How to Cut a Pomegranate

Named a Finalist for the 2022 Summer Short Fiction Prize

POMEGRANATE IS HARD FOR KIDS TO PRONOUNCE. It is difficult to wash the red stains from their fingertips and shirt sleeves. Ma used to call them Chinese apples, buy them once a year in July. There was a technique to slicing them open passed down by her mother. Bisecting cuts on the diagonal. A presentation of seed clusters inside. Like tiny cherry grapes from China. I slice the tendon in my thumb with a paring knife attempting the technique. The kids recoil from the shouting and the blood. Pomegranate sounds like, Poppa Gunna when Brooklyn says it. Chinese apple sounds like a slur coming from The Little Man. The ambulance takes their father away. Their uncle stays to take care of them.

Brooklyn is allergic to many fruits and vegetables so it’s hard to get her eating healthy. She mostly eats Baby Pasta. We call it that as an insult, as a way to provoke a scoop of sauce over her noodles. We tease her. Baby Pasta is plain penne with butter, sometimes with parmesan. If Ma could see this, she’d curse in Italian. Or maybe she’d be happy the baby is eating anything at all. I’ve come to understand this line of thinking. So what if it’s only Baby Pasta.

Some days later it is morning and my brother Jon arrives at the door. Finally Thursday. Thursday is my day of freedom, Jon’s day of connection and family bonding. It works as necessity for the both of us. For me they are a lessening of the pressures of fatherhood, of parenting hour-to-hour. For Jon they are a way to stay plugged into a structure. What better support than family? Who better to knock you out of a funk than a kid? Fresh air helps when feeling overwhelmed. Exercise combats depression. Self reflection is necessary for growth. These mantras move me through the days, but sometime I forget and give into the simple pleasures of fast food and big ticket entertainment. Those can be my favorite Thursdays, but only until they become routine. Three Thursdays of yoga, or hiking, or smoothies, bicycle rides, swims … and then that one Thursday of lethargy and fast food. A money machine on the big screen. A milkshake. An escort. Those cure depression too, but not for quite as long. About as long as it takes for my kids to find the McDonalds bag or the ticket stub and say, Why I No Get Happy Meal. Why U No Take Me to Movie? That comes from the little one. Why You No Take Me to Movie? That hurts. Far worse, The Little Man finding out some of my Thursday misdeeds. Down the line. The fallout.

I am on the proper Thursday schedule this week, a game of pickup basketball at 24 and a kale peanut butter smoothie from Smoothy King. Thirty minutes of reading at King’s Pond and thirty minutes to swing my Weighted Mace in the grass. So enriched I can be there with the sun and the sky above me, only to be suddenly so alarmed. And ashamed. I could be forgetful on Thursday afternoons in this time of .… I am late and there are unnerving texts on my phone from Jon. Kids incensed. They want Dad. iPads dead. By the time I get home they are settled again after the charging of the iPads. Brooklyn is half-asleep on the cushioned coffee table. The Little Man is scrolling a Reddit thread, r/makesmesmile. Say goodbye to Uncle Jon, I tell them. Junior gives Jon a handshake of intricacy and length and then he hugs Jon around the waist. Brooklyn slips into pre-dinner sleep. The worst time to catch some zzz’s.

In the kitchen I’m making a creamy mushroom and brandy sauce for some spaghetti. Two days ago I brought home a fresh loaf of bread from Andie’s Bakery. Still some left. The kids hate mushrooms but I’m feeling earthbound after my lake reading and Weighted Mace routine. The sun on your face is power and inspiration. Mushrooms take the flavor of whatever they’re cooked in. They suck up the oil right away and leave tasty brown burns in the pan. But in time, at high heat, they release their water and the pan gets soaked. No more burning. Saturate and release. The kids don’t even try a bite. The Little Man pretends to eat a scoop or two while he scrolls, just to make me feel better. Brooklyn eats Baby Pasta when she comes-to in a foul mood. Twenty minutes later The Little Man asks if he can have cereal instead. He crushes Cap’n Crunch.

The leftover pound of brandy mushroom spaghetti sits on the counter for the next few hours as I get Brooklyn to bed and The Little Man showered and teeth-brushed. He doesn’t need help exactly but he does require some signaling. Sometimes I have to push him into the bathroom (gently). I have to take the iPad and bargain with him, At least now it will be charged when you get out. I then have to come and get him out of the shower, which once you get him in…And then he fights the teeth-brushing and hair combing. Usually he does a half-ass job and I send him off to bed. I place a single helping of the leftover mushroom brandy spaghetti into a plastic Tupperware for tomorrow’s lunch. The rest I throw out. So many mushrooms in the trash. Not my favorite recipe.

