fermented ovenbird When a banana is abandoned its heart doesn’t just break, it liquifies. Here at the bottom of the fruit bowl is a forgotten one, barely identifiable, viscous and shrunken, oily and leaking, with a mummified skin, like the bog body I gawped at in a natural history museum when I was twenty-two and mortality was just a dark fairy tale. This banana could be fodder for forensic training. The soup of its undoing is a sickly swamp of fermentation, its floating remains are speckled with fruit fly maggots. It’s like watching the putrid beginning of terrestrial life—all those translucent mouths gorging on rot, waiting impatiently for their evolution, craving the itch of emerging wings and the possibility of flight. When I uncover the sludge of life and death foaming in my fruit bowl, I attack it with soap and hot water and vinegar, gagging a little as I ferry the mess to my compost bin. We say “new life is so beautiful!” What a crock of shit. Life arrives wet and weeping, slick with wax and the memory of our oceanic prologue. Life comes bloody, wrinkled, enraged. It comes creeping, squirming, grasping, gasping. We are no more beautiful than a fresh hatched larva sucking on the sweetness of death. 260822 what's it to you? who go blather from