Pungency

Chloe Anya Yang, United States

My mother used to tell me that when she was pregnant with me, she was swollen to the point of bursting. She ran a finger down her belly, told me how her skin would’ve split at this touch, like an overripe fruit, and she’d bleed out her juices too. And in the end, that really was what happened. She pulled up her shirt, showed me the C-section scar across her stomach; told me how I didn’t want to come out of her. The nurses were only able to coax me out by cutting her in half, bleeding her out and wringing her life juices dry. Only then was I satisfied. 

“If you could have your way,” she had told me, “You would have stayed in my womb forever. You must’ve thought it was sweeter than here.” 

“No!” I’d said, aghast. “Not if it hurt you so much.” 

She only looked at me and wouldn’t say anything more. Like she knew something I didn’t; that I was lying, though I didn’t know that I was. 

Unwilling to keep the topic on me and worried she’d somehow get upset, I pivoted. “What about Elise?” 

“It was smooth,” she said. She heaved a great sigh. “Did you think she would ever make things complicated? You know what she’s like.” I did. I’d always known my mother’s feelings towards me, but never Elise’s. She was not icy, not hostile, only a polished veneer of a human. Smooth. It seemed that she did not care for me but also did not hate me, completely and fully neutral about everything. 

My mother ended it there. She must have told me other stories when I was young, but I didn’t remember them, only this one. And so I grew up knowing that I was the cause of the greatest pain she had ever experienced. 

Here, with this story—me, as the baby who would have clawed her mother’s uterus apart if she could have—started the first and strongest of my many longings: I dreamed about a mother and a sister who loved me. 

- 

The last time I saw Elise was when I was eighteen and she came home for Christmas. It was just cold enough for frost on the windows. For me to be able to see Elise’s breath, puffed out in front of her. 

It was nine in the morning, and the doorbell rang very suddenly. No one ever rang our doorbell. Neither my mother nor I answered the first time, but then it went again. It seemed that my mother wasn’t going to move; so I stood up and opened the door. 

For a moment her breath was a white cloud in front of her, obscuring her face. Then the condensed breath parted, and there emerged a face, incomprehensible in one moment and then far too familiar in the next. Her hair was up in a bun, her hand on the same suitcase she’d brought away with her four years ago. 

Elise. 

It had been four years since I’d seen her last, and suddenly those years were a tangible thing in front of us, thickening in the white cold air. I dropped my eyes. 

When I turned away from Elise, my mother must have seen something in my expression. She hurried over, and they hugged, awkwardly, and I thought I heard my mother say something. I could tell Elise was looking at me, but I didn’t look back. If I met her eyes, the twisted ball of longing in my chest cavity would tumble out, ugly and naked and presented right for her. 

It had been fermenting for more than a decade. It was not for her to see. 

- 

My favorite food was oranges. I’d loved them since I was old enough for memory. They were the best blend of bitterness and sweetness, easy to swallow but not too easy, and I grew up practically weaned on their taste. My hands and mouth learned the motions: slice, unpeel, chew, tongue out the seeds, suck in the juices; clean up; and never unlearned. There was always orange: under my nails, around the bend of my teeth, lingering on my breath. 

Once when I was small, I’d finished eating an orange and forgotten to throw out the peel. I was sitting on the floor flipping through some storybook when I heard the door click, and this meant my mother was home. It was there, faced with her entrance, that I suddenly remembered with clarity that I had left the orange peels on the counter; it had completely slipped my mind beforehand. 

The thing about my mother was that her anger was quick to come and slow to leave. Especially when I was younger, she had been rather volatile. These were the small things I learned: how to tiptoe, go silent, erase all possible triggers, so she wouldn’t get upset. And she hated when the kitchen was dirty. 

I flew to the counter, and there, I heard her step through the door. By then I had managed to throw some of them out, but it was too late for the last peel: I eyed it, and then as I heard her head towards the kitchen, shoved the peel in my mouth whole. 

It was too big for my small mouth, scraping into the roof of my mouth, the sides, under my tongue with tough bitterness. I almost immediately gagged. But somehow I kept it there, and the counter was clean, and my mother did not seem to notice. 

This was the first time I fully tasted an orange rind. And as time went on, I started biting down more and more. Digging my teeth into the white of the peel, and found that it made my eyes burn but I could still stand it, that its ire tasted familiar.

