“Don't Forget the White”
a short story
Gary Baker, October 2013
“Why do you eat the white part?” She asked, her chin held in curious fingers.
I looked across from my park-side stone bench, the kind that appears as though carved from marble despite being everyday cement, and into the crystalline eyes of an elderly woman in an automatic cart. “Why do I eat the white of the melon?” I responded back, unsure of how to answer.
The real question she should have been asking was: why wouldn't I? or better yet: why didn't everyone else?
But I had always eaten it that way. It had always been the sweet, tangy crimson red first, dribbling down my moistened chin like an ecstatic cannibal with vegetal gore slipping down the corners of my lips, along the crevices made by years of childish smiles, and out over the overhang of my own mandible. It always made my jaw muscles ache with awe each time I bit into it, made my tongue sear with relishing delight as those black and white seeds floated over and beyond the grasp of my ability to bite down on before they, too, slid down my gullet and into a core of happiness.
