Sitting on the floor under the kitchen table behind a chair on wheels a melon, kind of the shape of a football but more round, like a deflated basketball, but not that color, not the color of a football or of a basketball, pigskin. No, yellow, bright yellow, canary yellow. I didn't think canary yellow, but when I bent down to pick up the watermelon under the table behind the chair on wheels, I saw it there. A hard balloon, tap-tap. Not a balloon. Some sort of life in there. Perhaps an egg, but, no; bigger than an ostrich egg. And yellow, bright yellow. What's this?What's what?
This down here, I asked.
Oh, that?
Yeah, this.
That melon?
Yeah. Is that what it is? A melon? A honeydew, I asked. (Yeah, it was about the shape of a honeydew melon.) But I had seen honeydews before; not in a while, and only at the store in the pyramid stacks of fruit. Never in a garden the way I'd seen watermelons and cucumbers and tomatoes. I had never seen a honeydew in its natural habitat. Maybe this was another kind of honeydew, a cousin to the honeydew. Is it a honeyedew?
Oh, no, he said, honeydews are more green. Whitish green.
I know that. I didn't say it out loud, but that's what I was thinking real loud in my head, with a sarcastic tone, as I heaved the oblong very green watermelon up from the dusty corner of the breakfast nook.
What is it, I asked again, as I carefully rolled the watermelon across the table.
He went on, honeydews are pale green inside, lighter at the rind, like a watermelon, you know, except a watermelon is red in the middle and lighter at the rind, pink then white, then green. Unless, of course, if it's a yellowmeat watermelon, which is--
I interrupted with the rest: yellow in the middle.
But he wasn't satisfied; he completed me: Yeah, then lighter at the rind, not so much pink, just white and then green. He stabbed a big knife into the skin of the green freckled fruit before him and slid it across the watermelon; a crackling noise issued forth and then he tugged the two sides apart. Crack! A fresh snapping sound. My tongue watered. I could feel my sinuses engage. A juicy tongue, a tear at the duct in one of my eyes, saliva running down my throat, salty sweet. The inside of this watermelon was ruby red. I figured it would be yellow, the way he chose his words and cracked it open just at that moment. But he wasn't the type to display dramatics of that sort. He was straightforward, simple even. And not easily reigned in.
But this.
What?
This melon?
Down there?
Yeah, this one.
That's a canary melon, he said, and continued cutting the watermelon into little triangles.
