The Pear

“In the beginning was the Heaven and the Earth. And the Earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Her words still rang in my ears; the bittersweet taste of pear lingering on my lips assured me last night had not been a dream. “How would you describe the world?” she had asked me, as she tucked the money into her little material pouch. It was something of a ritual; every meeting began this way — pay first; fuck after. “What kind of question is that?” I asked as I started to unbutton my shirt. “Normal, I guess?” I didn’t quite understand. “You don’t find it kind of dark… and hopeless?” she retorted. “Dark?” I had never considered this, it was as I had always known it to be.

My name is Mada, I’m a lonely man; the only man, who knows the story of humankind inverted. The world, has always been this way, chaotic, cruel; an utterly vulgar place. Our world has been sculpted from the hands of evil, and no one has ever questioned this assumption, that is, until her — Ivy. You know Ivy, everyone has an Ivy. She is the woman I go to, to empty my thoughts. I lost track of my purpose, if I ever had one, and wait for the night to meet my needs, where I find her at downtown’s local brothel — The Pear. That’s not its real name, the sign had been removed years ago, we just called it The Pear because of the old pear tree that lived out the front. For all we know it’s been there longer than time itself. They don’t give receipts here, the transactions are unknown; the other end is always the same, anonymous dirty paradise.

“I’ve stopped wishing for better days. I often catch myself begging for peace amongst my thoughts, but that’s not really achievable in this loathsome world,” she’s saying things again, things that I can’t quite follow, especially as I’m only half listening. She’s running her fingers along my chest and a pugnacious feeling dominates my senses. Deprivation has become my condition and her touch is a way of unsealing my dirty skin. I don’t need to explain, you won’t understand my ways; my acts. Brutality is a way of survival, a means to an end, not that there are many endings around here.

“I find myself handling the beginnings really well, everyday a new beginning, beginning after beginning, breath after breath, silver coin after silver coin,” I hear myself saying, my mouth kept going. “I don’t know if I’ve ever told you what I do for work? It’s fairly conventional. After you, I visit the cemetery to collect all the flowers that people have left on the tomb stones.” I hesitate, not knowing if she’s interested, but it’s not as if she has job of the year. Her fingers don’t flinch, so I continue. “I do this to resell them at the market.” “So you’re a florist? Just a dodgy florist?” She concludes. “Dodgy? What’s dodgy about that? You keep talking about things as if you know something that the rest of us don’t?” My mind wanders to the beginning of my days. They all start with me removing a page from the calendar she gifted to me, I do this to read the little notes written at the back. I suddenly recall this morning’s ambiguous one —“Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith; be courageous; be strong. Do everything in love.” I had no idea what it meant.

The sound of her voice brought me back. “There is something I know, I tried to share it with you through the calendar,” she was so collected, so calm, even though it seemed as if she were about to confess an illicit secret. “Darkness is not the way of the world, it was not how it was created, it’s just that we’ve known it to be this way for so long that we are completely blinded. We continue to give substance to the shadows instead of looking towards the light. Feeding our hate and pain and anger, instead of nourishing and nurturing the good within us. For a long time I was overcome by a sensation of hunger. I was hungry, but nothing would fill my appetite, I was searching for answers to questions I didn’t even know to ask. And then one day I had run out of why’s and reason’s and was met by a pure revelation. Does that make any sense?”

It did not, but it didn’t matter. The hour was up and I felt uneasy. I was hyper-aware that I couldn't un-hear the words she had just spoken and a mighty energy hung in the air. I stumbled out of the room, feeling semi-intoxicated and suddenly famished, like the hunger she had earlier described. It was as if her fingers tracing my chest had reached in into my stomach and emptied it. I was compelled to rip a pear off the old tree on my way out. I bit in hard, her words ringing in my ears. And with that first bite, my eyes were seeing new things. I didn’t go to the cemetery, I went straight home, immediately falling into a deep sleep…

As I woke up the first thing I noticed was the blinding light flooding in through my window. I’d never experienced such a thing before. I kept gnawing at my lips, searching for the pear’s sticky residue, my mind obsessively replaying last night’s events. My name is Mada, I’m a lonely man; the only man, who knows the story of humankind inverted. And I now find myself with the unbearable duty to pass the story along.