Blood. That’s all she could see when she walked into the kitchen. The liquid was dripping off the cutting board and onto the floor. ‘Was it a cut finger or something worse?’ She wondered, standing there in her coat — though she’d only left her kids alone for fifteen minutes to run out to the post office. The children knew the ‘home alone rules’ – no knives + no fire – and yet something lay bleeding on the counter and soaking through white paper towels.

She picked at the evidence of injury – the torn scraps of mottled leather skin, the ivory-colored crinoline tissue. She felt the pop of red stains underfoot and then she carefully exposed the remains of a pomegranate. This was an act executed by her youngest ‘don’t-make-mom-mad’ nine-year-old son – he’d tried to fix the mess he’d made and cover it up so she wouldn’t notice. But she did.

The boy had used nothing sharper than the cake-slicer to cut away at the flesh and couldn’t stop himself once he’d discovered the secrets that lay hidden beneath its plain exterior.

She’d bought the pomegranate for her husband as a suggestion, an overture, a talisman — for the life they shared before children, and for the life they live now – the one that exists in the in between of everything else — and before the next day begins. On her knees in the kitchen, she wondered out loud and to the scarlet stains on the floor: ‘How did it all get so beyond us?’

To her, that ruined pomegranate — even in its mangled, butchered state – was still a thing of sensuous beauty – a busted and broken maze of rubies, spilling + staining in surrender. Diamond-seeds lay in pools of crimson juice drying thick from ravage and decay – dark yet sweet…

Dinner had to get made and her husband was due any moment. No real damage had been done even if something felt missing. Life had to be tended to.

The husband checked in on his way home — asking if she needed anything from market. ‘A pomegranate’ she said a little too anxiously. And when he walked in empty handed – she didn’t push it. It wasn’t as if it was essential.

After dinner, the bedtime stories, and the dishes washed, the husband + wife, the he + she, sat quietly. Wine glasses smudged with fingerprints and candle wax dripping on the tablecloth — they spoke gently of the day and of what tomorrow would bring. And in one of those comfortable lulls – he walked over to the cabinet (the one above the fridge that only he could open) and then he reached in and pulled out something for her from above.