My mommy said I shouldn’t eat the watermelon seeds, that it would hurt if they made a home of my tummy. She’s a little loopy, my mama, and I don’t believe her sometimes, so I ate the seed and it tasted really boring. I swallowed the seed whole and nothing happened, mama.

My mom told me not to eat the watermelon seeds, that, in a few weeks, a small black tear drop floating in my body would hurt once it found a home in my belly. If it claimed my gut, it would throw out the food I tried to eat, greedy of the space, growing and swelling inside me until the button of my worn jeans would no longer snapped shut. She’s a little dramatic, my mom. I ignored fruit-flies swarming the chewed rind left on the counter, its sickly sweet scent swallowing the space of my small apartment.

My mother warned me never to ingest the seeds of a watermelon, that this little black tear drop once wedged into the sweet sponge of the fruit would one day decide the house it made of my torso was no longer its home. It tore its way from my body, strangled the sides of my diaphragm, round after round of reverberating contractions bent me over until the sweet clear liquid flowed from me. Then came the melon, my melon, that once found a home in my body – falling from me in clumps of sickly sweet spongey mush through shaking fingers into an unsuspecting porcelain bowl.
                             She was right, it did hurt.