Cherry Season by Sally Bjork

He ate tomatoes like apples. Sitting on the porch of the shack – plywood walls washed in white behind him – he grabbed the Morton’s salt canister at his side to season every bite. Juice ran down his chin, dripping onto his thin undershirt – stained from the picking strap and sweat, from the juice of the cherries that smashed behind the pail clipped to his belly an hour before and from the dust tractors stirred up as they hauled tanks of the new harvest to the trucks waiting at the orchard’s edge.

He shore does love them ‘maters, said Jeffry in his Little Rock drawl as we watched Eddie devour the plump redness – slurping juice off his palm and licking his cracked, cherry‐stained fingers after the last sloppy bite. We were perched high in a Macintosh tree a few rows from the shacks when Jeffry’s kin, as he called them, trickled in from the field. When there ain’t any on the vine, Jeffry continued, he drinks catsup – like a Coke – straight from the bottle. Jeffry and I laughed at his brother, who was ten years older. But, deep down, Eddie terrified me.

I was friends with Jeffry and his sister, Dayna. We grew up together, during harvest season anyway; they lived on our farm from the sweet cherries of June thru the crisp apples of October. Eddie was always there, too. One day that summer, Dayna and I sat under an apple tree – fruit‐laden branches brushing the ground – and we talked of what we wanted to be when we grew up. I wanted to be a singer. Dayna wanted to own her own restaurant.

Then, Eddie’s dull and dusty boots moved past the skirt of the tree. With a finger held up to her lips, Dayna whispered hoarsely, Eddie wants to be a rapist. She said rapist as if it were ordinary and benign, like a mechanic or a shopkeeper. That’s what he told me, anyway. A ball of fire swelled and rose from my gut to my throat, as it often did when Eddie was around, and burned into my shoulders, then arms, then legs as I hardened from the inside out. Already, I knew – even if I didn’t yet let myself remember – what she said was true.

Eddie didn’t wait ‘til he grew up. And, that wasn’t the first time I stiffened at the sight of his boots moving under the skirt of a tree. I kept silent, like he told me to. I froze when he looked at me. At night, I awoke, drenched in sweat, dreaming of monsters in the orchard. During the day, I plunged my arms up to my shoulders into the icy water of cherry tanks and watched as they blanched white amidst the crimson waves of cherries swirling from dark to light until I could no longer feel the cold burn, until my skin was numb, and red.

Also appeared in Bear River Review 2018.