia, her swift and aged body like a piece of wood worn by water. She had felt responsibility, even tenderness, for it, a precious object she had been entrusted with the care of. The weight of it, the feeling. Sometimes she had taken Mia’s hand in hers and frowned at her with the force of a thousand youthful admonishments: don’t get lost, don’t fall down, don’t go wandering. Mia’s hand was wrinkled and soft like a dried slice of apple. There was a scent that came off her body, wholesome and immediately characteristic of her, like sulfured sugar. Sometimes she had fallen asleep on Anna’s shoulder.
And then the bubbled thread of memory had fallen out of her grasp and now if Mia looks at her, it is with the blank pleasant gaze of a stranger engulfed in another realm, separated by vast, mysteriously rheumed distances of age. “Her mind is gone, just gone,” Mia’s daughter sighed to her months ago, holding a long cream colored envelope in her plump dark hands. The envelope contained the money they paid Anna to follow Mia through streets and train cars: neatly folded bills, cash because Anna did not have a bank account. Where does a mind go when it goes? Anna thought. She tried not to let her eyes fall to the envelope. Her mouth was bone dry; the thirst made her body like a vortex, emptied, a reedy stalk torn by soughing wind.
Mia’s daughter was crimping the envelope in her hands, absently. Would she ever give it up? Would she let Anna leave? “The other day she fell on the stairs, bruised her hip. We really shouldn’t let her go to the market at all, but she really loves it. God knows why.”
She offered Anna a watered down smile and at last proffered the envelope with a blunt, casual gesture, elbow at a right angle, abrupt and almost impatient. Her right nostril was flaring. These people, they change like the wind, Anna thought, and took the envelope. The white paper seemed to sear her fingertips.
–––
Mia coughs and shifts in her seat. Her eyes are gaining clarity. She looks around the train car, eyes seeking. Anna presses the two halves of her book together in a slow prayerful gesture like someone annealing glass, and folds it away in her bag. She shifts in her seat too, ready, wary. Mia rises, shaky hand enfolding the pole beside her seat. The train rattles on its tracks and Anna watches as Mia’s body shakes with it, the motion forcing her to sink back into her seat. There’s a corresponding wrench in Anna’s own body, like a bone coming loose.
The train is nearing their stop. When it slows, Mia stands again and Anna stands with her, hanging back. She has a vision of the two of them as connected by a string looped loosely around Mia’s wrist, a string that Mia cannot see, umbilical, rendering Anna ghostly and inanimate, helpless to do anything but follow. But today will be different. The resolve weakens and strengthens inside her, waning then waxing like a small moon or a struggling flame.
The route is familiar through the station, the air damp and unhealthy. Together, a pace apart, they clamber out of the white-tiled train station, into hot sun and red brick. There’s a bridge they need to cross before they get to the market, fenced on either side by corroded wire. Rusted locks, old rings of keys, rubber bands, teddy bears and withered roses, all of them hang pinned to the wire, rustling and nodding vaguely in the dry wind.
As they cross the bridge, Anna makes the mistake of glancing down. There’s a body in the river, bloated, face-down, another jumper. There are a lot of those these days. She can see the waterlogged white of its skin. It’s a man. A watch around his wrist.
Somehow that little detail, the wristwatch, is what spooks her; Anna shudders and hurries her steps. Ahead of her, Mia’s resolute figure, silvered and frailly unswerving, has already crossed over onto land.
Mia Christopher, untitled 1, 2017, sketchbook, 8 x 10”.
–––
Once they reach the market Mia is slow, sieving her hands through sacks of grain, thumbing knobbly citrus thoughtfully. For Anna, the nerves are starting to kick in. She breathes quietly in her hands, trying to work up the courage. Today is the last Sunday, and although in recent months, she has not undertaken these market visits with great pleasure, the knowledge shakes her to grief. She steps closer to Mia, so close she can see the iron-gray threads of hair coming loose from Mia’s bun, can make out the threads of Mia’s blue blouse, blue like a bird, like the sky.
Mia bends, examining a table of carrots with forensic concentration. Her rattled eyes rove the trailing dirt, thready tangles of extraneous root. Her mouth forms a quiet shape of pleasure; one creased hand comes out to feel the dirt-roughened carrots, the vibrant green tops. Not just orange carrots, Anna sees; there are white carrots too, and purple so deep it’s almost black. Mia fingers the purple carrots but relinquishes them to pick through little baskets of gooseberries with their crisp winglike husks still attached.
“Excuse me?” Anna says, and one hand comes to touch Mia’s shoulder, except she cannot bring herself to make contact. Her hand hovers like a frightened insect above Mia’s neck. Mia turns and blinks.
Anna’s stomach clenches and loosens. She says, one hand digging around in her bag, “Are you Mia Thorpe?”
