Apricot tree that die of fierce temperature

 Joanne appeared in the bright morning. The temperature of the sun was very much visualized on her light pink face that was scattered with a blush. The white dress she wore hung loosely about her like a brown fallen leaf on a ripe apple, whipped by the air that had already been whipped by the heat-winds that made her look shaky even though she was not at altitude. The temperature was a violent torture, the environment twisted and distorted by it like folding a piece of soft iron, as if refracted through water. Rusty sunlight dripped cold blood, slowly running down Joanne's cheeks. These freckles, as they were called, solidified on her face, made into a halo by the light, floating randomly. Joanne grabbed my arm-her fingers were like a thin bundle of crayons, between the cold temperatures of love and death. Her hair was always fluffy, as if it were the tail of a gray squirrel, blazing hot at the moment from the brutal summer sun, and at the same time spread out in front of me from the proximity of its owner's head to another human being like some kind of grotesque ornamentation of tribal garb. Joanne's flesh-colored lips opened and closed like a fish's breath, and her voice was slowly crushed by the light, as if she were acting out a black-and-white mime. As she approached, I heard her say, 'Walk me to the apricot trees.'

I don't know how to ride a bicycle, so Joanne walks with me on the sticky asphalt road. The smell in the air belongs to a natural, haphazard mix —the heat has contributed to it. This scent of wilderness is not a rule, but on the whole, it is much superior to the perfumers in the perfume stores. As we walked through the hybrid thicket of berries, dandelions and many, many stray wildflowers, with the mulch growing haphazardly behind us, climbing over wire and wooden hedges in open-mouthed demonstration, and the tiny spikes on the branches screeching regardless, Joanne smiled and raised the corners of her mouth as soon as she heard it-she wasn't the sort of person who was particularly well suited to smiling, and a smile rather made herface look hideously stiff, like a frozen specimen of gray fox.

Simplicity was an art, but Joanne instead took a liking to the opposite of that art. She was passionate about stews, incongruously colored wool socks, and light scattering, and so at the moment she knelt down to pick out a flower from the clump of natural hybrids, the white hemline draping down to the grass, tinged with a starry brown. There is no river along the edge of the bush, so I guessed that the thin, soft stems of grass were still dependent on the occasional rainfall, and crouched down to watch Joanne weave a Frankenstein-style wreath. Joanne wasn't crafty; she was just curious about Ophelia's death. So the blood and water from those grassy branches ran sloppily over her slender fingers, bringing the scent of earth and vegetation breath to her hands. She ended up just haphazardly hitching the various plants together like a chowder stew, barely allowing the crown to hang loosely on her arm.

The forest's welcoming rite of passage cascaded as we stepped from the dying hayfield into the overlapping, sheltering foliage. The woods show a youthful aging, like the shriveled and stretched palms of a dehydrated young man. Here you can observe the cycle of biological life, the leaves trying to grow and dying. Joanne planted cherries, peaches, and pomegranates here last year, which she says are representative of human life. Now they are ripened by the hot light, their sweet scent ripening in the hot sun. I accompanied Joanne in planting an apricot tree and have not paid much attention to it since, even in a kind of exile, apricots have no special meaning for me, and I only have vague memories of their sap being as thick as liquid glue and their etymology from the Arabic language.

Despite not being planted by her own hands, Joanne still holds that apricot tree in the utmost love. I said that the apricot tree is weak and thin, the branches are like a terminal patient without a doctor, the flowers are crooked, falling to the ground like a pile of torn confetti, but also as if a not very funny stand-up comedian, embarrassed to stand on the stage, unable to speak. I asked Joanne: Why do you love her?

I told her I didn't believe it, yet she still insisted that she loved it. I turned a deaf ear to her jokes and wove my way through the carcasses of leaves and the newborns of the grass, finally finding the almond tree at the end of the trail. Its bark had sizzled and exploded open, and its branches were as straight and protruding as the ghastly white femur of a broken leg. It had died from the violent temperatures, and the fruit had tumbled woefully to the ground, worn to death by the withered yellow hay and the newborn, verdant young grasses. The rind was cracked like a human hand that had labored too long, and the flesh was oxidized to a darker color, turned inside out as if it were a piece of popcorn that had fallen under a chair, or as if it were a gruesome murder. Because of the heat, the apricot's scent became sweetly vile, as vertiginous as an overturned honey pot-it was a relic of summer's death.

