How to Peel a Mango

How to [peel back time/lance an old wound/decant your grief with just] a Mango

1. Identify your craving.

2. Make your selection after tenderly squeezing each mango in the chilly supermarket pile. Not too soft, not too hard, not too green, not too orange. The perfect fruit will make itself known to your fingers.

3. At home, prepare your kitchen. Arrange cutting board, paring knife, bowl. Offset the stem and cut lengthwise down the fruit, separating one curved cheek from its body. Turn and repeat. Set aside the two hemispheres and return to the pork chop of your denuded pit. Keep your knife steady—the hairy seed will not relinquish its flesh willingly. Let the juice run down your hands, wrists, elbows. When the blade becomes useless, use your teeth.

4. Close your eyes and return to your childhood. The juice drips down your chin. You are eight years old, sitting in the lowest branches of a mango tree, its coffee hued bark firm and stippled beneath your thighs. The tree sits on a ridge, flanked to the left by the ocean, and, to the right, by a steep downhill slope. The tropical air around you swims through a dense shade of towering branches. Look, here is your best friend, perched beside you. Together you gaze groundward with a sense of ownership; a brief, rainbow zing of euphoria and anticipation surge up your throat.

Across a narrow valley is an aviary full of vivid, screaming parrots. Sometimes you creep across to watch them. You long for their glossy-bright feathers with a desire so intense it feels solid in your chest. You can taste it in the hind of your mouth like a sudden, violent salivation.

Midway down the hill is a starfruit sapling that only produces tart green fruit; farther up is a smooth-barked tree that you and your friends rob of guavas before they ripen, the competition between you so keen that the prize of a chalky, rock-sour fruit in your own mouth is far sweeter than the possibility of a ripe guava’s mild flesh sunk between another child’s teeth.

In a few years, on a path along the hill’s ridge, in a crumbling erosion of dirt and lacy tree root, you and your friends will find a human femur. In the sandy limestone crawl space beneath a neighborhood house, you and a gang of other children have created a warren of tiny dwellings for families of corn kernels. In the silky dust under another house you sometimes tease antlions from their slippery caves with the velvet stigma of hibiscus flowers. Once, you reach your hand into the dark, rocky hollow beneath a stair and feel, instead of a secret message hidden there by your friend, the firm, clammy flank of a sleeping toad.

At eight years old you don’t know it yet, but of all the many places from which you will be uprooted, this ridge and its valley, where you lived so simply for a scant handful of years, is the place you will grieve most bitterly.

But the flavors of this place, the smells—they become a part of you. The salty tang of ocean spray; the sharp bite of rust; the putrid rot of garbage, humming with flies and silent, teeming maggots; the feral effluvia of bodies and skin. Down the ridge, through a graveyard, and along the coast is an open air market where vendors spread bits of cardboard or tarp across the ground and heap their produce in glistening pyramids, where your mother buys finger sized bananas and deep red papaya and spiny rambutans and fresh-shucked coconuts, where you examine turquoise and lapis and coral colored fish, their round eyes glinting mercury and pearl and yielding supple under your curious fingertip. The pungent stink of their fresh-dead muscle, ocean-hungry and bereft, engulfs you.

5. Eyes closed, juice dripping, the fragrance of your childhood in your nose and a dull bereavement furring your tongue, let yourself remember what it was to be eight years old and full of wonder, in a world which you loved but were grafted into for such a short time. Let the loss dissolve in your mouth. Let it slip down your throat. Let it go.

6. Open your eyes and return to yourself. Deep breath. Remember your grounding exercises.

7. Turn to the twin mango cheeks you set aside earlier, dividing them into thirds lengthwise. Remove the skin and cube the flesh, adding it to your bowl in a growing orange pile. Gather all the skin and use your teeth to suck away the remaining shreds of fruit. Wash your hands and rinse your cutting board.

8. Select a fork and lean against the counter, eating bite after bite after bite after bite. Slow down, remember to chew. Close your eyes if it helps. You will always be hungry. Finish the bowl and set it aside; the dishes can wait.

9. Carry the tooth-furrowed skins and slippery pit to the trash. Let them drop. Look at your hands, slicked with golden pulp. They are empty.

10. Are you balling your fists? Are you doubled over? Maybe you’re on the floor now. It’s ok to howl. Grief is the whole recipe, babe. Lance it from your suppurating heart, wring its jagged shards from your salt-screaming muscles. Decant it into the empty vessel of your cupped hands, and see how it shimmers there, opal and quicksilver, ocean-hungry and staring mournfully back at you.