Peach Pit
The air conditioning kicks off sometime in the night, and Jonah’s gone from bed when I wake, my skin damp, aflame, like someone’s left the stove on all night and day. It’s the middle of June and the air conditioning is still out. Jonah will get to it when he gets to it. I fill my bathtub halfway with cold water, then ice cubes like my mom used, but the water’s already tepid by the time I step in. We’re in another drought. I scrub as if I haven’t bathed in a week, because it feels that way. I can never get clean, not with the desert air. I itch my shins, peeling off the dead skin, and dig the grime out from beneath my nails. My nail beds are clean: clean clean clean. They shine like pearls. But the tub only does so much.
June draws out the end of the desert bloom—the last of any color for miles off the exit before Picacho Peak. We’ve lived off the exit before Picacho Peak since we were born, and we will live here till we die. I have never known a life where sand doesn’t cling to the soles of my feet and in the hair on my nape every waking moment. I have never known a life without heat, unbearable, unrelenting. I have never known a life without Jonah. As a kid, he was the flightiest of the neighborhood boys. As a man, the quietest.
I call out to him from the tub, “Jonah?”
No response. He’s already gone to the factory.
I’m sweating again by the time I’ve dried off from my bath. Downstairs, our framed wedding photo is face down on the coffee table. In it, we press our cheeks together, Jonah’s eyes still bright and blue. We had some fun, Jonah and I, back when we thought we’d get out of here. When our skin bruised like peach flesh, beads on my bike spokes blink blink blinking down the winding hill from my parents’ house as Jonah flew past me on his Sting Ray, arms thrown wide like wings; how Jonah loved to fly. Us, lost in the desert in his pick-up, windows down to feel that wind. Only once the sun set did I let Jonah kiss me, our lips cracked from dehydration, the sweat on my cupid’s bow still drying as we traded spit and sand.
Jonah promised there was more to life than our town off the exit before Picacho Peak. When we rode our bikes down main street, peering into lit windows, he promised we’d never be like those people inside. Trapped in a town so small the entire population can fit in the church when someone gets married, and the entire population can fit in the churchyard when someone has died. Jonah would go to flight school once he had the money. I could be a flight attendant while I got a degree, in what I didn’t yet know. But we’d have time to figure that out. We’d have time to see everything. After high school graduation, he took a job at the steel foundry. Wouldn’t spend a penny more than he had to. I taught English at the high school, and saw myself reflected in those kids, itching to get out.
Then, my mother’s service.
My mother’s been dead for a year. Sometimes I pretend I’m still standing outside her old colonial, banging on her front door and begging to be let in. My nail beds bleed as I gnaw at them, as Jonah collides with the door, and I think, I just wish we had answers. It’s the waiting that’s the worst. But the worst is when the door splinters open, and the worst is following Jonah into my mother’s house, and the worst is the next thing that comes out of Jonah’s mouth. So, I stop time. Pretend I’m still sitting on my mother’s doorstep with bloody nails, red as the polish she’d paint our toes with every Sunday morning before Mass, her admiring my tiny feet, allowing me to wear her favorite kitten heels she didn’t fit into anymore.
But then I see, my nails are no longer bloody. No longer polish red.
After she died, I needed a new dream. Jonah and I started trying to get pregnant.
In my mother’s absence, Jonah and I eat dinner in quiet. She used to play “peach and pit”—tell her the softest, sweetest part of your day, and the hardest. Jonah was always a “no-pit” kind of guy. When I forced him to pick a pit—“Okay, okay. If I have to have one, I guess—the hardest part of my day is leaving you.” But his voice had a forced quality about it whenever he answered. I was supposed to take his answer and blush, and feel so lucky to be loved by him. So, I’d roll my eyes and play along. I’d agree. He was a “no-pit” kind of guy.
But there is no sweetness now that my mother is gone.
Despite Jonah’s insistence that he is okay, I’ve seen that pit widen and split-open in my husband since his accident.
Still, he tells me he is a ‘no-pit’ kind of guy. He leaves for work earlier every day. He never eats at home. I only ever see him in the dark, hiding the left side of his face from me. Now that my mother’s gone, there’s nothing holding us to this place anymore, but Jonah’s given up on getting out.
The digital clock above the stove blinks—00:00—00:00—00:00.
The electric is back.
I check that the gas stove hasn’t been left on. When I pull my hand back, the overhead light flickers, and the electric is gone once more. The clock is blank. My nail beds are already black. It’s the middle of June and the air conditioning is out again and I cannot stop scratching my shins. I pick out the grime beneath my nails. And then I clean. Dig out the black between the kitchen tiles. Scrub the chipping granite counters—they’re not supposed to chip. When I’m done, the house smells like limoncello. Too sterile, like a hospital.
