Banana peel

Molly Windham

He loves bananas. Believes they cure all ailments. After a night out I’d watch him, with raccoon eyes, devour them one after another. I never liked them. They leave my teeth perpetually dirty and a film in the back of my throat, but I loved him. Seeing him indulge so delightfully in something he needed was enough for me.

I liked it because he looks at me like I’m a banana. He undresses me with the same rash expertise. He tells me, “I want to put all of you in my mouth,” kisses, licks, bites every inch of skin. He always bites me ravenously, like he hopes my flesh will turn to mush in his mouth. Like he wants to eat me until all that’s left is bone and my banana peel.

It’d be easier that way—being a lump of discarded yellow. Because one banana has never been enough for him. He needs to gorge himself to keep his ego full.

Last night, I almost wasn’t a banana anymore. He looked at me like I was evil. I tried to give him every reason to hate me as much as I hate bananas. But behind his feigned look of pain was that same lingering lust, typical. “Don’t do something stupid just because of me,” he says. Don’t let someone else eat my banana. “Can we talk?” he asks. Let me eat you whole. I am nothing but something to be consumed.

I think he was who I felt watching me on my trip. I was crying. Sitting on a dock sheltered by the woods, but I could still feel those eyes on me, looking on in lust at my body. The trees took on the shape of his face, a top lip for the bottom, a nose inches from mine, puppy dog eyes with the same sharp-toothed appetite. Every twist and turn I made to feel undesirable was met with that same ache of him watching, of him eating me. I think he likes it when I cry, honestly. He would’ve really gotten off on that whole experience. I ate strawberries, free of him, but they turned to mold in my mouth. They were infected with a memory of him discarding my peel.

I can see him at the head of the table, double fisting bananas. His mouth overflowing with the filthy, yellow mush. My peel is on the floor. My body is covered in bites. All of me in his mouth like he always wanted. He’s probably got that red gag on me so I can cry, but not speak, so he can force feed me the mush that’s overflowing from his mouth. I’ve lost my appetite. 

Unlike him, my only cure-all is fasting. Usually, it’s involuntary, nerves shot to hell by his ego or my liver by alcohol. I realize now I always sat at that table with my plate full, not touching a thing, while he’d have his great feast. Content to stare on in amazement at the way his lips curved around the flesh. He would ask for the reason behind my fast, take a shallow answer, and shrug. He’d place a banana in my hand and promise it would fix me. He never let my protests against the fruit reach his ears. “Eat the banana.”