It was happening! Leila's nightmare was about to come true! The thing had finally managed to make its way into her abdomen, coiling around her intestines like a ten-foot viper and setting her pancreas and liver ablaze. She was sure light would soon spring out of her belly button!
Her thoughts went back to that August day in 1995. Lunch was Welsh rarebit with roast potatoes followed by watermelon. Mom recited a Charles Simic poem as she slit its belly open, spilling its juicy blood and exposing the crimson flesh and black pips.
Green Buddhas
On the fruit stand.
We eat the smile.
And spit out the teeth.
Leila was on her third slice when Mom gently smacked her hand away.
"That's enough, sweetheart. You've had plenty of food already.”
Then, she added as an afterthought,” Did you know that if you swallow a watermelon pip, it can do some weird things and even take over your body?"
The image that popped into ten-year-old Leila’s mind was like a scene from a movie she had sneakily watched with her cousin Raymond - a horror called Alien, where a scaly creature laid eggs inside people's bellies, incubated, and burst out of their chests.
She avoided eating watermelon altogether for a while, afraid the same thing might happen to her.
When she was in her teens, entered the age of reason, and decided she wanted to study quantum physics, she realized that her mother's story was just an old wives' tale. But apparently, the ideas our moms inadvertently put into our heads when we are kids tend to come around, and we can’t let them go no matter how hard we try.
Despite her firm knowledge of how things worked in the real world, the fear of the watermelon-induced inter-belly invasion remained in the back of Leila’s mind whenever she ate a slice of that darned fruit. She tried to resort to her understanding of the principles of matter and energy to rationalize her fear. She told herself that the watermelon's juicy sweetness was merely a result of complex chemical reactions and that any notion of it invading her organism was purely irrational. Yet the "but what if…" lingered.
“What if Mom’s cautionary story holds a sinister truth? What if those tiny seeds, once ingested, unleash evil energy within me, slowly but surely devouring me from the inside out?” she thought, promptly forsaking her university training, and putting the rational side of her brain to sleep.
The tray in front of her seemed to mock her, its cold, shiny surface reflecting her growing discomfort. The once-appealing meal, complete with a watermelon rind, now looked repulsive and threatening. She couldn't shake off the feeling that the pip’s electrons had already done a sneaky quantum leap without needing a superconducting electrical circuit and were about to unleash a grotesque transformation within her. The vision of her body transformed into a weird garden of tendrils shooting a blizzard of shimmering photons made her want to cram her fist into her mouth and vomit the offending pips.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we are passing a zone of heavy turbulence. The captain has turned on the fasten the seat belt signs. Please remain seated until further notice."
The flight attendant's voice rang urgent, but nothing compared to the panic dancing a roaring fandango in Leila's gut. She had always been a fearless flyer jetting off to conferences around the world, but the announcement sent shivers down her spine this time. As she settled into her seat, the dance macabre made her think that the worst-case scenario was not engine failure, hijacking, or even a crash but a watermelon performing physics-defying tricks in her stomach!
The turbulence was now tossing the aircraft like a can of sardines someone was trying to tip into a bowl. Around her, passengers gripped their armrests while the overhead lockers rattled, threatening to spill the luggage out. Leila was sure the next movement would split the plane open, and the machine and the passengers would rain down like metal and flesh confetti, accompanied by the sound of shattering glass and screams of terror.
Soon, the inevitable would occur - the fruit would release its energy and take up all space. The belt already pinched her waist. She could almost see her stomach swell like it had been pumped full of helium. The buckle would pop off and smack the passenger next to her square in the face, gauging out his eyes. It was as if she’d downed an entire tube of Lax-a-Day. The pressure was unbearable. She knew she wouldn’t be able to hold it much longer before exploding and dripping blood and tissue all over the aircraft.
It was hard to believe that out of all the weird things that could happen to her, she'd wind up as an involuntary experiment, proving that quantum leaps both in
physics and genetic engineering were not always a welcome step forward. She'd soon become a human incubator for a watermelon!
She squeezed her eyes shut when the violent quaking got harder and harder.
"Miss! Miss!" the flight attendant standing beside her struggled to shake her awake.
"Are you okay? We're experiencing some turbulence, but we'll be through it soon. Just hold on tight and try to stay calm."
And just suddenly, as it had begun, the bloating and the fear of a pip transmuting its energy inside her vanished. She was back in her seat, safely strapped, her flat stomach tucked into her skinny size-8 jeans, the turbulence subsiding.
"I have no idea what I could have named the watermelon infant. Perhaps Dolores… Dolores Beckett, like in the “Quantum Leap” TV series. I can bet it must be excruciatingly painful to give birth to a monster fruit," she chuckled as the loudspeakers spluttered back to life, indicating they were about to land.
—
Polish by birth, a citizen of the world by choice. First story short-listed for the Irish Independent/Hennessy Awards, Ireland, 1996. Since she went back to writing fiction in 2020, more than 80 of her stories, flash fiction and non-fiction, have been accepted for publication. She has recently won 1st prize in the International Human Rights Arts Movement literary contest.