"The Pear"
The man walked to the farmer’s market shortly after sunup. He bought nothing but a single pear, which he carried home in a paper sack. He placed the pear, still in the paper sack, in the refrigerator. The pear was pushed all the way to the back of the refrigerator, on the second shelf, between the butter and a Tupperware full of week-old stroganoff. The door swung shut, and the tiny bulb blinked off. And all the pear could do was sit, and wait, and get colder.
Through the door floated the muffled acoustics of the man’s day: The throaty gurgling of the percolating coffee. The screeching grate of a chair being pulled out and scooted in. The roll-oll clash, roll-oll hush as the man opened and shut drawers again and again. The swish strik swish of metal on metal as he sharpened each blade in the house. The kuh-lick kuh-lick as he strode about the kitchen and up and down the stairs in his heavy boots, which he was never supposed to wear around the house.
The pear slowly cooled on the refrigerator shelf as the man went about his chores. In the darkness, it incrementally got colder; first the fragile, tender skin, followed by the heartier stem. The dense, grainy flesh took much longer to cool, and it did so slowly.
The center of the pear was still warm as the man pulled open the door and pulled out the Tupperware of stroganoff. The man knocked the pear over as he slid the Tupperware past. The pear lay on its side as the man tore off the lid and opened the microwave, buttons screaming their shrill BEEP BEEP BEEP, followed by the whirrrr-dzuhhhh as the microwave spun slowly into life. As he ate, the man tapped his heavy boots on the hardwood, knocking little bits of dirt onto the floor with every tap of the steel toes. She hated that.
The pear spent the rest of the day on its side, slowly cooling until its center was just as frigid as the tender, green skin. The man settled in his plain, straight-backed chair. It had once been red, but sunlight and the wear of years had faded it to a dry rose color. He leaned forward in it, pulling out his little pocketknife and slowly whittling on a length of birch root. The wet wood shavings fell onto the thick green carpet. That was another thing he was never supposed to do. The shavings never came up, no matter how many times she vacuumed. He liked the feeling of the firm, wet wood falling away under his knife, and he thought there was nothing much better than whittling in his chair.
The seeds of the pear were even cold as the woman’s car pulled into the driveway. The sun was already setting outside, and the sunset was fiery and angry. The man was still whittling as she walked through the door, dropping her keys briskly on the counter. Her words were muffled through the heavy insulation of the refrigerator. She yelled at the man about wearing his boots in the house, about whittling on the carpet, and about leaving his dishes from lunch dirty on the kitchen table.
The man cared about the words about as much as the pear did. He flicked the last piece of loose wood from the end of the birch root. Then he stood up, walked slowly into the kitchen, and drove his sharpened stake into the woman’s throat. She died without making a sound. He let her fall to the ground in a heap then dragged her onto the counter. Through the refrigerator door came the roll-oll clash of the knife drawer. For a time, the man stood and thought, wondering which would be best. Then came the faint clop, clop, clop, for nearly an hour, of a cleaver striking the counter.
The pear had begun to freeze, sitting as it was near the back of the refrigerator where it was coldest. For the next few hours, all that could be heard through the door was the faintest splashing sounds, followed by flush after flush of the toilet.
Finally, the man opened the refrigerator door, wiping his hands in a wad of paper towels. He pulled the paper bag with the pear in it from its shelf. Opening the bag, he drew out the pear. The man wiped a big knife on a different paper towel and cut a big slice out of the thoroughly chilled pear.
It was so juicy.
