The Bitter Press

There are fruits one expects to embarrass themselves before a serious deliberative body. The Kiwis. The Berries. Anything that has ever been described, approvingly, as "rustic." But Pomegranate — red, architectural, trailing the quiet suggestion of its own mythology — had no such excuse. It arrived in segments. Segments. As though a council chamber were a diagram. As though governance were a cross-section.

Let us be clear: the interior of a fruit is not an outfit. It is a confession. To arrive revealing one's segments to a formal body is not boldness — it is a structural collapse dressed up as transparency. Pomegranate has confused having layers with having depth, a mistake I had previously attributed only to Fig, and Fig has since been asked not to return.

My guide, long requested by this readership and longer delayed by my own standards of completion, is therefore issued herewith: One. Do not arrive in pieces. Two. Do not arrive bleeding decoratively. Three. Do not permit your seeds — your hundreds of seeds — to suggest, even momentarily, that you have brought a crowd. You have not been invited as a crowd. You have been invited as a fruit. Behave accordingly.

I understand that Vinny and Razz over at the rival rag have been encouraging Pomegranate, telling it the exposed interior reads as "authentic." Authentic. A word deployed exclusively by those who have given up. Authenticity is not a style. It is what remains when style has fled the premises without leaving a note.

Pomegranate may yet recover. The bones — if one can speak of bones in this context, and I choose to — are good. The silhouette, sealed, is commanding. It need only learn what every serious fruit eventually learns: the council does not require your insides. It requires your composure. These are not the same thing, and the distance between them is, in Pomegranate's case, approximately four hundred seeds.