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Rot

Geoffrey unwrapped the gift when nobody was looking: a mango, and it sat on the counter observing
the flutter of wrapping paper, the general unease of decadence, the laziness of light fixtures. 
            “That’s ok,” the others said. Geoffrey could have the mango if he wanted. He thought long and hard about drawing a face on it. Some siblings said no.
            “You’ll mess it up.” said Suze, but Geoffrey wanted to draw the face. Geoffrey was obviously artistic because he wore Weston’s hat sometimes and wore the same shirt three days in a row and left the bus stop last Tuesday to go hunt lizards.
            Then Geoffrey decided that mangos do not have faces and that’s just fine—he put the mango in Suze’s American Girl Doll cradle and it lay there for a long while slurping shallow breaths sometimes.

On the very-merry-day-after-Christmas, Les and Weston went hunting for the mango.
            “Mangos must be eaten,” the parents said at the house meeting. Ten children caught Geoffrey in the corner of the pantry and Les held him up by the scruff of his neck.
            “Where is the mango?” Les shook Geoffrey a little. Geoffrey squeezed his face shut like a dried strawberry.
            “I won’t say!” said Geoffrey.
            They swatted him fourteen times on the bum. Fourteen was Geoffrey’s least favorite number. After that they told Geoffrey to run and get a fly swatter and swat some flies, because Geoffrey loved bugs.


The poor chap sometimes snuck out on the roof of the house and burned incense.
            He wasn’t allowed to have incense and he knew it, so he stole some from Suze because she wasn’t allowed to have incense and knew it, so she stole some from a party where she, wistful, watched all the satin smoke sliver out of the tall wooden container. Wooden like a casket, wooden like a wedding chest, wooden like oak trees falling over in an ice storm.  
            Geoffrey was enchanted—this smoke slower than Boy Scout smoke, slower than Les’s cigarette smoke. It was graceful like so many velvet dragons. Graceful enough to grab and let go again. Like fishing, when you catch a little one and let him go before he bleeds out. 


At once Weston found his son on the roof of the house.
            “It’s my garden,” Geoffrey declared. Scattered around him was a coconut and a cucumber, three bananas, and a pineapple from next door. “Mango belongs up here with the others.”
            but Dad picked up the mango and examined it.
            “Look, it’s starting to rot a little bit,” he said. “Mangos do that.” Mangos rot. Fish rot. People rot. Not everything is incense and velvet dragons. 
            Geoffrey was kind of crying and the incense had just burnt out and there was no more smoke to catch in his palm. “So what do we do?”
            “We’ll dry it out.”
            They sliced a faceless mango into polished strips, slumbered under space blankets on the roof, and the morning brought a hot Arizona sun that tasted like watermelon.

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