Chimera

She often dreams of fruit.

She knows these are dreams because she can taste citrus before she even opens her eyes. The setting is always subject to change— her childhood bedroom, a farmhouse, an abandoned mall. But without fail, she comes to with the taste of lemon on her tongue.

When she rises and surveys her surroundings, she finds fruit in odd places. Wedged between floorboards, or balanced precariously on the headboard of a bed. Once, she woke to a blueberry nestled snug into her navel.

Today, she comes to on a sailboat, docked to a pier overflowing with patrons. Off the mast hangs an unruly tangle of raspberries. She calls out to the figures she sees on land, to no answer, and decides that in this dream, she speaks a language to which no one else knows the response.

She wonders what she might see in her dreams this time. Every time she dreams of fruit, she dreams in surrealisms. Clouds that are firm to the touch, board game pieces that grow to life size. She dreams of Greek gods, of childhood holidays, of blazing suns rising over snow-capped mountains.

But more than anything, she dreams of girls. She dreams of girls, with their lips wrapped around apples, fingers dimpling the flesh, crisp foam dripping down their chins. Girls, splitting pears in half with sharp, sharp knives, and offering her to bite. She dreams of honeydew curves, freckles like strawberry seeds. Wonders, would the dream end if I reached out, and touched?

She sees others, too, but girls are the ones that scare her the most. When she wakes up from those dreams, it’s always with a start, and a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. Her body, like a stone fruit even in waking, roiling in the impossibility of it all.

Even in a dream, she laughs at the thought of telling her mother. Sitting down with her brother, who is slowly growing his father’s stern jaw, and telling him I like girls, too. Unthinkable, undreamable.

From a jumble of fruit rolling around the starboard, she palms a round, red grape. She recognizes the thick, pearly skin as the ones she eats in Beijing, her grandmother’s apartment, piercing a hole through the skin with jutted teeth and sucking the gelatinous middle clean out. The way her uncle, who has grown white hair since the last time she saw him, used to blow air into the hollow peels like balloons.

She feels the urge to squeeze. To crush. She wants to feel pulp spilling out over her knuckles, the pop of flesh giving way under pressure. Instead, she opens her mouth and bites.

Even in the dream, she can immediately taste that it’s gone bad. What initial sweetness came oozing out from the pockets of still-ripe fruit is quickly flooded by a sour, milky squelch. She recoils and moves to spit it out, but finds, in a cold wave of dread, that she can’t— her jaw won’t unclench. Her lips, slicker by the moment with drool and the acrid juice of rotten grapes, will not part. She becomes hyperaware of the incessant grinding motion of her teeth, pulverizing flesh into pearls. Unbearable, grating pressure.

Underneath her feet, the boat begins rocking back and forth, and an unbidden terror rises in her chest. Bile wells up in the back of her throat, threatening to choke her, but in a place between petulance and fear, she refuses to let it spill over. She doesn’t want to throw up. She doesn’t want to be asleep anymore. She doesn’t want to keep waking up to an insatiable hunger and a hazy sense of loss. An unbridled craving for tangerines.

She wonders if she’ll ever stop dreaming of things hopelessly out of her reach. Her uncle, halfway across the world, slowly forgetting how old his funny niece is. Holding hands with a girl on the porch of her childhood home, and waking up before her mother opens the front door. Swallowing cherries, pomegranate seeds. Pushing it down until she can’t feel it anymore.

Kneeling on the wooden deck of the boat, legs sticky with seawater and fruit juice, she looks up and watches as the sky above her seems to quiver once, twice, and then begins to slowly peel away. Beyond the flaking sun, she can make out the fuzzy shadow of her ceiling fan, the faint glow of her bedside lamp. A grape in retrograde. A dream, closing in on itself.