The Fig Tree

My mother loved the fig tree.
Every year she would quietly anticipate the mauve pouches ripening and the blush flesh honey sweet. She ate as many as she could during its harvest, a fig with breakfast, lunch and dinner and two afterwards. With the ones she could not consume fresh, she turned into every type of fig based concoction she could. My father and I would shake our heads at her and in reply she would impishly smile that at least none went to waste.


Every year, she would wait til dusk to pick the bounty. When the air would hang thick with the sickly sweet intoxication that would seep into the garden.


When my mother died, I couldn't bear to touch the fig tree. My father, an advocate of forgetting hurt suggested that we uproot the tree. In the end, even he couldn't let the chainsaw blades go near his wife's tree. We let it stay there, it became an unspoken agreement between the two of us to pretend that those spindly branches and those intertwining trunks did not exist.


I went to that tree the other day. I felt that I had to.
The figs were hanging heavy, full. The were swollen with sugar. I plucked one off a branch, it's skin a dusky purple. I didn't know why I had done that, figs were too overwhelmingly sweet for me. I cracked open the fruit, forcing the nail of my thumb beneath its skin and splitting the fig wide open, its juice trickled down my palms.


I dropped the fig. The rejected fruit rolled over the grass. In it, a colony of ants scattered away.