The Alchemical Banana
“Because bugs live in the bottom, that’s why!”
Every time I catch my husband staring at me askew, one eyebrow slightly cocked in suspicious interest, I want to shout these words and insist with clenched fingers how very true they are. Bugs live in the bottom. I have a fondness for bananas, for the sweet pale pulp and the simian actions of peeling their skins away, but I absolutely refuse to eat the last inch, where the dark pith pulls from the silky flesh to leave a divot. That little bellybutton is the dark sanctuary of germs.
“It’s a waste,” he says. “Here, give it to me. I’ll eat it.”
But I won’t let him. That’s how deeply my love runs for him. That last bite of banana is infested with pestilence, invisible to the naked eye but swarming beyond the limits of human perception – minuscule paramecium, multilegged centipedes, glossy ants too tiny to squish. I imagine the pasty fruit riddled with tunnels, the highways and byways for thousands of Lilliputian mites, nibbling away and constructing labyrinths and working slowly up the curved marrow. They are born in the dark medulla, like homunculi, out of nothing. They are the spirits of putrefaction, toiling under the golden, sun-kissed rind to turn its innards to mush, to feast on the fruit that distilled them, and scurrying hither and yon with steps too small to see.
Little bugs, black and burnished, live in the pith. They are bad to eat. It is one of the earliest things my mother told me, so it must be true.
“You’re not throwing it out, are you?” he asks in an incredulous tone. “You’re thirty years old! You don’t really believe that story about the bugs?”
My logical self does not. How could I be so silly, so irrational, so ridiculously vigilant? My mother probably mentioned the presence of germs in passing, unaware of the magnitude to which my imagination would carry her words. The bottom inch of a banana is no different from the top inch. I know as well as the next adult that if I were to peel the fruit from the opposite direction, holding the stem in my fist and using a knife to pare open the brown button at its base, this banana would taste exactly the same.
But my heart tells a different tale. If I dared to eat that last morsel, it would turn sour and sulphurous in my mouth, and the tropical sweetness would become the musky flavor of millipedes scarpering over my tongue. Do not eat the base of the banana, for germs live there. All the imperfections have settled to the nadir, stewed together and fermented, grown sentient and begun their ascent into the sublime fruit. For thirty years this ritual has been enacted and these rules of nourishment have been followed, and with every banana eaten I have reinforced the validity of my mother’s caution.
Out it goes, into the trash, the flaccid limbs of the yellow rind and the bottom nub of the banana, bearing its cargo of microscopic vermin eager to infest the shadowy hollows of my own pulpy core.
– Kim Bannerman is a freelance writer currently living on Vancouver Island, and she invites you to check out www.kbannerman.com for a list of her novels, short stories and articles. She stands by her claim that her office isn't messy but is, in fact, organized using a method too complex and byzantine to explain.
