How to Eat a Mango
There is a pure animal joy I find in mangos. Like a dog I want to sniff out their age and location. Like a monkey I want to drag my teeth against their seed. Like a bear I lick my hands, wrists, lipsclean of translucent gold juice.
To start: You must select the right fruit.
My favorite big two-colored mangoes. I like how they look like fat lovebirds, how they stay warm and how they fill my whole palm with the feeling of smooth waxy skin. When they sit in the sun, I smell the soil they are from.
I like to cut them to the right of the stem, top down and slide the knife close to the long seed. I like it when the mango is slightly underripe so no fibers pull and the scent is tart and bright instead of sweet and dense.
When both halves are separated from the seed, I peel the skin from the remaining edges on the seed and gnaw off the fruit, or slice it into tiny curves.
When my face is full of juice, and my teeth with fibers from the biting, I am ready to carve up the two matching flower petal halves. Yellow, concave, and glistening, I slice them into an even grid careful not to punch into the thick skin.
Then I turn the grid inside out and the cubes of mango still attached to the skin separate like tiny buildings. If I am alone, I eat them off the skin in small toothy bites with no utensils at all. One building each snatched bite by pearly bite. If I must share, I cut them along the skin in rows, a man and boulevards of juicy bright flesh fall gently into my white bowls.
The perfect fruit between hard and ripe is like small melody of notes. At first just the scent of mango, sweet yet banal but the best is a tiny bit sharp; like a dare; and the wash across my tongue is a quick revelation of acid, sugar and sun and they spread through saliva as the body awakens to accept it. The cut fibers are soft and slimy at first, warm or cold in the mouth and then quickly separating into wiry fibers. The first bite, once mostly scent fades into a sweet cloud that fills my mouth, and I can feel the sun melt between my teeth.
