Apple Week by Anna Fernandes
Started off as a missed full stop. A poppy seed of punctuation. No longer a sesame seed speck. Grown beyond lentil and overtaken blueberry. Outstripped kidney bean, then grape gone by. Blasted past the more interesting kumquat, fig, and lime. I’d never even tried a kumquat… Oh. Pipped pea pod. Lately lemon. Now, apple. Next, you will be avocado if we get that far.
It’s never household items; as big as an egg-cup, as long as a stapler, as curved as a bar of soap. Instead, there’s an apple spinning around in there, rolling over itself as if being bobbed. It’s easy to forget you’re not actually a navel orange, rotating slowly, a perfect, cratered moon. The citrus fruit of my loins. The heat of Valencia shimmering around my womb. So fertile I grow enough tropical fruit for a fruit cocktail. As if we don’t mind the idea of gestating a coconut, but would balk at a conker, a large egg, a quarter pounder with cheese. I resist thinking of you as I crunch into a shiny apple, or as I plunge my thumbs into an orange, the shock of the spray on the air, the juice running down to my wrists.
15 weeks. A Thumbelina baby for the palm of my hand. Your own pips, seeds, eggs tucked inside, an insurance for the future line. I try to resist imagining you as a giant-headed, starfishing, synchronized swimmer, only just grazing the sides, hardly enough to give me a flutter. Hardly. But you, you must feel the bass line of my heart drop deep under amniotic waters. My blood thrumming through the plumbing. My breath the waves that crash on the far shore. I am all the planes of your existence. Like the humming of a fridge.
No one knows I went to the clinic last week. It was studiously unsentimental in beige. No primary colors. No fruit charts. No wrinkled toes or curled fists. An oversized clock was ticking into the silences. I could convince the doctors (both male) that it would be for the best. They had read my notes, after all. I could even convince myself, for a minute. I am hollowed out with nausea and fear, yet stuffed full of ripening fruit. It rises, like choking acid. I’ve rescheduled the next appointment again.
I was nearly late through the gate today. Last out, almost, they fly at me in turn, hair whipping, bags and scarves trailing. Relief flushes their cherubim faces. Arms around my waist and legs so I can’t move. There’s tears when one has a mini bag of Haribo because it was a class birthday, and the other one doesn’t. This smaller one twists his sweaty fingers from my grip, so I hold his puffy hood along the roadside and pretend not to, while he strains to leave me. Then there’s homework, reading, dinner to be assembled and thrown away. An attempt to finish work left abandoned earlier. Then there’s bathtime, toothpaste smearing, and bouncing on the bed to get through. Then there’s an appointment for three days’ time, not marked on the family calendar. For avocado week. If we go.
Artist’s Statement
In my writing I hope to explore the crushing expectations placed on mothers, the mythologising of pregnancy and also to explore the ambivalent sensations created by push-pull mothering in a patriarchal society.
Anna Fernandes, an ex French teacher and now mother of two young children, lives in the Cotswolds in England. She likes to join in Flash Fiction Face Off by WritersHQ and has read work at Bristol Waterstones live events.