“I am,” Mia says. She’s wary. One of her hands is still poised over the gooseberries, like she wants this encounter to be over so she can go back to her fruit induced reverie.
Anna produces the book from her bag and displays it like a shield. Mia’s eyes widen as she takes in the title: Dryads & Saints. A young Mia poses on the cover, eyes lowered. Those same eyes stare at her now, narrowed, watchful, with a distrusting intelligence peering through the fogged glass.
Weakly, already hating the excuse she’s picked, Anna says: “I’m a fan of your work. I was wondering if I could speak to you about it.”
She purchased the book a few weeks ago, on a whim. She had known Mia was a writer. They had spoken of it years ago and Mia had laughed about it, oh those days. I don’t write much anymore. Later, on her phone, Anna had read the brief Wikipedia entry for Mia Thorpe, curious. The article text read: Known for her shortform prose and philosophical musings inspired by nature, Thorpe established her reputation as a budding savant of the Red Day movement, a neopunk literary movement known for condemnation of government environment policy and speaking out against the widespread use of raingas as a bioweapon. As much of her work took the form of spoken word poetry, not much has survived to date, barring her only extant work of published prose, the volume Dryads and Saints (stylized Dryads & Saints).
Reading Dryads had been like plunging through deep water to see the ruins of an ancient drowned city, rusted cups and necklaces, crumbling villas, jilted statues, the concentrated physicality of a lost history. Mia writes with the kind of sensual intellect that once sparked obscenity trials. Now that kind of a book collects dust in secondhand stores.
Anna read it in several breathless sittings, plunging in and out of the book, losing hours. Lines resurface in her head occasionally. She remembers one now, staring at Mia who has taken the book from her and is touching it slowly, turning it over like she does not believe it exists. How can I begin to describe the age before you were born? Vast summers, mysterious insects, the wasted glamor of old silk, tarnished mirrors, frog ponds, carnivals that came and vanished in the blink of an eye, weeds growing in the streets, fruits we had no name for in the English language.
The book is deeply personal, revelatory, voluptuous with images of nature, most of which Anna has never seen in real life. It’s addressed to someone, a mysterious you. Now, as Mia thumbs the pages with her aged hands, eyes large and sorrowful, Anna can almost believe that Mia was writing to her alone.
Mia glances up and says, frankly: “My dear, it has been an absolute age since I’ve seen this. I’m sorry I’m so quiet. I just, I wasn’t expecting…” She touches her hair, her throat, almost nervous.
Anna stares at her. There is no way forward. How can she say what she must say, what she has come here to say? She has followed Mia through trains and over bridges even though it is the last Sunday of her employment and she could have left if she wanted to. The money is already hers, the envelope is miles away in her apartment by the dirty riverbank. There is no need for her to see Mia, or Mia’s coldly pompous daughter, ever again.
She hears the voice of Mia’s daughter in her head, as Anna had heard her last Tuesday. The colorless, coarse slide of her voice interspersed with sudden, startling bursts of meaning, complete phrases leaping out unscathed from a brutal rush of static. We’ve decided, Dan and I… too dangerous in the city… If it were different, a different time, maybe. And, which filled her with cold, slightly greasy hunger, and shame for her hunger: there’s a 10% bonus in the envelope. Later Anna had Googled the retirement home, seen pictures of smiling elderly beachgoers in waxed swimsuits, rosy with sun. A little blurb at the bottom read: premier artificial beach— no risk to your loved ones!
“Yes, of course,” Anna says now, at a loss, and looks down, embarrassedly, at the fruit. She touches the brittle wing of one of the gooseberries, lightly tracing the vein. “Gooseberries. Right?”
Mia Christopher, untitled 5, 2017, sketchbook, 8 x 10”.
“Yes,” Mia says, shoulders relaxing. She hands Anna back her copy of Dryads, and Anna puts it back into her bag.
Mia is wearing a knotted shawl bundled over the blue blouse, and she adjusts it in her elbows as she leans over the gooseberries. She gestures. “They taste like muscat grapes, only with a hint of acid. The wings make lovely skirts for paper dolls, if you have children.”
“Oh,” Anna says, and shakes her head. The sky is beginning to darken, turning the color of blue glass. She wipes her hand on her long skirt. She feels soiled and desperately wasteful, like a rotted fruit. “No.”
“Of course,” Mia murmurs, polite, apologetic. “I forget how it is these days.”
Anna manages a smile. Truthfully she cannot imagine what it was like in Mia’s age, such abundance, as she’s heard it told: plants pushing their roots everywhere they could. When Anna imagines childbirth, the process of being a mother, her mind conjures pale, sterile images: white hospital rooms, exquisitely calibrated fertility procedures, endless cost. Most of Anna’s generation are medically unable to have children, a common effect of raingas exposure.