I pointed to the ripe apricots and told Joanne that they were my body, whereupon she plucked one from a thin dying branch and consumed it, the juice spilling out from between her teeth and lips as if cleansing for a guillotine. Joanne's eyes were bright in a way that was not self-same, her lyre-like ribs flared under the hem of her skirt, and the flush on her face intensified as if it were a patch of gaudy pinch marks. I thought she would weep, but she only mutely put on the crown of flowers she had woven for me. She crowned me under a flat, deflated apricot tree, not knowing whether she wanted me to be Napoleon or Ophelia.

No one wanted to hold a funeral for an apricot tree, so we walked casually through the afternoon and closed our eyes in silence for the apricot under another tree, resting on the roots that stormed the ground. The scent of plant hybrids brushed against Joanne's skirt as she talked to me about the overabundance of landscapes, without logic, as if she were just trying to squeeze the words out of her small intestine through communication: she told me about the children who run around on the grass in early spring, about how they look like brightly colored fruit and vegetable juices with beads of water in the juicer being churned up like a vortex and disappearing into a jungle of old and newgreenery; she told me about the crowds that look like a pale, frothytide, rising and receding on the gray-black highway in the evening; she told how the moon died, eerily reduced to a white pepper grain in the slimy universe; she talked of the birth of thunderstorms and the multiplication of rivers, and then extended it to how ice-cream went into heatstroke shock, and finally puddled on the ground in the form of a shallow, man-made lake. Then she recalled again the apricot tree that had died a horrible death from the violent temperatures, and remembered the stump of the golden apricot pierced by the newborn green grass, as if it were a chapter of ragged poetry torn in two from it. Joanne brought her head close to mine, muttering complaints about the violence of summer. Her long, fluffy, soft flaxen hair, tainted with the sweet smell of surly pulp in the migratory flow of air, is now woven with my shorter locks as if it were a piece of mottled wool that had been half-unraveled. Joanne's flesh-colored lips pressed against my ear, exhaling icily; she said she loved me like a sob, played haphazardly over the posthumous sounds of summer death.

The heat is an inevitable mutilation of the fruit, and humans are not immune to it, avoiding death only because of the pliability of their skin. I thought of Joanne's appearance at the boiling of the blood in her face in the early morning, and of the red pomegranate I had seen cracked open one day on the withered grass-its child had died of the same unknown cause as it, limp and limp on the ground, left to the brutal heat to crush it into a skin, to be dried out and mummified into a shriveled mass.

Joanne once told me that the pomegranate was her body. She longed for an Ophelia-like death, throwing the pomegranate's shell into the water, the dead branches as a tiara, the fallen flowers as a bodice, pulled under by brittle watercresses and nibbled by fish. Joanne hummed a Danish ballad on her lips, and then sang another one, "Green Sleeves," because Ann Boleyn had died by beheading. She held up a handful of pomegranates reverently and told me she wished she could dissolve in my stomach acid. She said the pomegranate seeds were her heart and added that she wished to be sliced open and swallowed by my teeth. The pomegranate seeds leave an icy mark on mythroat, reminiscent of a jellyfish's tentacles. Her hand is only warm enough to touch melt a block of ice, and she offers me her complete love at this moment-her love colder than death and too hot to beat between my teeth. The bright red liquid rolls compulsively down my throat, causing the reflex mechanism to turn on subconsciously, like a starving and extremely hygienic person confronted with a loaf of bread gnawed by a rat, inedible and difficult to discard. I say her love is too full, she says mine is full of holes-perhaps our bodies should be exchanged for each other. It probably wouldn't make much difference if her flesh were rotten and I fell apart at the first blow.

I opened my eyes just in time to meet Joanne's eyes, which had been staring at me, her vision flowing like a liquid that eventually evaporated into a clear vapor. So I said I loved her like a sigh, silenced and burned out on a summer apricot tree.