My Mother the Nectarine by Megan Haeuser
“My Mother the Nectarine” is one of three editors’ choice selections for the CRAFT 2024 Flash Prose Prize, guest judged by Meg Pokrass. Our editors chose these pieces as exemplars of the way imaginative ideas and powerful prose can build a sense of otherworldly wonder in flash.
In “My Mother the Nectarine,” Megan Haeuser explores the sprawling complexity of grief, motherhood, life, and death from within a fruit basket. Experimenting with the brevity of flash fiction and inspired by the “simplicity and space” of haiku, Haeuser crafts a powerful piece that consists of one vivid image: the potent, juicy metaphor of the mother as a nectarine. In her author’s note, Haeuser remarks that this text is so “compact that the title became a necessary part of the story, adding the texture, color, and fragility of the nectarine.” This “fruitful” metaphor is lush and laden with sensory familiarity—the thin skin of the stone fruit, the ooze of a bruised peel, the stilted ripening process. Through this image, Haeuser presents the stages of growing, aging, hurting, and healing while maintaining a striking economy of language. Take a bite out of this inventive text, which Megan Haeuser hopes will provide readers with a familiar space in which they can reflect on their grief, their complicated relationships, and their hope for a future that, while bruised, may still taste sweet. —CRAFT
My mother never ripened. When she was young, they bit into her and stopped the natural ripening process. After they’d spit her out, she stayed green until she began to rot. At the end of her life she was wilty around the bite mark, crunchy in the middle, and soft and mushy on the bottom. Sometimes I wonder what she would have been like if she’d been allowed to ripen all the way. I wonder what I would have been like. Would she still be alive? Would we be nestled together in a fruit basket, growing sweet? They didn’t bite into me, but when they noticed her rotting and picked her up to throw her away, they knocked me to the floor. I’ve still got the bruise on my side, but the rest of me is ripening okay. Just don’t press too hard on the tender brown spot. It still hurts sometimes.
MEGAN HAEUSER is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara and has recently relocated from Los Angeles to San Luis Obispo. Her short fiction is forthcoming in Salt Hill Journal, and she has had a play featured in the Fertile Ground Festival of New Works in Portland, Oregon. The writing she is most proud of is a series of short stories for her niece and nephews about a band of cousins with superpowers.
Featured image by Michael Breucker, courtesy of Unsplash.