- 

More than once I considered trying to start a conversation. The night Elise came back, my mother made us an approximation of Christmas dinner, and I sat with my knees tucked closely into the edge of my chair, not touching my food because I couldn’t really stomach anything but oranges. Elise and my mother were talking politely. I had a vague feeling I was watching a performance and the three of us were giving a sad, disspirited rendition that would be panned by critics the next day. 

Elise was talking about college. It was going well. She complained—though it wasn’t quite complaining because she never complained—about student loans. Asked my mother for any news in the town. Carefully skirted around the topics of my mother’s health, her jobs. 

I tried to say something. I should probably talk about school. It was a safe topic and I was doing fine. College application deadlines were soon, and the advisors told me I had promise, though they said that to everyone. 

But I couldn’t quite summon the courage, and my tongue flopped awkwardly in my mouth, unpracticed and clumsy. After all, I’d never known how to talk to either of them. So I sat and listened and watched and didn’t meet Elise’s eyes. 

- 

I vaguely remembered that Elise had not always been the way that she was. Had not always been vacant, despite my attempts to break past that indifference; had not always been so completely devoid of any regard towards anything in this home. The memories were quiet, but there. 

Elise had known our father, though I didn’t remember him. He had died before my first birthday, right after Elise’s fifth. My mother hated him. If he hadn’t gone and died, she used to say, everything would be fine right now. The only things he’d left her were a baby and a little girl, far from enough money, her choking illness, and desperate crippling grief, and she would never forgive him for it. 

I used to sit by her bed sometimes in the mornings, on weekends, because her weekend job’s shift only started in the afternoon. She was always very pale, her little bottle of pills always there on her nightstand. This was when I was still very small, still rather unafraid of her, fearless in the way tiny children are. She wouldn’t speak to me but I would place my hand on her arm, an orange in the other hand. Every single time, I would ask her if she was getting better, and every single time, she failed to respond, and my oranges never tasted as good on those mornings. 

Most of the time Elise would come into the room and pull me away after a while, telling me to let our mother sleep. By then, Elise was already quiet, slipping into impassivity and almost there. She still smiled often, though.

- 

A few days before Elise was to leave, she and my mother fought for the first time since I could remember. I didn’t hear how it started, only heard when they started yelling. It had been a comparatively long time since I had heard my mother yell, but it was just as familiar to me as if she had only just been screaming in my ear. Elise, on the other hand, was foreign. I didn’t hear her voice often enough, and I had never heard her raise it. 

They went back and forth for a while. I tried not to listen, a rising bitterness in my mouth. Orange rind. I’ve wasted my entire life for you two, I am literally wasting away and I’m still stuck with you, wasn’t raising you enough, you dumb girl? Elise; it barely counted as raising us because you hate us, always stewing in your own selfish struggles when you had two little kids to raise. God, we were just children. Were we worth anything to you? My mother; what the hell are you going on talking about worth? I have slaved away my entire life for you, I’ve fed you, I’m the reason you’re alive, and you’re talking to me about worth? 

Before Elise could respond, my mother demanded to know why Elise was picking a fight with her just then. Why, after twenty-three years, after my mother had finally gotten rid of her, she came back. “And don’t give me that crap you’ve been telling me about wanting to reunite with family. You think I don’t know how much you hate me?” 

“I didn’t come back for you,” said Elise, and her voice was slippery and impassive again, just like that. Her voice cracked over the first syllable, sharp and glittering and bright with everything she had never said. And then it bled over the next, flowed, and then her voice was slippery and impassive again, just like that. 

- 

The first time I kissed someone was when I was still young but not small. It was on the swings in the playground, and it was an accident. We were there on the swings together. We’d wind up the chains of the swings until we were high above the ground, then let it go and spin down to earth until we almost puked. I was just coming off of that giggling high, laughing as the world spun around me, and his face must have come too close, since one moment everything was hazy and pale and sparkling and the next, he leaned forward and pecked me on the lips. 

After we broke apart, we stared. Something was crawling along my lips, tiny little ants rooting around in my gums and digging into my bottom lip where it had touched his. 

Then I turned around and ran away. 

I spent the rest of the day trailing my fingers along my lips, resisting the urge to shove them in my mouth and make things clean. When school let off that day, my mother was still not home. She worked every day, burnt and sallow when she came home, so I would always check to see if she was there—it changed depending on her errands—then tip-toe into my shared room with Elise. 

It was just a small kiss. I tapped my fingers along the sides of my arms. The insides of my mouth tasted worse than the bottom of my orange peels, crusted and burning. It was just a small kiss. Hadn’t I wished for someone to love me for so long? 

