desert(ed) fruit

by JM Cox

image source unknown

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Dates are a holy fruit, mentioned in the Qur’an twenty two times, agent of health, aide to pregnancy, eat seven of them in the morning and your body will be protected from poisons and magic.

I too could mention dates twenty two times, most likely more, in a single dialogue, elucidating as to the simple pleasure they grant, a prewriting snack, served with tea, a topping in summer kale salads, elaborating, whether to a greedy customer or a curious friend, on the dates we serve at work, with lemon filling, coconut cream, tahini, pistachios, sea salt,… a hint of mint (?) Just the date is enough, but I won’t complain about the rest.

I steal dates from my other job, stole I should say, having more time to scurry away while barbacking than my current state of bartending. To tend is to be present, like the desert sun. I steal them, still, from the walk-in downstairs, creeping, head bent, back arched, beneath the building, into the cold, struggling for cucumbers or tarragon or whatever garnish is missing. The dates rest, off to the side, and sneakily, though it is a task of tetris, rearranging the cartons and containers, I’d be caught with a glance, I grab two, maybe three, putting them bare in my pocket, careless of the caramel residue that will linger. They are worth it every time.

…

What I would fail to bring up in just such a dialogue is exactly what I have refused to mention yet, to anyone. Hardly myself.

:a box of dates from the bodega—small, dry, texturally off, but still sweet—cheaper too;

I’m halfway through the box, halfway through the date, I look at what I’m eating, inside, nearly blowing in the wind, shaken awake by the breach of light, the sweethome masticated, a maggot writhes. I imagine it screaming, yelling at me. I’ve always been terrified of maggots. They appear large in my mind, this one is not even the length of a pinky nail, more thin than clipped keratin cliffs. If I were to draw it with black pen, I couldn’t leave its porous body open, wouldn’t be able to portray its paste. It must’ve been a baby. Sweettooth. It trembles due to sugar rush. It cries because it is selfish. It doesn’t know any better.

I refused to believe it.

I threw the date away.

The box too.

…

I hesitate, now, with bodega fruits and vegetables. The box was packaged, sealed, it was in my cabinet for less than three days, it wasn’t expired, the dates were dry, and dry and dry and small and off, but still sweet.

…

Sugar preserves. It ferments. It doesn’t ruin.

It’s not supposed to at least.

I want the holybody of the holyfruit. I want the unnaturally natural. The desert candy.

I don’t want it invaded by the selfish hungry growing child maggot.

…

I hesitate. I stutter.

I consume.

…

Everyone has a date.

You have an onion.

I always thought you were affected by its flesh, a rotted bulb, squishy in your hand, the molting skin, the harassing, tearjerking scent. I imagined reaching into a bag, searching, searching to grab, grasping gripping ripping through, into the wet onion, the wet onion stains the fingers, burrows beneath the nails, the purple residue, the purple residue smells sour.

I thought you touched the gelatinous crisp of onion, but you ate it. You don’t like to throw food away after all, don’t like to waste a single bite. You wanted to use the onion, it would be fine, after rinsing, cooking, you tasted rot.

…

“I’m thinking about the onion,” you say.

My mouth shrinks. I nod.

You don’t realize how much I understand. I haven’t told you about the date. And I still eat the

onion. I encourage you to do the same, to work past it, but here I am hiding the onion, beneath

pasta sauce and powders, aside peppers and fake meat, letting them crunch or cooking them

until they’re loose as ribbons, I’m hiding the onion I say to embrace.

I eat my dates, refuse to think—

I bet the maggot would be crunchy and soft and warm like an onion.

…

Your act of refusal, and disgust, is more an act of acceptance than anything I have done. You recognize the onion, you think of it against the tongue, the sides of the mouth, one knows how a bad taste lingers, sticks to the nose, the clothes, clings and clings and clings to the back of the throat, the interior cheek, the soft palate, pools across the floor. The way it refuses to leave…

I deny the maggot, and thus I deny the date,

and thus I deny myself.

…

In Le Livre de Promethea, Cixous writes:

“and as for me, is it easier to write hell than sandwiches? The thing is that putting a sandwich into a text requires the art of a diamond setter. The commonest element becomes the rarest for someone who works paper…. How can one convey the depths of the secret magic of fat red radishes?… I still don’t know if it is easier to measure myself against God or against radishes.”

Writing hell is surely easier. It comes with its own secret magic. I need imbue it with nothing. That elusive, illusive, interior turned out. The maggot made visible inside.

…

As for the date, the date I put in summer kale salads, alongside apples tempeh and avocado, laced and leaden with hemp seed, drizzled with balsamic vinaigrette—I could never write its common form, could never carry on about the way the fibrous fat both splinters and oozes between the teeth, filaments fitting and filming across protruded denuded bone, sugar sticking to fingers and those fingers sticking together and that sugar spreading to everything that is touched, making its presence known, as though sweetness itself is the infestation…

To write the date I must write it into hell.

I must deny all that it is.

Only here, in this denial, do I begin to taste, do I begin to feel something worm between my teeth, thrash on my tongue, something fleshy again, fleshy and vocal, crying angry jealous selfish upset abject—the undignified object—only here, in contact, with this falsity, this fantasy, do I begin to feel something close <closer> to real.

…

And as for me, I wouldn’t dare measure myself against the date. I’m more like the maggot—

hungry sweettooth child, nauseous and screaming, my masticated world.

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JM Cox is a writer from Louisville, Ky. They received an MFA from Long Island University, and their work has appeared in online journals by GUM and Archway Editions. Their debut novel Apotheosis is forthcoming with Crop Circle Press in Winter 2026.