Small Holdings

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SOME PEOPLE OPEN up like flowers; slowly, painstakingly, each petal unfurling, reacting, affirming. Responding, simply, to warmth and to tending.

Other people can be peeled; like a fruit — like an orange or a pomelo — the skin comes off, and underneath is something full and ripe, perfectly segmented, waiting to be apportioned by deft and inquisitive fingers.

Doug was like an egg. A boiled egg. Hard-boiled. He was knocked once, twice, many times, and his shell cracked, and it crumbled, and underneath was something slippery and rubbery and not especially digestible.

If he hadn’t been hard-boiled, he would have dropped from his shell, moist, sloppy, just a mess. In certain respects, in retrospect, that might have been preferable.

I’d been wrong about Doug all along. I’d thought he was an oyster: barnacle-hard outside, abrasive even, but with a vulnerable interior, maybe a pearl in there somewhere, hidden, precious, protected. I also considered at certain points that he might be a beetle. Beetles, it seems, like some other insects, have a skeleton on the outside and the flesh, the soft bits, inside. People are traditionally soft on the outside, and the bones, the frame, the supports are hidden away within layers of skin and fat and muscle. That’s exactly how I am. Soft and yielding, like tripe to the touch.

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