The American pawpaw takes six or seven years to produce fruit. You may wait for the fruit to fall, or you can shake the tree if you’re impatient, or if you doubt the tree’s ability to know when it’s time, which must be the case sometimes since everything is so deeply confused what with the scorching summers, the smashing records. So, you shake and shake because it’s his favorite fruit and the dumb tree is finally ready and how much time does anyone really have, anyway? You hear the backdoor whine open and slam shut but all the pawpaws are down, so you are too busy to acknowledge. Pawpaws taste a little like mango and have small, shiny black pits inside of them. The fruit is so malleable, you can scoop out the meat with a spoon. You hear her calling you but you are gathering them in your shirt and oh my god it’s going to be so amazing when you bring them inside and scoop out the meat and you wonder if you could make pawpaw ice cream out of this and feel super earthy, like you’ve got everything by the balls for once and you’re the one driving. You hear it in her voice, the phone call. The prognosis. A pawpaw slips out of its shirt hammock, and you revel in the act of picking it back up, this little green bomb, about as big as a grenade. But she has the real grenade, doesn’t she? No matter how much life you bring into the house, the call came through, and now she knows. But you know too by the crumbling structure of her voice, the quiet care when she says, What are you doing? And you hold the pawpaws so tightly in their hammock, so safe. The American pawpaw is rich in vitamins A, C, P, K—basically all the letters. The pawpaw is life. If you could just bring them into the house…. It isn’t good. It isn’t good. You knew this wouldn’t be good. You hold them so tightly they all fall out but one, which remains stuck and squished against your rib cage and wrist. You will lose him. Soon, you will lose him. The American pawpaw produces the largest native edible fruit in North America. You let her hug you, and even though the fruit is smashed, you can’t let go of it. It remains between you, permeating your t-shirt, your hands, your fingernails until you don’t know where you end, and it begins.

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EJ Green’s short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Hobart, HAD, Wigleaf, Juked, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and others. They live just outside of Philadelphia with their partner and two cats where they read for Philadelphia Stories, practice martial arts, and try not to kill everything in their veggie garden.