Annabelle Taghinia
Winter is the pomegranate season. When the weather is cold, they appear on my kitchen counters, ruby and round, rolling between my father’s palm and black granite. He told me, this is the way we used to do it when I was young, as I leaned over the kitchen sink, biting through the red skin until the juice from all those seeds he had crushed up inside came rushing through, laughing as I stained my chin pink. I imagine my father when he was young, staining his chin pink with fresh pomegranate plucked straight off the Mashhad trees. He told me that in the Iran of his childhood, the trees were heavy with fruit that tasted like nothing else, running into your mouth with the sweat of play and the dust off of the streets: fresh, complex flavor. The American fruits never hold a candle; he spits bland strawberries into the sink and grimaces like he’s tasting rot instead of absence.
My father left Iran when he was twelve, on a flight that hesitated to land, circling above San Francisco as he held on to his mother and brother. Not everyone was lucky enough to leave that way, but my father has always been a lucky man. Lucky enough to have known English, lucky enough to have pale skin and ethnic ambiguity, lucky enough to have a good job, a family, success.
What my lucky father can never do is return to Mashhad and roll fresh-picked pomegranates on the dusty pavement. What my lucky father can never do is be twelve years old again, wiping nectar off his chin and laughing as a country fell apart around him. When my father speaks of Iran, gesturing with a mango cheek or drumming his hands against the countertop, a glimmer enters his eye, a wistfulness hesitates around him. My father remembers Iran lodged in time, the dusty streets of his youth perpetual.
Recently, I’ve been practical, sacrificing the drip of juice down my chin to break open the fruit like he taught me and eat the seeds. They last longer. Each time he pulls a pomegranate out of the winter produce: the mealy apples, the hard pears, he asks me first if I would like to drink the juice this time. When I finally agree, I am struck by the time it takes to knead the leathery skin underneath our thumbs until the seeds inside pop without puncturing the fruit, the rush of flavor when I put it to my mouth, the minutes I spend leaning over the sink, squeezing the pomegranate for everything it can give, and the taste when it finally runs dry, like bitter rust and fruit skin, like luck and sticky chins, like the rot of absence.
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Annabelle Taghinia is a junior in high school and spends her free time writing. Her work has been recognized by Scholastic Art and Writing, and has appeared or is forthcoming in BULL, Right Hand Pointing, Eunoia, Yellow Arrow and Levitate.