Please Follow My Instructions ( For This You Will Need a Blood Orange)

i)

There is a blood orange on the table but it is not for eating. Citrus sinensis.

Blood oranges are the result of a spontaneous genetic mutation.

Your mother – before her heart stopped - stored blood oranges in the fridge. Liked them with a chill. She would use her broad thumb to gently apply pressure to the thick skin to puncture it down to the fruit.  

One piece for you, one piece for your sister, one for mammy.  

One piece for you, one piece for your sister, one for mammy.

If you were to peel this orange you would say, by default, one piece for you, one piece for your sister, one for mammy. It always happens.

Your mother taught you many things using one or two oranges as a prop:

• How to put a bra on without using a mirror
• That implantation bleeding happens when the fertilized egg attaches to the lining of the uterus.
• The art of undressing an orange requires much patience.

Here, blood oranges are a winter fruit but back then, you only ever remember eating them in summer. Memories are almost always in sepia, and outside. You ate them like red hearts on the veranda, your sister pretending to lick menstrual juice from her wrists.

At peak ripeness the flesh is vermillion and tart.

Uniquely jammy and bitter, this fruit in mythology represents matters of the womb.

The blood orange has several blond cousins.

The white pith of a blood orange is thicker than many navel orange varieties.

You must not eat this spherical fruit.

Gently pull back the pithy layer, sniffing deeply every time you rip a piece of peel away. Feel the bitch of the juice sting at your nail bed.

You can smell the orange, but you must not put a single segment of it to your lips.

The trouble with blood oranges is that the intense labour of the hands feels disproportionate to the size of the emerging fruit.  

One weekend you went out in your sister’s new dress without asking and your mother said you can peel your own flipping orange.

Blood oranges have a lip split bloodiness to them with all the antiquity of fine leather. Hold the orange as though it is something vintage against your mouth.  

When you salivate, swallow it.

In your mother’s hospice last week, she asked if you or your sister could bring her a blood orange.

Blood oranges are hard to get hold of out of season.

The blood orange sat there for three days until the skin became loose.  

Your mother said the blood orange was a spectacle to behold and in her haste for last things, had forgotten she could no longer chew.

In Luke Kennard’s Notes on the Sonnets there is a line which says: the best oranges are hard to peel. Your mother would have said blood oranges are the best bleeding fruit there is.

You haven’t met Luke Kennard to ask him, but you strongly suspect he is referring to blood oranges.

ii)

There is a blood orange on the table and it is definitively for eating. Citrus sinensis.

This orange has been through a major separation and spent time in a wire-bound box, a fruit crate made of corrugated board and subdivided into a box titled Peel and Pulp Red to be held by you.  

The colour of peel is not necessarily a good indicator of ripeness, but its surface gloss is.

This orange is glossy.

Hold the orange. Winterly and orbital.  

You really like to hold a blood orange. In your palms. Count its pores. Feel its charge. A precise therapeutic weight. You don’t care much for apples. No. Good god but you like your oranges!  Orange mad, you are. There is an entire and complex narrative inside every blood orange. Fireside stories. Coral flair. Rocket fire. Moroccan flame. Brick Red. Raspberry bellini. Pepper Red. What will be your story? Open the orange and let your fucking story out.

Score around the entire circumference of the blood orange using a knife, beginning at the top of the fruit. Quarter turn the fruit in your hand and score it around the circumference again, making four equal sections.

Shimmy the pointy end of the knife under the skin between the pith and fruit of the orange, slide it down to easily peel back the rind.

Slice off the top ¼ inch of the peel to create a flat surface. Turn the fruit onto this side so that the blood orange will not roll away. Beginning at the top of the orange and slicing carefully, pare away the peel by cutting around the fruit to remove all visible pith.

You are salivating like Nigella Lawson does when she massages fruit.

Make that Velcro sound when you thumb open the orange.

Take a little boat of orange. A segment. Bite. Incisor ripping through membrane. There are men on the tip of your tongue. So many of them. You have to unpeel one from the back of your throat just to make room for air. Benjamin. Daniel. Thomas. One you referred to as Tone. One of them tastes very bitter. It is the one who taught you how to eat spaghetti. Grace the fork, you cack handed leftie. 1997. Whitby Bay. You listened to trance until there were gargoyles in the guest room curtains. Supper, he hand fed you chips from the paper. Shared the same glass.  

Hold another segment in your right hand and make a closed fist so that your fingernails are digging hard into your palm and then: squeeze. Feel redness dripping down your fingers, and your insides all buttering up, and then, put the wet fingers in your wet mouth.  

Suck.

Taste the eroticism. Chew at flesh. This orange going down your throat is like being unbuttoned. Or unbuttoning someone. This orange is all the angles bird flight makes across cold cream skies, a piano, the weight of the silence inside a cathedral, sandstone against a bare back, the indentations socks leave. This orange is a deep purple kiss with all those tiny pauses in between when two mouths are gasp open, but the lips don’t touch.