A. B. Cooper

Grave Fruit

Providence, Rhode Island.

The Harvest Moon swells Roxbury Russets, flesh crisp and sweet, juice spilling down children's chins as they laugh in the mellow fall sun. The tree has grown year on year, its fine fruit renowned.

In the churchyard next door a family grieves anew: an exhumation before a move. The rhythmic rattle of shovel through leaf and loam punctuated only by a magpie's harsh warning chatter and the wet sucking of cidery windfalls split by blade.

Spade strikes wood; the coffin crumbles - Mourners stumble back…

Fetid air births a mass of twisted roots, its form unmistakable, twisting along vital paths of spine, rib, hand and foot.  

Empty eye sockets, mouth disgorging a woody tongue, their ancestor stares blindly up at clear October skies, his body a living parody of death.

On rotting bones that foreign fruit did feed; its seed the life-after-death force of poor Roger 'Roxbury' Williams.

A. B. Cooper, a moon-blooded nyctophile, is a guest editor at Paper Swans Press, where she’s edited both poetry and flash fiction. Her first novella - Lykke and the Nightbird - is coming soon with Three Drops Press… Days are for dreaming; spin words while the moon shines. Carpe Noctem.