The next day I bring the kids to school and work from home. Later I pick them up from school and shuffle them to a party at Rick and Gail’s. Somewhat mandatory, these neighborhood get togethers. Pizza Fridays. Hell, it’s the summer. Community is good at combating depression (this I remind Jon often). The cure to many addictions lies in a sense of community. I hate Rick and his grandstanding however, and Gail is always rubbing my back too long. It is my turn to make the parental cocktails. I had submitted the idea a week prior (which was protocol) as we enjoyed Gail’s “Gin and Tom..Ick!” It was Portofino and a fancy tonic from the internet. Nothing special. It was also protocol to name your signature cocktail, all the better if it was an inside joke. Tom (of the prior week’s signature cocktail inside joke) was the outcast of the neighborhood. Practically banished. The stories of his tortured life like a novel everyone in the neighborhood had read. I’d publicly agree that he was a deviant, a rage-head and a boozer. Something wrong with him. Secretly I admired him in the stories they told. No-one had seen Tom face-to-face in years. There was only his old black pickup truck coming and going from the driveway. No waves from the driver’s side. His house, somewhat rundown by now, had a pool Tom used to fill with ducks and other local birds. He owned a goat back when, which was misunderstood by the City, several Dobermans, and a garage full of birds in significant homemade cages. Tom and his wife operated as an animal rescue before his wife shot herself with a 12-gauge. Rick would joke that it was Tom who’d done it, or Tom who’d drove her to it. There was another Tom story in particular though, one so sticky in my memory I often dreamed at these parties of being like Tom.

Several years before I moved in, Rick and Tom fell out. Rick didn’t want Tom’s Dobermans shitting on his lawn anymore. It was no longer acceptable for other dogs to roam and defecate on Rick’s lawn. Tom disagreed. Rick placed hands on Tom’s collarbone. There had been drinking. Then the Dobermans jumped on the leash and signaled a bite and total fuck job to Rick’s balls. They only diced the pants, no blood. Tom dragged the dogs back to his place while Rick shouted obscenities. The dogs continued to bark even long after they were home. Tom decided to walk his dogs much later in the night after the altercation. Sometime after Christmas, Rick and Gail walked their Christmas tree to the curb for the garbage men. When Tom saw the tree at the curb he saw his revenge. He quietly dragged the tree back up to Rick’s side door and placed it firmly in the doorway. The next morning, when the tree appeared to Rick outside the door, he thought, I guess I forgot to put the tree out. Three nights later, Rick again dragged the tree to the curb for the garbage men. On the eve of every garbage day for three months, Tom returned the tree to the side door of Rick’s house. And every garbage day Rick dragged the demon tree down again. At times defeated, angry, bemused, sick, scared, righteous. There were tales of Rick’s early morning cries when he discovered the ghost tree again back at his doorstep. How do you return! What have I done to cause this! Why? Eventually Rick was so frustrated he held a small get together at his place and torched the tree in the backyard. He toasted it and cursed it. It light up so fast.

I didn’t have a fancy name for my drink or even the stomach to handle it. With the kids around, and with the hell it brought onto Jon, who needed the heartache? I wanted to use the rest of the brandy I used for cooking the mushrooms, so I made up a cocktail called The Brandy Newman, which was pretty much an Old Fashioned but with Brandy. I had no other connection to it besides I knew Rick and Gail liked to blast “I Love LA” from their home speaker all summer, even though we lived in New York. They had come from LA. It was their defining characteristic. Their identity within the neighborhood. Lovers of Fleetwood Mac and The Sunset Strip, mentions of highways nobody here could identify. They were going to love the cocktail. I wouldn’t stay long, blame it on the kids. Bedtime for the little one.

The morning after the party, Jon knocks on the door. He wipes his nose as I let him in. When Jon is high, I don’t love him as much. Brooklyn can’t tell the difference, but The Little Man stays in his room. The over sentimentality and the dishevel. The darting eyes on his uncle. The greasy matted hair. Everyone else’s fault. Jon’s not so much a danger that I can’t let him in the house. Still, I lean on him, too. It’s not quite him as my third kid. There are still Thursdays. He can still be responsible, but today I can tell this will put us back a month or so. Six weeks until I’d get my Thursdays back. It wasn’t that serious this time. A few of his childhood friends were back home on a stretch and they were doing a bit of binge drinking and drugging like the old days. Mostly cocaine and Xanax, ungodly amounts of alcohol and cigarettes, hundreds of Juul pods. Minor unreported assaults at worst. He smells like piss. His nose runs. Brooklyn goes down for a nap after a large protest. The Little Man emerges only once to use the bathroom and fill his Nalgeen with ice water. Efficient. He says Hi to his uncle but doesn’t go in for their handshake or for a hug around the waste.

