Unstill Life with Mangos

John Wythe White



One morning, reading the paper, she hears a mango fall. An abrupt snap of release, a rustling descent through thick leaves, a thud that sounds too heavy, a bounce, a settling in the underbrush. She walks outside to fetch it. The sun on her face feels strong for so early in the day. The ground is already warm.

Yellow and orange fruit, bright as flame. Before now, she has seen them only in Mexico, much smaller. This one’s as big as a softball but oddly shaped, a roundness radiating from a flattened axis, “oblong” too ordinary a word for such an eccentric variation. Spheroid? Ellipsoid? Ovoid? It looks like a swollen comma.

A thick drop of sap oozes from the broken stem, leaving a shiny trail on the skin, sticky on her fingertips. Up in the tree is a spectacle of mass ripening, mangos in every phase of change, like maple leaves in autumn, turning from dark green to crimson to orange to bananaskin yellow. She remembers a maple tree a few blocks away from her childhood home. Whenever she mentions it, nobody believes her. No one can conceive of a maple tree in Los Angeles, an autumn in Southern California.

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John Wythe White is an Oahu North Shore-based writer of magazine and newspaper journalism, short fiction and drama, and the novel A High and Beautiful Wave. “Unstill Life with Mangos” is from Short-Timers in Paradise, a collection of short stories, essays & a play.

www.johnwythewhite.com

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