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I bought my first summer mango, a plump Mexican beauty spotted red on one side, unbroken yellow on the other. It spent three days in the fruit basket, unmolested, ripe, and tempting. But it was never the right time; in the evening it seemed better for breakfast, and at breakfast-time it seemed a more fitting dessert. Fortunately, Saturday cut that particular Gordian knot by presenting the fruit at lunchtime.
 

I planned a clean operation. Use a sharp paring knife to whittle chunks off one half, cube and consume, swath the remainder in plastic and tuck into fridge, hopefully to be recovered before its time came. (One must be vigorous in resisting the oubliette tendencies of the refrigerator).
 

I cut a longitude, then another at a right angle. The knife just sank into the flesh without falling, assuring perfection. Pinching a corner of the skin at the pole, I peeled back a neat quarter. I tossed the discarded skin into the sink, then peeled off another quarter. This one didn't come of quite so cleanly; there was chunk of mango attached on the far end.
 

It was here that I made my first, only, and fatal mistake; I lifted the skin to my incisors and like any good monkey scraped the tasty bit off. Ohmygod those summer smells butter sweetness sunshine… swallow, it's gone. I looked down at the mango in my hand, half naked. There wasn't even time to decide whether or not to carry out the clean surgery as planned; mango was suddenly pushed against my face as it was torn asunder in orgiastic pulp attack. Hands became secondary tools to mouth. Juice dripped into the beard, teeth simultaneously carved and strained the buttery pulp, and fingers busily rotated first the fruit and later just the seed. There were occasional happy slurps and grunts. ^[1]
 

Now, writers often use fruit to signify sex, as though the two were inherently bound by sole virtue of being primal and natural and stuff. It's an easy temptation, especially since our language ("skin", "ripe," yada so on and etc.) basically screams HEY! FRUIT-EATING IS SEX! But sometimes eating a mango is just eating a mango, you know? ^[2] So don't think CHUCK MANGO SEX. Please. There were primal urges, sure, but these were much more about getting in touch with the culinary techniques of my distant ancestors then vegisexuality. ^{[3] [4] [5]}
 

As I scrounge the bathroom in search of floss, I wonder, how did the noble savage cope with those stringy mango bits? ^[6]
 

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