Blushing Purple

It blushes purple until the purple apologizes and fades pink into red. But the purple—that’s assertive. That’s uncommon. That purple causes him to pause, run his thumb over that blushing bruise, and say, “Look at this one.”

She snaps her mouth shut, mutes her fight, not because of the tomato’s unusual shade but his words.

He’d said that before. Was he mocking her now?

Those words. He’d come to meet the woman at the bar stool next to hers, but the open seat was on her right, the other girl on her left, and the confusion caused all three of them to flounder, fumble their flirting, shift cocktail napkins. The paper napkins added to the embarrassment by doing what all damp cocktail napkins know to do—adhere and then disintegrate rather than ever give in and glide to a new position.

The other girl, who had curled her hair and wore black strappy heels, disintegrated and left the restaurant with a sour twist of lips painted a matte red.

Tomato, she thinks now, naming the girl’s lipstick color. He is still holding the obscenely colored tomato, looking intently at it, not her.

Then, they had watched the back of the departing date—a golden zipper stitched straight down a black dress—disappear through the door, and he had turned his attention to her. With one glistening, burgundy nail, she dug a furrow through the napkin mush under her glass. But when she dared look up, her tawny eyes assertive, uncommon, and, she feared possibly wanton, he had said, “Look at this one,” and he had been looking straight in her eyes.

“Do you mind if I take this one?” he asks now, holding the blushing purple tomato in his hand as though cradling the globe of the world.

He is about to depart her world. He has asked permission to take the crepe pan. Yes. The record player. Yes. The cat. No. Finally, apparently, he would like to leave with the heirloom tomato she’d bought at the farmers market and displayed on the kitchen counter. 

He does not ask to take her. She is not sure, if he did ask, if she would answer yes or no.

Instead, she says, “Yes,” hoping he will not trade it for the next, better-looking tomato. Could there even ever be a better looking tomato? Just look at it. It blushes even deeper purple under the couple’s admiring scrutiny.

Then, with a ferociousness she never anticipated, she snatches the tomato from him and bites. Orange blood spurts from the white incision line of her teeth. The purple flesh gashes open. Thin, transparently vulnerable tomato skin flaps against her lips. Pale seeds drip then cling to her chin.

She feels the bite as keenly as if the tomato had been the flesh of his purple-red beating heart.