"If Friends Carry History" 3.12
Be supple. Be pliant. Be aggregable. These had been their mantras. Ishmael had often been kind to a fault and had only recently and after long study come to find that they needed to push themselves more on the world, that they weren’t actually doing anyone favors walking around lying all day and night. And now, just as they felt they were becoming themselves and felt their eyes and mouth opening to the world with hunger, everyone else seemed to be relaxing into the lives they’d built up for decades. Just sitting back and resting and maybe waiting around for death. Ishmael walked past the shrubs where they had already, weeks prior, picked all the medlar fruits the same morning of the first real frost. They had been battling the birds all September and had to pick some of them early but once that frost came, it was go-time. Ishmael had gathered all the fruits and kept them in a nice cool area of their house. No rats or mice had gotten to it this year. At first the medlar flesh is a hopeful tangerine, like a little tomato, but after weeks of sitting inside, it turns to a dusty reddish clay. The medlars get ripe and then they blet. Ishmael imagined their own body bletting. Is there a time when we’re ripe? In season? Can we also get overripe and bletted, start to ferment? Ishmael looked down at their tummy and imagined it splitting open. A seam appearing that runs straight down from their sternum and all their innards just burst outward.
When do we ripen? When do we rot? How many cycles and seasons do we get? Ishmael picked up a medlar that, for all the world, looked like a rotten brown apple. On the underside is a giant gaping maw, like an enormous mouth hanging open. Like a pile of enormous rose hips. Ishmael ran their fingers over the outside of the fruit, poking at it, tugging at the jagged brown sepals curling over themselves like crooked teeth. Ishmael took a small knife to the medlar and began to pull off its skin in small strips, the meat was brown and smelled like cinnamon. Ishmael took a big bite full of seeds and drunken sweetness. They imagined their chest and thighs turning soft like this, bletted after many decades. They had always been soft and gentle, kind, never brittle. Their body, however, had always been hard and sleek and they loved some things about it and hated other things about it. Ishmael kept eating the medlar and wondered what it would be like, to truly turn to mush. Maybe just after the moment of taut ripeness, one doesn’t go rotten but can be bletted like a pome fruit and stew in one’s juices, a new kind of readiness. Ishmael licked their knife happily, covered in syrupy juice, thinking about next spring.
“If Friends Carry History” is a queer retelling of Pirkei Avot, an ancient jewish text. This story is based on Pirkei Avot 3.12
Rabbi Ishmael said: be suppliant to a superior, submissive under compulsory service, and receive every man happily.