They move toward the line for purchasing fruit. Anna hastily picks up a small box of gooseberries and holds it in her hands. She has been thinking for days about what she will do. What path she chooses to go down. Part of her wants to seize Mia’s arm and desperately shake her, say run now, they’re coming for you, there’ll be no more markets and Sunday trips on the train for you, not where they’re going to put you. But what future could there be? Anna has a hazy, anguished dream of the two of them living together, in a cottage in the countryside, if the countryside were not a wasteland. She would help Mia in the mornings, cook breakfast for her, soft porridge and an egg and some fruit, she would take Mia on walks and to the market any day she likes, not just Sundays. A feeling of tenderness, warmth, desperation suffuses her— unmistakably a mother’s feelings, although it’s an inappropriate comparison. She would help Mia sit down, stand, she would wipe her mouth if necessary, help her bathe, she wouldn’t mind, she would do it without question.
“Flowers?” The voice comes from below them. Dazedly Anna looks down, and she sees a small woman, so short that at first Anna thinks she is a child. She has a flat brow and a vapid, singsong voice. She proffers her burden, a dozen bundles of strange yellow flowers. They have spiky green stems and delicate petals as fragile as tissue.
“No thank you,” Anna says in a low voice, but Mia touches the small woman’s arm and buys a bunch, which she holds in her hands as if weighing it. Her eyes are distant. The dream Anna has of the two of them breaks apart, shuddering from the blow. Impossible. Mia has no reason to trust her, she cannot even remember who Anna is.
“Do you know what these are called?” Mia says, gently, turning to her. She raises the flowers. Anna shakes her head.
Mia says: “Dandelions.” She turns the word over in her mouth, reverently, like she’s polishing a stone. “From the French. Teeth of the lion. In my day they were considered weeds.” What she leaves unspoken is that now even weeds are rare enough to be valuable.
Anna smiles although she wants to cry. There have been no weeds in cities since the last wave of gas. Anna was six years old. She remembers putting fabric on the windows, rags, dirty towels, anything they could spare, tamping it down, her mother’s frantic voice and the greasy smell of the gas, and how everything had looked after they opened their doors: desiccated, like rotten skin.
She says, lifting her copy of Dryads just barely out of her bag: “Maybe you should write another.”
“Write another,” Mia repeats. Anna cannot read her tone.
The dandelions lie ragged in her basket. “People would read it,” Anna says, in a whisper.
Mia gives her a strange, formal smile like a door closing. She says: “That’s very sweet of you to say.”
They have reached the front of the line. Mia pays for her gooseberries and several other fruits she has amassed as they traveled along the line, fruits with skins of thin pale green, others ruddy plum brown, still others lightly furred. Something holds Anna back from leaping in to assist her. It’s like the cord that had once bound her to Mia has turned instead against her, looping around her wrists, keeping her immobile.
When Mia is done she turns and shoots Anna a stranger’s smile, it was nice talking to you, see you again. She leaves without looking back, her stooped figure wending its slow way through the crowd with the basket in her elbow. Anna watches her go.
She pays for the small basket of gooseberries. Her feet lead her down Mia’s path, but Mia cannot be seen. It has begun to rain, fat droplets plinking like jewelry on the ground, and a frisson of fear makes its way through the market before people register that it is normal rain, just water, no accompanying hiss of gas.
Anna sways where she stands. One of her fingers finds its way to the basket she clutches, and to the hard yellow gooseberries. She closes her eyes when the taste hits her tongue.
Across the square, the flower woman is still singing her jabbering song, offering her weeds to nostalgia, and the look in her eyes is both manic and listless. Anna swallows and peels off the rasping wings. They’re dry and brown, so fine she can see through them like aged muslin. The wind tears the wings from her fingers and she lets it happen, watching as the damp husks whip through the sky then fall limply to the black asphalt, swept down in the sudden rush of rain.
Mia Christopher, untitled 6, 2017, sketchbook, 8 x 10”.
Naomi Gage is a young writer based in Los Angeles; she has been, variously, a Scholastic National Gold Medalist, a Betty L. Yu & Jin C. Yu Creative Writing Prize Finalist, and a Kenyon Young Writer. Her prose work interrogates themes of ecological grief & anxiety, as well as the vivid, fractalized nature of teenhood in the digital age.
Mia Christopher is an artist based in San Francisco whose creative journey began in childhood and was solidified during her time at California College of the Arts, where she earned her BFA with a focus on painting. While painting remains her primary medium, Mia's artistic exploration spans a wide range of mediums, including photography, ceramics, tattooing, and printmaking. She finds joy in collecting small objects and ephemera, particularly stickers, which embody a sense of tiny, joyful treasures that inspire her work.