I sat there until Elise came back from school and I heard the front door click shut. She must have seen me there, but didn’t say anything, instead sat down on her own bed and immediately began her homework. Elise, I wanted to tell her. Elise. There was a boy who kissed me. He likes me. Elise, that makes my throat close up. 

I didn’t know why I wanted to tell her. Even if I had I don’t know what would have happened. Elise was four years older than me, blank as a slate; we were sisters in blood only. 

So I kept silent the rest of the night, stared at her out of the corner of my eye sometimes. Wished she was the one who wanted me. 

- 

Elise had her things packed the next day. As she sat on her bed, her side of the room wiped just as clean and bare as she was, I suddenly understood this was going to be the last time I’d see her. Even the first time, it had never felt final. The sheets on her bed had been there; the lamp; some of her clothing. I’d never been able to bring myself to do anything about them—that would mean she was truly gone, and I feared that that would erase her from my mind altogether. These small physical reminders were proof that she existed. That I had a sister, and that was more than I’d ever felt in her presence. 

Now, everything was gone. She had her suitcase in hand, about to step out of our bedroom for the last time. My throat throbbed like something was dying in it. I could stomach the taste of bitterness, orange rind, the acidic sweetness of orange juice, but this was something I’d never learned: how, when all taste dissolves on your tongue, leaving only detritus behind, to swallow that. 

“Elise,” I said. 

She didn’t look back, but she paused. I sat there, throat working around everything I had never said. Instead I asked, “Why did you come back?” 

Her thumb ran itself across the handle of her luggage over and over again. “I wanted to see you again, before you left for good,” she said, and then she was gone. 

She had come back for me, I realized, a few minutes after she left and after processing the words. I stared after her, where she had been, for a long time. I had the vague urge to spit at where she had been. After all this time—far too little, far too late.

- 

A few days after Elise left for the final time I had gone into the trash and scavenged out everything she’d thrown away, desperate to retain some trace of her and to shake my limbs out of the cast that they had been in for the past few days. 

Toys, old homework assignments, art, hair ties, books. There wasn’t much, and it could all fit into one drawer of her nightstand. I regretted it almost as soon as I started, didn’t know what burst of motivation had led me there. This meager collection was the only picture of her life. As I ran my tongue along the roof of my mouth I tested the taste of the emotion held in there now. It tasted dead. 

An old research paper she had gotten full marks on. Two dolls, mangled beyond recognition. A birthday card from her best friend that she had stopped talking to. It was all so overwhelmingly human like she had seemed. The name Elise was written or displayed on almost every single thing. 

And there at the bottom of the pile, crinkled, had been a family portrait, drawn in unsteady crayon. Me, holding my oranges. Her in a pink dress. Our mother, smiling. 

In young, spidery handwriting; Me and my family! :-) 

- 

I hung it on my wall and left it there even as I packed all my things and some oranges for the trip, the day I was finally going to leave. My mother wasn’t there to see me off. I supposed I had already caused her enough pain. I understood her but I would never love her, the same way I was her agony child but her child nonetheless. 

As I boarded the bus, I found a seat near the back and leaned my head on the glass of the window, hugging a few oranges to my chest because I meant to eat them. I didn’t; I had no appetite. I’d always vaguely felt that I’d been skirting something; a real life, a family, a sister, never quite getting there. Here on this bus, I was teetering, somehow. 

I stared out the window. I let my tongue rest in my mouth, didn’t taste bitterness or deadness or anger or longing, and held my oranges so tightly my knuckles whitened. 

After the driver let me off I thanked him. Stood there with my suitcase, imagining Elise doing the same. I was finally gone. I would probably never see my mother or Elise again, and here I was, alone. 

I was still holding my oranges. I had them in a death grip. There was a trash can nearby. I thought of teetering again, between real and unreal, an unloved girl and an unconsidered one. I thought of a milk-soft baby, a little girl’s entire world upended, a sickly mother with the world on her shoulders. Sticky juice trailed down my fingers, the ridges of my knuckles, peels crushing into slush, and I let the oranges go into the wastebin, leaving them to rot.

Chloe (Anya) Yang is a young writer from New Jersey. She is always writing about love and oranges. Besides reading and writing, she loves anything J.R.R. Tolkien, strawberry milk tea, and cats. She is an alumna of the Adroit Journal's Summer Mentorship Program, a national Scholastic Gold Medalist, and an Executive Editor at Polyphony Lit.