Today my brother is rambling and the words he is repeating most are: drop shock. I enjoy a cup of coffee and for Jon some green tea. I ask him, What does drop shock mean? Why must you do this on repeat? He says it’s mostly warn off by now and drop shock happens when you parachute into a land that’s unfamiliar. So foreign to anything your senses have ever observed. A paralysis sets in, the landscape spins. You smell burning. You don’t know where the fuck you are. I offer him more tea and I finish a full pot of the good stuff. Brooklyn is pounding on the door to come out after her nap. I ask Jon if he wants to stay for dinner and sober up some more, but he leaves before Brooklyn makes it down the hall. I do not know for this if I am grateful or aggrieved. Junior joins Brooklyn and I in the living room and asks if we can order-in tonight. I tell him I planned to cook. Brooklyn shouts, McDonalds! The Little Man wants pizza. We compromise on Chinese food, Brooklyn getting screwed. The Little Man plays on his iPad while we wait for the delivery guy. Brooklyn and I play with her ice cream shop toy set. It’s like a tea party but with ice cream. The miniature sprinkles like rainbow ants on the floor. What a delight, a miniature version of a comically tiny food. The doorbell rings and I come to present my cash, but it is Jon coming back to see if the dinner invitation stands. Behind him comes the Chinese food guy. Jon pays him plus a fat tip. I wanted to cook, I say to Jon as he carries the Chinese food into the kitchen.

It’s nice to have two adults and two kids at a dinner table. There is balance and genuine laughter. We don’t have alcohol, but finish all the Poo Poo Platter selections. Almost all the Lo Mein is gone. All that’s left are the plastic wrappers from the fortune cookies. Jon says the fortunes used to be better back in the day. Tonight they say, Everyone has ambition. Tonight they say, It’s a good day to smile. They used to say, I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. They used to say, All things are difficult before they are easy.

Jon stays the night. Him and The Little Man stay up watching a few of the Mission Impossible movies. Jon loves Tom Cruise. The Little Man loves the go go action. Cruise hanging off a plane. Cruise sprinting on a building. Brooklyn and I fall asleep in my bed. There’s an iPad between us. I close her Youtube Kids and open up the History app. I doze to the sound of a wildlife program about the Romanian wilderness. I think about drop shock. I can hear the blasts of foreign mega-cities exploding and Tom Cruise shouting, Get Down. I do not know how late they stay up.

Several duty-filled days later and it’s finally Thursday again, but Jon doesn’t show up for the kids. I try to reach him on his cell but the number is disconnected. Perhaps his bill is unpaid. Perhaps he’s passed out somewhere with a crust in his nose and piss in his pants. Maybe it’s worse. But the thing about addicts is you lose patients over time. Sometimes you wish the fucker was dead so he’d learn his lesson. But what is there to learn after the fact? It is always the same with addiction. Always these conflicting feelings. The Little Man is angrier this time with tears behind his eyes. The tremble of rage and heartache. The thought of being left again. Fuck him, he says. Fuck him, you fucker. Go for your Thursday, Dad. I can watch Brooklyn for an hour. He encourages me to take my personal day. I think of Jon. I think of my son and my daughter. There are times as a father when you don’t know if you are entering a new phase of fatherhood or if you are making a critical mistake. You have to live with that. I say, Why don’t we all go to the park together? But The Little Man refuses, takes a stand now on maturity, wipes his eyes with his Minecraft t-shirt. Resentments grow you up quick. Anger like the best growth spurt. I don’t want to lose his trust. I want to do what is best for him and for us. I agree to go, but only for one hour and only to The Park and back. He knows where to find me if anything goes wrong and plus he can track my exact location from his iPad. Call 911 as your last resort, I tell him, You can do it through an app.

The weather is cooling off now and the leaves can be heard in the breeze and on the asphalt streets. Still they’re mostly green, but you can feel the color change on the way. The park is magnificent at this time of morning. Nobody there save for an Orthodox couple on a park bench. A young wife pushes a baby stroller away from her and then back, rocking their kin around in the sunshine. A lone man is approaching from out of the woods on the walking path. Not uncommon. He looks somewhat disheveled with a long strand of grey hair spilling out from under a winter hat.

