When they put Dad on the operating table, they let Anthony and Mom and I watch his coronary artery bypass graft through a video player. They sliced his chest open like a parcel, but they didn’t find a heart – instead, attached to his veins and arteries, was a fig, pulsing, glistening, bleeding. The surgeons stuck a pair of tweezers into the fruit, took a few seeds out, and sewed Dad back together. I reached my hand out to try and touch the screen, but Anthony pulled me away by the wrist.

            The doctor said Dad had made a full recovery, but a few months later, Anthony found him unresponsive on the kitchen floor. They did an autopsy and determined he had died of heart disease. Mom asked them to cut him open – they found the fig rotten, black from the core. Mom took out a wooden box with the seeds they had taken from Dad during the bypass surgery and planted them in the garden. Eventually, a fig tree began to grow.

            When the tree started growing flowers, Anthony told me about how figs grew. He said figs were either male or female, and the male figs were pollinated by a special type of wasp. If the fig was female, though, the wasp would get stuck inside until it died. Anthony told me that he knew what the doctors didn’t, about why the fig was there. He told me it wasn’t diseases or genetics – no, it was karma. A few weeks later, we got a call from Mom that she had fallen and broken a bone. The doctors did an x-ray; where her heart should’ve been, there was a bundle of grapes.

            Anthony moved out to live with some friends and only came for dinner once a week. He stopped eating fruit. I remember one dinner in particular because it was the first time the fig tree had ever grown fruit. Mom baked the figs into a cake and then cried when Anthony refused to have any. She went into a different room while Anthony left. After, I cut out a piece of the cake, rammed it down my throat, and told Mom Anthony had taken it with him.

            Eventually, I was the one calling Anthony to tell him Mom had died. The person at the morgue gave us the grapes, saying her body smelled like wine. When we got home, Anthony went to the garden with a shovel and dug out the fig tree. He drove to the woods nearby and then we left both the grapes and the fig tree in a puddle a few metres off the trail.

            Decades later, when Anthony was sick, I came to visit him in the hospital. His eyes were so bad he could barely see. One night, he started coughing up glistening red droplets all over the floor. I picked one up and crushed the pomegranate seed between my fingers. The juice dripped down my hand and onto the hospital bed. Anthony asked me what is that? I told him don’t worry, it’s only blood, nothing more. It’s okay. It’s only blood.