As Diligent as a Monkey Orange

and when he could no longer climb, that’s when he reached the topmost of the top of the smallest and flimsiest tree he ever climbed.

He paused to glower down at the black of her fleecy head & the white of her scalp where her hair parted like a highway. From up here that’s all he could see, a head with two flip-flopped feet tucked beneath it.

She cluttered the view of the highway, which parted her hair, with that of her face when she looked up: identical slanted eyes, upturned nose, a small constricted mouth. That’s his sister alright. But she seemed to be like a bodiless alien from up here.

She looked up impatiently and said, “Pick the fruit already! Come back down! I want to taste it!” 

But now that he’s up here he realizes that he didn’t climb all this way to strip the tree from its’ unique fruit, this Maboque Orange with a hard shell and sunset-colored flesh that looked like a brain.

He didn’t climb merely to pack it under his armpit, or stuff it in his shirt, or hug it in his underwear. He didn’t cut his hands right on its’ cushioning where a mole made him distinguishable.

Nor did he splinter his feet against that rough part of the trunk right there, only to scramble back down like people in everyday life relentlessly do: Hurry, hurry, hurry.

Except they think they’re hurrying up but they’re just accelerating down.

People are oblivious in the fast-moving world when they’re not on this tree.

No. He wasn’t ready to let go of this moment on the Maboque Orange Tree.

He wanted the leaves, and the cool air, and the view, and the monkey business of primitive blood running through his veins.

He wanted to merge with the brainy flesh of this hard-shelled orange, which some people called Maboque and other called Monkey Orange.

He wanted to eat the fruit while he was still on the tree.

He wanted to be there long enough to adapt and figure out how to break its shell open, (probably the best way would be to slam it with one arm against the thin trunk), and devour its flesh for the first time.

He wanted to then only share the fruit with his sister through description.  

He wanted to eat it alone and let the juice dribble down his chin without wiping off the sticky nectar. He thought that’s probably how the Adam from his religion book ate fruits.  

He wanted to spit out some stringy stuff from it that is hard to chew, aiming his spit on his sister’s upturned nose. 

He wanted to be as diligent as this unique Maboque Orange, which someone said only grew in South Africa, but that his neighbor planted here.

So diligent, this fruit! Weighing down the stem it’s hanging on but not yet breaking free from it and falling, lest it gets bruised, or else it explodes.

Hard shell or not, everything is vulnerable from this high up.

Diligent is everything he was not, but everything up here made him everything.

He worked hard to keep his balance. 

One slip,

one snip,

one rip,

one dip,

one flip…

and he would be a goner.

No.

He would stay up here for a while. Watching his sister’s head tapping its’ flip-flopped feet as she wondered what on earth he was thinking about, and why it took him this long to climb back down from the tree.

But then he saw her try to climb up to him, and he couldn’t risk sharing his magic. Besides, he wasn’t positive the tree could hold two monkeys.

He wasn’t sure about much anymore for today.

He yelled, “I’m coming back down! Stay there!”

She obliged and said “Bring the freakin’ fruit!”

And he did. Choosing his underwear as a pocket for it.

He promised himself to climb back up another day, alone, with due diligence.

But he grew up too fast.

And this monkey business on this monkey orange tree, this primitive feeling, this everything that he wasn’t down there…. it was all forgotten between the pages of his homework and the passing of bread on the dinner table and the feel of his mother’s clammy chest that night when she kissed him in bed.

No one knows how such great things come about and just disappear.

There is not enough scientific evidence.

Not enough candidates sharing their experiences.

No software can facilitate deciphering such intricacies of the mind.

No graphs or databases can calculate the stuff of thoughts.

But oh, it never ceases to become a stifled hope, a wonder, a diligent memory that squeezes his eyes into a squint as if its too far to be seen, and a purse of lips because it feels much closer.  

No one will ever know (not even his conscious self), that before each exam, each trial, each meeting, the Maboque Oranges and the diligent way they hung on to their thin twigs until they ripened and elegantly fell, is what will reap his success for the next 80-some years.

Such primitiveness will only sparkle in his subconscious.

But it will be what makes him the ‘everything’ he started to become up there on the tree, a fetus formed in nine minutes, and reborn in just one, among the diligence of the Monkey Oranges.

by Beisan A. AlShafei