I try to read but can’t stick with the material. Sometimes nonfiction invigorates the brain and sometimes it leaves me cold. I kick my shoes off, pull my socks down, and toss them in a pile by my book and my backpack. Out in the grass the sun is strong now. I begin the routine I’ve been practicing. First I swing the Weighted Mace from my hip, drag it above my head, practice the techniques they show you online when you purchase the equipment. The grave digger, the alpine squats, the boom and shake, the cuff straightener. If you perform these motions in a certain order and with muscle dexterity and flexibly it looks like you’re dancing. You dip with the weight on your shoulder. You lunge with it around your back. If you lose yourself in the movements you achieved a form of meditation. A muscle and mind flow state. A higher plane. But I’m not concentrating as I should be and the mace slips from my left hand undergrip. The twenty-pound end of the club cracks me behind the ear and the next thing I know there is a blue jay in a near tree branch and a sunset behind the baseball diamond. Is this drop shock? The surreal feeling between the ears and nothing making sense out of the eye holes. Sound muffed and dull like noise cancelling headphones. I taste penny, which means blood. The blue jay flies from the branch to the bench where the Orthodox couple had been. The sun shrinks, the last of it’s glow recedes behind Hook Mountain. A large mechanical whirring sound as the park lights switch on. It’s hard to move.

Suddenly a man is helping me from the ground, pulling me up by my shoulders. Looks like a good wonk, he says. He’s strong despite his age, despite the wisps of ratty grey hair under the Carhart logo. He holds my shoulders together, sensing my impending fall. You’re bleeding, he tells me. I check the wetness on my upper neck. Looks like a good wonk, he repeats. Let’s get you figured out. He walks me the quarter mile home, through cool asphalt streets. The darkness sets in now and the streetlights struggle to raise the light floor. Several cars pass, but none stop. He’s got me on his arm like I’ve taken an ankle injury during a football game. He’s the bench guy coming out to walk me off. Next we cut through backyards like children, but be it with a more sinister feel as we are grown men. Different implications of a child passing through your backyard than two uneasy men at night. Eventually we pass an overgrown pool, full plant life thriving in the low end. One obese duck still in the middle of the deep side. There are several bird cages and what looks like a feeding system. There’s a rusty wheelbarrow with rocks and dirt inside. We approach the side door to the home. Let’s get you fixed up, the man says.

He brings me inside and despite my blurred vision I get a feel for the desperation right away. The smell and the emptiness, like no guests have entered in some time. Newspaper and dried animal droppings. There are picture frames placed face down on table tops. There are more empty bird cages with only the sawdust bottoms and yellow-stained water still in their feeding tubes. He hands me a wet towel and places a bag of ice on my neck. Hold this here. The cool pressure feels good. He wraps up the gash quickly and assures me it’s not too serious. I’ve seen worse head wounds, he says. He’s breathing heavy now having nearly dragged me a full quarter mile. It hits me where I am. I’m just down the road at Tom’s place. Not so Ick…but definitely the smell of gin somewhere. I remember my kids. I remember Jon. I have to get back to my kids, I tell him. They’re home alone. Can you come with me?

I can hear Randy Newman’s “I Love LA” and smell the burn of lopsided pizza coming from a Hot Stone Fire Grill. Gail waves to me from the deck in her yard and mouthes something I cannot understand. Her expression changes as she sees Tom with his arm under mine, hoisting me the final stretch home. Rick appears then to consent in Gail’s disapproval. The mass of the party huddles in the corner of the deck to watch us pass in the neighborhood. They whisper into their cocktails, some of the men punch each other in the arm as of way of saying, Would you fucking look at that. The Hot Stone Fire Grill churns a delight of enticing pizza smoke into the neighborhood. Tom yells something up to the party but I cannot make out the words with any meaning.

Jon’s car is in the driveway as we approach the house and a small relief comes over my neck wound. I insist Tom come inside and join us for dinner. He tries to refuse but the kids embrace us at the entryway and Jon looks cool behind them in the kitchen. The sounds of the final Mission Impossible film blare from the TV set. I nearly trip over Brooklyn’s ice cream toys. What happened to your head, The Little Man asks and I tell him about the incident. They laugh as they imagine my beloved Weighted Mace turning against me. Brooklyn sits with Tom on the couch, asks him how many scoops of fake ice cream he’d like to stack onto his plastic cone. Three scoops he says. Tree coops, she says and mimes the stacking of ice cream. I give Jon the I thought you were dead look. He shows me shame by way of looking at the floor. I whisper, Thanks for coming through. He hugs me with one arm around the neck. I’ve seen worse, he says of my wound. I leave them in the family room to start off in the kitchen. The soothing metronomic chops of an onion. The splash and relief of olive oil in a hot pan. Soon there is the godly smell of garlic, onion, oil. The comfort of home when something’s cooking. The fizzle of a chicken cutlet. The taste of bread and butter.