The digital clock above the stove blinks—00:00—00:00—00:00.
The electric is back.
I pluck a peach from the bowl on the table—stolen from Louise’s orchard down the road, her shepherd, Rosie, too lazy and old to chase in the heat. Rosie used to have enough energy to race Jonah and I to the outskirts of the orchard when we were in high school, but, like everything, the desert has drained her. My thumbnail pieces the soft flesh of the peach, and the juice runs down my arm. I lick it up.
Jonah forgets about my ultrasound. He forgets everything these days—he didn’t notice when I started losing too much weight, or how I tossed in the night. Did he not think of me? Of how I was doing? Did he think himself the only one lost?
I tell the doctor Jonah’s just running behind, but she insists she must begin the appointment. When she spreads that cool jelly on my skin, for once, I am cold. Wonderfully cold. She points to the screen to remind me of my empty womb. “Oh,” I say. Oh. How had I forgotten? The ultrasound stares back at me, my womb empty, empty, empty, a deep pit inside of me, yawning awake. My doctor asks to see my shins, to make sure the scars are healing okay. I’ve itched them raw. She gives me an ointment for them. I tell her I’ve been feeling wrong lately, and she writes a new prescription. Town is so small that we have one doctor for everything, everything except cancer.
My mother’s chemo treatments were at the hospital a town over. How she hated to leave the house without her scarf covering her bald head. How I’d found her hiding in her bathroom once, eyelashes plucked out, handfuls of hair, bent over the sink crying. “I’m just an ugly old lady now,” she said, and she said it again, and again. And when that piece of steel flew off from the grinder and clipped Jonah, I took him to the same hospital. The doctor might have saved the vision in Jonah’s left eye had there been a nearer hospital.
Jonah comes home late that night. The air conditioning is out, and the bed sheets scratch over the raw skin on my shins. He crawls into bed in the darkness, avoiding touching me. I roll over to kiss his shoulder, his collarbone. “Jonah, hold me.” But he doesn’t move. I grip the sides of his face. “Please. Just talk to me.” His good eye is blank, and his bad is milky.
He pulls my hands away from his cheeks. “What is there to talk about?”
“You missed my appointment today. And—you haven’t said anything since I lost the baby.” Yes. I lost the baby. I must remind myself. The wound is so deep inside of me that I can no longer feel it.
He’s quiet.
“Did you think about me? At all?”
He turns away, and I know that means he didn’t.
***
The electricity is out again when I wake up. In the dark, it looks as if the wallpaper is melting, peeling, for our air conditioning is out at this moment in June. The window’s open to let in a breeze. Jonah’s not in bed beside me. There’s a knocking from downstairs, a loud thrumming, and my skin’s on fire. In the kitchen, the digital clock above the stove is blank, and my peaches have rotted. It always goes this way in the desert, when it’s so hot and dry nothing can survive outside the fridge. But the electricity is still out. I itch my shins till my skin’s raw and open all the windows and scrape the grime from beneath my nails, but there’s no breeze and it’s hard to breathe, like ash in the air.
I chuck the peaches. The thrumming begins again, the walls shaking—but it’s only Louise at the door come to collect me for Mass. I hide my dirty nail beds from her in my pockets. “Is it really Sunday already?” I haven’t seen Jonah all weekend.
“Come on dear.” She forces a smile, combing my hair back from my face. “We got to get you out of this house.” She pulls my hands out from my body. “Look how pale you are.”
I didn’t notice before, but my hands are moon-white, and my nails–my nail beds are black. I scrub my hands before we go, clean, clean, clean. Louise chitters all the way to church, pushing up the sleeves of her long gown, patting flat her gray hair. I should have changed into something nicer. My mother never would have left the house without a freshly pressed dress and a full face of makeup. If she needed something from the store before she had time to get ready, she’d wake me, no matter how late I worked at the diner the night before, to go for her, still in her nightdress and hair curlers. And when she got sick, she refused to leave the house for anything but her doctor’s appointments. At her sickest, she refused to let me take her to the doctor.
In the end, she locked herself up in that old house. When Jonah finally broke her door down, he found her first. “Don’t come in here,” he yelled. But I followed him anyway. I found her swaying from the rafters, still done up, just as beautiful as when she was alive, silver belt ornamenting her pale neck like pearls, kitten heels dangling from her toes.
When I ask Louise how she gets out her pit stains, she laughs.
Mass is just as boring as when I was kid, watching light filter through the stained-glass angel, coloring the pews teal and Jonah’s face pink. Even during our wedding, when I held Jonah’s hands between mine and the priest’s sermon went long, I watched the shifting lights.
