Peeling Grapes

Ander was 12 years old the first time he ate a grape with the skin still on. His grandmother (whom he'd  only just met) sat him down in her living room (which he'd now seen for the very first time) and handed him a glass water and a bag of white grapes (which were green, not white). They were still wet from the quick rinse they'd been given, still attached to the slimy brown stalks that made him think of dirty, fallen branches. And they still had the skin on.

Ander wasn't hungry. Ander felt sick. He felt as though his insides had been replaced with the English Channel. Cold, grey-green, choppy and nauseous. His intestines swimming around like skinless sea snakes. But his new old grandmother was sitting opposite him on a new old armchair in the new old living room, watching him. And he didn't want her to talk to him because he didn't have anything to say to her, so he pulled a grape from its branched bunched brethren, and popped it into his mouth.

The skinny grape felt odd against his tongue. It pushed hard back as he rolled it around his mouth, like a green glass marble. He pushed his teeth into it and shuddered at the bitterness as its skin burst open. A taste he wasn't used to. Like sudden, unexpected sadness. The kind that came all at once like a summer storm, then lingered afterwards, in big sad puddles, lying there for days on end. Ander felt like a big sad puddle.

Grapes without skin aren't as hard to bite into. And they're not bitter. His mother used to peel his grapes for him, one by one, and serve them to him in a sky-blue bowl. He never asked her to. He didn't even realise grapes had skin, not until he was much older. Even then he wasn't sure whether the skin was to be eaten or not. His mother just peeled his grapes for him. It must have been because she loved him. But perhaps it had a little something to do with the fact that she was sick.

His new old grandma brought the white grapes in a bag to her hospital bed. And when his mother died, she brought them home again, and brought Ander with her. And she didn't peel them, or put them in a little sky-blue bowl. She just placed the dripping bag before him on the coffee table. He asked her why she hadn't peeled them. She sighed and said, "From now on, Ander, you'll have to peel your grapes yourself."

Ander decided he didn't want to eat grapes any more.