Portrait collage by Chad Wys (via Picdit)
Falling Garden by Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger (via The Jealous Curator)
pomegranates
When she was sixteen she had a strange disease. A salivary gland started swelling and hardening and hurting. Then she started spitting little stones. Finally she had a complicated surgery to remove the defective gland which slightly damaged a facial nerve. That’s why, from sixteen on, she only smiled half smiles and she only loved half loves - for her, the two things were intimately connected.
Now that she was alone in her kitchen, cutting into the leathery skin of a pomegranate and making the heart-shaped fleshy rubies crumble to the white plate, she thought:
“This is what my blood would look like if what happened to my gland had instead happened to my heart. Then, whenever I’d cut myself, I would bleed strangely beautiful pomegranate arils. And then the boys would want to suck my knees whenever I fell, my fingers whenever I cut myself cooking and my lips whenever the biting frost of winter made them crack. They would suck the juicy seeds with burning lips, play them with their tongues and finally crush them with a lusty bite.”
