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1 | --- | ||
2 | title: Peaches | ||
3 | genre: prose | ||
4 | |||
5 | id: peaches | ||
6 | toc: "Peaches" | ||
7 | |||
8 | project: | ||
9 | title: Autocento of the breakfast table | ||
10 | class: autocento | ||
11 | ... | ||
12 | |||
13 | "My anger is like a peach," he said. | ||
14 | He was trying to show how metaphors could be anything. | ||
15 | I thought it worked. | ||
16 | I wrote it down in my red notebook. | ||
17 | |||
18 | In my other class, there was a long discussion about the difference between metaphor and simile as they relate to [Prufrock][]. | ||
19 | I could only think about his peaches. | ||
20 | I wonder if he dared. | ||
21 | |||
22 | A few years ago my friend dressed up as J. Alfred Prufrock for Halloween. | ||
23 | Her costume consisted of rolled khaki trousers and a peach. | ||
24 | (I wonder where she found that in [October][].) | ||
25 | She was annoyed that she had to tell everyone who she was---"At a writers' party!" | ||
26 | I don't remember if she ate that peach. | ||
27 | I do remember the main meal was spaghetti. | ||
28 | |||
29 | That party was held in a house in Chattanooga, in the basement. | ||
30 | There was a big back yard where people drank and talked and sat in the darkness. | ||
31 | Somewhere someone was smoking weed with a visiting writer. | ||
32 | |||
33 | Earlier that day, [the writer had read a poem about his car accident][sebastian] a year ago, in Georgia, on the interstate. | ||
34 | It had broken him pretty badly, and his wife, but somehow their child was unharmed. | ||
35 | He said something about the peach pit being the one place Georgia held sacred. | ||
36 | He said it was the place where all new things grow. | ||
37 | |||
38 | I can see how anger could be like a peach: its juice runs out of the mouth and down the chin, dropping onto the pants and staining them. | ||
39 | In the same way, I can see how [anger is like sex][]: they are both heightened states of emotional observation. | ||
40 | |||
41 | In Atlanta, there are something like five or ten [Peachtree Streets][]. | ||
42 | I'm not sure if they all connect at some point, but from what I could see, they would have to do some contorting to get to the same point. | ||
43 | I like to think a giant peach tree grows there, like the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. | ||
44 | |||
45 | I was walking down one of Atlanta's Peachtrees with my girlfriend when a man in tight pants, a runner, jogged past us. | ||
46 | We both agreed he had a marvelous ass. | ||
47 | I was annoyed, however, when she confessed that she wished I had one like his. | ||
48 | Later, we ate at a taqueria with peach-habanero salsa. | ||
49 | |||
50 | [My mother][] would read to us as children. | ||
51 | The first real books I remember, the first novels, are Island of the Blue Dolphins and James and the Giant Peach. | ||
52 | I don't remember Island of the Blue Dolphins as well, probably because no movie was made of it. | ||
53 | |||
54 | There's an independent video rental store where I grew up called [Popcorn Video][], one of the only stores I went to in my hometown that wasn't a chain. | ||
55 | Every time we went, my sister would rent two movies: _James and the Giant Peach_ and _Home Alone 3_. | ||
56 | |||
57 | I wasn't allowed to stay home alone, or I don't remember it, until I was fifteen. | ||
58 | I built a potato cannon out of PVC pipe and a barbecue lighter. | ||
59 | I would load a potato, spray hairspray into the barrel, and light it. | ||
60 | Once, the cannon wouldn't light. | ||
61 | I looked down the barrel and pushed the trigger button to see if I could see a light. | ||
62 | I forgot that I had already primed the barrel with hairspray. | ||
63 | I singed my eyebrows and bangs. | ||
64 | |||
65 | In peach season, my father would bring home a bag of the freestones every week or so. | ||
66 | He always got the cheap ones, so they were usually dry and pithy, with a stone that fell apart and nearly broke my tooth. | ||
67 | I don't eat them anymore when I go home. | ||
68 | |||
69 | My mother would always eat canned peaches with cottage cheese. | ||
70 | For some reason I didn't think this was common knowledge. | ||
71 | I showed people how good it was when we went to a buffet: they said "I know." | ||
72 | |||
73 | To be honest, I'm not even sure what a peach tree looks like. | ||
74 | I do know what an orange tree looks like, from a backyard in Phoenix, and a fig tree, from a back yard in Chattanooga. | ||
75 | I also know what a cherry tree looks like, or at least a type of them, from my own backyard at home, as well as mulberry and apple. | ||
76 | If, for some reason, I find myself lost in a sinister Garden of Eden, I'll at least know a few of the trees I can eat from. | ||
77 | |||
78 | I always heard growing up that the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was an apple. | ||
79 | Maybe I'll luck out: maybe it'll be a peach. | ||
80 | |||
81 | [Prufrock]: http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html | ||
82 | [October]: axe.html | ||
83 | [sebastian]: http://www.32poems.com/blog/5158/weekly-prose-feature-an-interview-with-sebastian-matthews-by-justin-bigos | ||
84 | [anger is like sex]: statements-frag.html | ||
85 | [Peachtree Streets]: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Peachtree+Rd+NE,+Atlanta,+GA/@33.7779425,-84.3843615 | ||
86 | [My mother]: riptide_memory.html | ||
87 | [Popcorn Video]: http://popcornvideo.net/ | ||