Blood Oranges
Illustration: Ansellia Kulikku. My mother used to peel oranges with a butter knife, separating the rind from the plump globe with rhythmic efficiency. Bursts of citric acid would rest on her fingertips and knuckles, looking like ash. When she finished, she’d brandish the vivid peel, a continuous whorl, unbroken. Then she’d remind me what this tiny triumph signified.
“Back home we used to say if you can peel the orange without breaking the rind, you’re gonna get a new dress.”
I have a tattoo of an orange above my right ankle. Or a grapefruit, depending on my mood. It’s a juicy one; three droplets spurt from it. The tattoo artist, Erica, inked me on a muggy summer evening in 2018, three seasons after The Breakup, two months before I changed jobs, several weeks after my thirtieth birthday. We talked about her upcoming trip to Italy with her mother, how long she’d been saving up for tickets, her exhilaration at the prospect of abandoning the bloated city for a little while. I didn’t mention that I’d started teaching myself Italian with a workbook a few years back, then I’d downloaded DuoLingo, and then abandoned the effort altogether. I chewed on my grin as the needle plunged in and out of my skin, Budweiser sweating in my hand, staring at nothing, feeling everything.
An orange. A grapefruit? The tattoo doesn’t need to mean anything, unless I want it to.
Sometimes I miss the rugged indignity of childbirth. I don’t remember the last time I felt so uninhibited, so untethered from shame. Naked in the garden, and I didn’t give a shit. I was barely aware of the two a.m. Uber ride, the check-in process, the conversation with
