The Pomologist – Lauren Hwang-Fink

September 26, 2026

My friend’s husband the pomologist studies walnuts, but we have bigger plans for him. By we, I mean his wife and I. The three of us live together in a hastily erected apartment complex at the edge of an agrarian college town. I met his wife a few years ago in an undergraduate creative writing class. She wore a hammered copper wedding band that glistened like snake skin under the ceiling-mounted LED lights. She was older, in her mid-twenties, and going back to school on spousal tuition remission. At first, I disliked her because she was always snacking loudly on bags of walnuts. “If anyone wants to make Mexican wedding cookies, fesenjan, or baklava, call me,” she impressed upon the class. She wrote a surprising fictional story about a goat herder that I admired in part because it was melancholic and sweet and in part because it was provocative to write a fictional story in a non-fiction class. We became friends. She mentioned she needed a roommate. Shortly after, she introduced me to her husband the pomologist.
        When the pomologist was a boy, he had aspirations of studying citrus, specifically the pomelo, the largest citrus and progenitor of many cultivated citrus varieties. In the bathroom of our apartment hangs an illustrated chart depicting the citrus family tree. Next to the other progenitors like the mandarin and the citron, the pomelo looks perversely gargantuan. I like looking at the chart while brushing my teeth, which sometimes leads to minor toothpaste flecking. I thought nothing of this until one day my friend told me that the pomologist found the flecks offensive. It’s bad enough the fruits hang over the toilet.
        When the pomologist started college, he made a practical decision to forgo citrus and study nuts. He interned at a walnut research lab because walnuts are where the money’s at. After graduating, he stayed on with the lab and was promoted full-time to Junior Specialist #1. His job, the lab, and half the pomology department are funded by nut tycoon Diamond Nuts.
        “A couple papers linking walnuts with cognitive health and wham, suddenly people start noticing walnuts look like little brains.” He said this dryly and with much vitriol. I can understand the pomologist’s frustration. Because of consumer demand, the pomologist lives a very predictable life. In September the pomologist drives to walnut farms throughout the Central Valley collecting nuts. The rest of the year he spends inside, testing walnut packaging for freshness, searching for an elusive goldilocks ratio of oxygen to carbon dioxide.
        When I first met him, I asked the pomologist if he studied walnuts because he liked them very much. This was naive. “Did you know that all walnuts sold in grocery stores are over a year old?” he countered. “By the time you eat a walnut they’ve oxidized completely. That classic walnut taste? That’s rancidity.” Walnuts aren’t even in his top three nuts. His preference favors tropical, fatty nuts like macadamia, cashew, and Brazil. We always have a surplus of walnuts around the apartment that the pomologist refuses to eat, even if baked into a moist banana nut muffin.

My friend is concerned about the pomologist’s spirit. She believes the pomologist must stop researching walnuts or else risk irreparably souring his soul. Because the pomologist is married to my friend, I am sympathetic. Because the pomologist is also my roommate, I’m personally interested in improving his countenance. To this end we have started proposing new, exciting topics in pomological research for the pomologist to take up. We take turns pitching our ideas Shark-Tank-style at the dinner table. Mondays are my day to cook so I do it then, with the wafting leverage of a bowl of spicy tofu stew set before him.
        “You should invent a pitless cherry,” I suggest. “It’d be the greatest sensation since seedless watermelon and candy grapes. You’d be a millionaire. And you could get Luxadoro maraschino to fund your work.”
        The pomologist can be a bit unimaginative. “Cherries are drupes,” he says balling his fist for emphasis. “They’re stone fruits. Stone fruits cannot be grown without the stone. It’s the very axis which the flesh grows around.” His open hand strokes his closed fist again and again, as if in a time lapse of growing or a pantomime of villainous hand rubbing.
        “Blue fruit,” his wife pitches. “Blue tomatoes. We’ve seen yellow, orange, and black, now how about blue.”
        We offer our ideas in earnest, but sometimes the pomologist gets very angry. He shuns his dinner and leaves the apartment to take a palliative walk. I imagine the route the pomologist takes. Our town is tied together by sixty miles of interlocking parks and bike paths. These green spaces were designed by precocious city planners as a kind of healthful circulatory system of pedestrian traffic and urban tree cover. The paths are curved and well paved and the parks are verdant and planted with fruit trees. I imagine the taunting cornucopia the pomologist sees: ripe Cara Cara oranges, powdery European plums, and glossy, scarlet-red cornelian cherries. As he rounds a bend he passes pomegranates, quinces, and figs striped with the stretchmarks of their own ripeness. He walks further, past olive trees whose fallen drupes stain the pavement purple. Near a community garden he watches a squirrel descend an abutting fence carrying a large tomato. The tomato, the pomologist can tell, is a Brandywine beefsteak. In its haste the squirrel drops it, leaving the pockmarked fruit in the grass beside the path. The pomologist bends over. The tomato is perfectly ripe and shaped like a full diaper. Tiny air bubbles ooze from the cavities made by the squirrel’s incisors. The pomologist moves his hand as if to squish the tomato but hesitates. For a moment he looks thoughtful, like he might sneeze.