A Rare Moment of Loquat

Catherine sits cross-legged in the backyard under her mother’s loquat tree, eating its fruit and talking to Jack, her big brother’s best friend, who is just going into his sophomore year of high school as she is entering her freshman year. He’s telling her about what teachers to avoid even though she doesn’t get to choose who her teachers will be, so she’s only half-listening to his words, concentrating more on the music of his voice as they wait for her brother to come back outside.

She puts a loquat between her lips and presses down on its flesh, the softness and smoothness of the skin and the meat, and she wonders if this is what a kiss feels like. He says, “You know if anything goes wrong, you can always come to me. I’ll help if I can.” He narrows his eyes as if this is a wise thing to say, and she half wants to laugh at him. Instead, she palms the fruit and crawls over to him on her hands and knees.

Without planning or thinking about it, she leans forward, arching her back and stretching her neck. She kisses him. She closes her eyes because that’s what people on television do, and she exhales slowly into his mouth.

She thinks for a quarter of a second about all that is coming, college, marriage, children, all of that chaos, how hard it will be and how beautiful too. When the kiss is done, she falls back on her haunches. He’s blushing. He says, “Your breath is sweet.”

A kiss, she decides, is like a loquat. A kiss is gentle and firm. A kiss, she decides, can fill you up and silence you. She says, “Yours is too.”

John Brantingham writes: 

I am the first poet laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park, and my work has been featured in hundreds of magazines and in Writer’s Almanac and The Best Small Fictions 2016. I have eleven books of poetry and fiction including Crossing the High Sierra and California Continuum: Volume One. I teach at Mt. San Antonio College.