Sitting on my desk is the Rose apple and now that I've said its name, I remember if this were two years ago, I would have used 'that' as its pronoun or toed the footsteps of my homies to use the prefix 'local' (and if you're from my town this is just as bad) before the apple. I cannot imagine I did this thing: the denegration of God'sgift with a 'that' like it was worthless.This has been the predicament of the fruit, its namelessness, unsalvaged by how many mouths have fed on its flesh and sapped its sugared waters. Wasn't it a thing to be admired and respected? This fruit, with its glowing smooth rubbery skin and its body, an upturned red-capped mushroom devoid of the burden of a stalk. Do they care to look inside? How God blessed it with juicy cotton and how like a nest it nurtures its young, a brown spherical seed snuggling in all that imperial gossamer? The next time I find by some chance a stranger sauntering to a fruit stand to order one of these, pointing for a 'that thing'.I'll go to him and say: It's called Rose apple. You hold a miracle in your hands, give it a name!"
© I.K Inyang