The pews come alive now, sunbeams flickering red and orange. My skin is on fire. The air conditioning must be out. The priest’s voice comes to me from a great distance, and I remember the way he once grasped my hands between his to offer his condolences.
Louise looks frightened when I stand in the middle of Mass, but she cannot catch me as I sprint from the chapel.
I ran track in high school. I was the only one ever fast enough to catch Jonah.
***
When I reach our driveway, my lungs burn. The house is dark but for the shadows swimming behind the windows. I make out Jonah in the moonlight. He’s standing at the stove, back to me. And I realize what he already has. People like us don’t make it out of places like this. Inside, I flip the light switch, but the living room remains dark.
My hand comes away hot, for it is June: June June June, and our air conditioning is still out. In the kitchen, Jonah stands at the stove, the flickering flame reflected in his milky eye. “Jonah? Why are you in the dark?”
He doesn’t turn back to look at me. “Electric’s out.”
“You think you’ll get around to fixing the air conditioning soon?”
He doesn’t answer.
“You missed Mass.” I scrape at the grime I know is beneath my nails.
“Really?” His voice floats away. “Sorry. Slipped my mind.”
“Are you making dinner?”
He mumbles, too quiet for me to hear. When I peek over his shoulder, there’s nothing on the burner. He curls his hands around the flame. The digital clock above the stove is blank. I pull his arm from the burner, rubbing his palm, burning. In the moonlight, his skin is almost translucent, freckles aglow. “Jonah. What are you doing?”
He grunts and turns away. I know to stop asking questions.
I kiss his shoulder.
When he goes upstairs for the night, the electric flickers on for a brief respite. Air blows down my neck. I scrub my hands clean clean clean. The digital clock above the stove blinks—00:00—00:00—00:00. That night when I lie in bed next to him, the electricity goes out again. I can feel the dirt already back on my hands. He kisses me.
His left eye has the luster of a minted nickel.
I ask, “Peach and pit?”
He turns away, hiding the left side of his face. As I drift off, the mattress begins to tremble. No, that’s not right. Jonah trembles. I know he wants to be left alone. He wants me to let him be a “no-pit” kind of guy, but we both know—he’ll never be a pilot. We’ll never leave this place, this town off the exit just before Picacho Peak.
***
The air conditioning is out when I wake up. The window’s open to let in a breeze, because it is the middle of June and the air conditioning is still out. Jonah’s not in bed beside me. My skin shifts, alive. The bedroom handle burns my hand like the stove has been left on all night and day.
Or, it burnt my hand, four months ago.
The fire climbs the staircase towards our bedroom, or it did, months ago.
My shins tingle, but months ago.
Downstairs, the kitchen is, no, was alight.
The stovetop was aflame. My shins bubbled and glistened. I coughed from the smoke. The digital clock above the stove was blank. Everything dark but for the red between my legs. My nail beds black with soot as I parted the flames to look for Jonah, but—the peaches—the peaches—the peaches—wrinkled, their burnt skin tearing, melting—
***
The next morning, glorious dew dampened our belongings.
The fireman marked it as an accident so I got the payout, even though he knew. Everyone knew. It had only been a matter of time.
Had Jonah thought of me before he did it? Had he thought about my life? What if I hadn’t woken up? But no. He must’ve known—my scent was over exaggerated during my pregnancy. I would’ve smelled the smoke. He must’ve known, the firehouse had a fast response to our desert off the exit before Picacho Peak. He must’ve known I would be fine. He must have. But had he thought of the baby? Had he thought of my grief, of how I wished I hadn’t woken up that night?
I don’t think he thought of me at all. There are easier, less painful ways to do it—take a gun out into the desert, or a wrong turn off a cliff. But he’d been so lost.
The firemen asked me, do I have anywhere to stay awhile?
They could not catch me as I ran back inside, as I ravaged through the house searching for what I’m still not sure. Like I said, I ran track in high school. I was the only one ever fast enough to catch Jonah.
***
The air conditioning kicks off sometime in the night, and Jonah’s gone from bed when I wake, skin damp, aflame, like someone’s left the stove on all night and day. The window’s open to let in a breeze. Our wallpaper melts and pills, for it is the middle of October; it is October and the air conditioning is still out.
Taylor Ebersole lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where she is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University. There, she has also worked as a reader for Barely South Review. She is the winner of Baltimore Review’s Flash Fiction Prize and the Jerri Dickseski Fiction Prize. Her fiction has appeared in Baltimore Review, Constellate, and RiverCraft, and is forthcoming in Allium, A Journal of Poetry & Prose.
