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The first time Joe tasted a prickly pear was a summery afternoon after cleaning the windows of Sally Buck’s house, and her new boyfriend bought him a small basket of red and yellow fruits that grew in his garden.
“Do not touch, honey, let me peel them for you first.”
And Joe kept his eyes on Sally's hands as she peeled and cut the spiky fruit, disposing them on a paper plate.
“Atta boy, have a taste.”
And Joe took a slice in his mouth, savoring the sweetness of the pulp and finding himself perplexed at the texture of the seeds crunching under his teeth.
But he still ate the full plate, asking for more.
He never thought about it again until that day he came back to the dirty flat he shared with Enrico Salvatore Rizzo, and saw him trying to send something down the sink. It was something bright and yellow and so out of place in the gray and brown room.
Rico was coughing as usual, keeping a hand on his mouth, his back turned on Joe, who was engrossed into taking out a few grocery items he bought from a paper bag, but his eyes were still attracted by the yellow coming from the sink, as if Rico was trying to drown a small sun.
“What’s your business over there, Ratso?”
He asked then.
“None of yours for sure, Joe.”
Rico replied between the coughs, and something else slipped through his fingers, another little sun.
“Are you throwing up?”
Alarmed, Joe stepped towards him and he was about to gently put his hand on the smaller man's back, who just turned on him, shaking him off.
“It’s nothing I told ya! Leave me alone!”
Joe stepped back, his eyes focused on yellow… petals now sticking to Rico’s lips and hands.
It wasn’t much, but it was enough to remind him of something else… something he probably had forgotten.
So he shrugged.
“Ah, yeah, if you say it’s nothing, then I'll leave you be.”
He took off his boots and laid on the bed with his radio close to his ears, trying to drown Rico’s coughing with strangers’ voices.
Rico kept coughing all night, and he was still coughing when Joe left to look for some money in the morning.
Walking through the streets of the Bronx, keeping his hands in his pockets and tight in his shoulders because of the cold, Joe was thinking about his roomate.
It wasn’t a secret that Rico was sick, but that new symptom was worrying Joe a little too much, also because he couldn’t really put a finger on where he already saw something like this.
The more he squeezed his nogging, though, he managed to get some images coming to his mind, like small azurine petals staining one of the blond ladies’s lips and handkerchief, or Sally spending hours in the toilet to get ready without letting Joe enter, and once she left leaving behind fresh lavender perfume, and…
The realization hit him all at once.
He already saw those flowers, they were falling from another person's lips, but they stopped after he joined his own lips with them, and he tasted prickly pear and he smiled because he remembered how sweet it was.
Joe immediately ran back home, almost skipping the unsteady stairs, and when he opened the door the sink was almost clogged by a small mountain of yellow petals in it.
Rico was sitting on the chair leaning in, a continuous stream of petals falling from his mouth, so Joe grabbed his shoulders hard and looked at him in his eyes.
“Is there… something you have to tell me. Ra…Rico?”
Enrico glared in those big eyes and then just looked away, trying to hold on his shame.
“I am not a fairy.”
He mumbled, and All joe could do was hugging him, keeping him tight against his chest.
“I know. I know you are not. I guess… you don’t command these things.”
Rico closed his eyes, holding on Joes’s shirt and taking a deep sigh, his cough slowly decreasing.
And as the New York sky broke down, the two of them stayed like that, hidden in a hole in the wall, unable to put into words feelings fragile as snowflakes on window glass.