Okay, I promise my next entry won’t be about death. But as I was typing the last post about the two-sided coin that is love, I remembered a passage from Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! Not my favorite book on the whole, but it had its moments. This being one of them:

I’d fix on The Chief’s raw, rope-burned palms or all the gray hairs collected in his sink, and I’d suffer this terrible side pain that Kiwi said was probably an ulcer and Ossie diagnosed as lovesickness. Or rather a nausea produced by the “black fruit” of love—a terror that sprouted out of your love for someone like rotting oranges on a tree branch. Osceola knew all about this black fruit, she said, because she’d grown it for our mother, our father, Grandpa Sawtooth, even me and Kiwi. Loving a ghost was different, she explained—that kind of love was a bare branch. I pictured this branch curving inside my sister: something leafless and complete, elephantine, like a white tusk. No rot, she was saying, no fruit. You couldn’t lose a ghost to death.

She showed me a diagram in The Spiritist’s Telegraph, part of a chapter entitled “The Corporeal Orchard.” I’ve never forgotten it. It had a punctilious, surgical level of detail, like one of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical sketches—only in this drawing the aortas and ventricles of a human heart burst into flowering trees.

“Gross, Os. You think there’s a rotten fruit stuck inside me?” I touched a rib, horrified but also filling with a sort of dark self-regard.

Kazuo Ishiguro wrote a book about this same topic, called Never Let Me Go. I did love that book on the whole. Some say it’s a dystopian story, and depending on your notion of an oppressor, it is.