The Judgment Tale

Over the growing shadows fell the dead weight of  light. With a long bark mules metered the distance and turned back. Dust rose like columns of unpaid debt. Spit dried before it could reach the ground. Then the thin-barked orange trees disowned their thick-skinned fruit. Then mosquitoes spat out bad blood into the gutters and were gone. Fish was opened like a two-page book, its skeleton, caught aflame like an asp, inscribed with fire along the bone lines, then slapped on a stone face of a plate next to a Coca-Cola bottle as cold as hell. In the market fruit prices jumped up so high — the seller women turned into hawks. With a gibbous peacock brushing by their feet, in the woods where each leaf  hides a face, and each trunk a spine, and each tree a crime, where owls and angels, a man and three women were contesting an apple. The winner’s body itself was an apple with skin chewed off. Inside her breasts milk circled like a growling animal locked behind two heavy nipples. It was both day and night. Her moon-white hand on the sun-gold fruit. In her hair more stones than in a graveyard. So I followed the woman as she ate hoping if not for a bite then at least a spit in my direction. But she left nothing of that apple. Not even the memory of eating it ever.