blood

in which the author is filled with a certain kind of hunger

On October 17th, 2014, Tumblr user pukind posted fanart of a character from the popular webcomic Homestuck eating a pomegranate. They subsequently received a request from a user that they tag the photo as containing gore, so it could be blocked for people trying to avoid violent/disturbing imagery. pukind retorted that a warning was unnecessary since they had, in fact, painted fruit. Discourse ensued.

Anyone who’s disassembled a pomegranate knows that unless you’re careful, it will turn your kitchen into a murder scene, its crimson juices spattered everywhere. There’s something morbidly fascinating about the process of prying free the seeds as well, freeing the glistening red arils from the bone-colored pith they cluster in. Maybe it’s this imagery that lead to the inclusion of pomegranate seeds in the myth of Persephone, the consuming of six of them binding her to half of each year spent in the Underworld.

Proserpine, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1874

But Persephone is not the only mythological heroine to consume a forbidden fruit. While popular culture depicts Eve sinking her teeth into the humble Malus domestica, thanks to some etymological confusion (the Old English æppel referred to any fruit, as did the Latin pōmum, precursor to French pomme), perhaps the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was something more appropriate to the region. Perhaps instead of biting into the bland, white sweetness of une pomme, she peeled back the leathery red rind of a pomegranate, crimson juice running down her fingers and sinking under her fingernails as she picked out the arils. Maybe she bit into it altogether, her lips stained red, blood-like trails running from the corners of her mouth, a foreshadowing of the curse she and all women after her would bear.