Writers in the Attic: Apple

APPLE

writers in the attic

APPLE

writers in the attic

Works selected by

MALIA COLLINS

PAST EDITIONS OF WRITERS IN THE ATTIC: 2019 - J. Reuben Appelman

FUEL

2018 - Samantha Silva

SONG

2017 - Diane Raptosh

GAME

2016 - Susan Rowe

WATER

2015 - Rick Ardinger

ANIMAL

2014 - Kerri Webster

NERVE

2013 - Bruce Ballenger

DETOUR

2012 - Cort Conley

ROOMS

This is a Log Cabin Book, an imprint of THE CABIN 801 South Capitol Boulevard, Boise, Idaho 83702 (208) 331-8000 thecabinidaho.org (c) 2020 The Cabin All rights reserved.

Book design by Jocelyn Robertson Printed and bound in the USA in an edition of 250 copies.

GENERAL OPERATIONS OF THE CABIN ARE GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY: The City of Boise Idaho Commission on the Arts National Endowment for the Arts and the Idaho Community Foundation

THANK YOU TO OUR MEMBERS MEMBERS OF THE CABIN AT THE SUSTAINING LEVEL OR ABOVE RECEIVE A FREE COPY OF THE Writers in the Attic ANTHOLOGY: John Allen

Vicki Kreimeyer

Suzanne Allen

Elsa J Lee

Thomas Beauchaine

Marcia Liebich

Dianne Bevis

Brooke Linville

Darla Christiansen

Carol Lloyd

Lindsay Clarke-Youngwerth

Drew Lobner

Jill Costello

Pat Machacek

Ed Cryer

Beth Malasky

Staci Darmody

Julie Manning

Sandra Davis

Molly Mannschreck

Katherine Devlin

Bill Manny

Terri Dillion

Susan May

Gwen Dry

Yvonne McCoy

Phyllis Edmundson

Beverly McLean

Carolyn Eiriksson

Kelly Miller

Deborah Eisinger

Stephanie Miller

Theresa Fox

Betsy Montgomery

Steve Frinsko

Camron Newton

Stefanie Fry

Stacy Pearson

Marshall Garrett

Seth Platts

Julie Gendler

Wendy Rancourt

Jon Getz

Cathy Rogers

Heather Getzloff

Paige Shafer

Laura Gibson

Bonnie Sharp

Jackie Groves

Samantha Silva

Greg Hahn

Michael Spink

Alice Hennessey

David Stearns

Deb Holleran

Russell Stoddard

Lori Hudson

Anne Struthers

Debbie Johnson

Bridget Vaughan

Linda Kahn

Mikel Ward

Cynthia Keller-Peck

Nancy Werdel

Tom Killingsworth

Anne Woodhouse

Vivian Klein

CONTENTS Introduction • 1 Author Biographies • 125 About The Cabin • 133 BLOSSOM Garnet christy claymore • 7 Still Life Anita Tanner • 9 Hush / Apples Falling In The Orchard August McKernan • 10 Paradigm Lost Ruth Saxey-Reese • 12 Irish Apples, Crow Speaks Alexandra Ellen Appel • 14 Cézanne’s Apples Cheryl Hindrichs • 15 The Conversation Rebecca Weeks • 19 Foo Dog Dené Breakfield • 21 BRANCH When Picking An Apple JoAnn Koozer • 27 Genesis Undone Judith Steele • 29 Together Again Susan McMillan • 31 Manzana / The Orchard Julia McCoy • 34 Queen Sandy Friedly • 42 Little Sapling Christina Monson • 46 FRUIT Indulgence / Shine Eileen Oldag • 53 Bathing The Children Anita Tanner •55 Based On The Old Northwest Of One History Kim Monnier • 56

Apple Pie Morning Lisa Flowers Ross • 57 An Exercise In Romance Margaret Koger • 58 Walking On The Boise River Greenbelt One Summer Evening Liza Long • 59

What Became Of The Apple? John Barrie • 60 “App’m” Kyle Boggs • 63 Apples For Life Howard Olivier • 66 Pippin Carol Lindsay • 69 Sunday Dinner Marsha Spiers • 73 TREE The Retelling Celia Scully • 79 Eve-Grabs-The-Apple CMarie Fuhrman • 82 Ars Poetica Francis Judilla • 83 The Evolution Of Eves Janet Schlicht • 84 Forbidden Rebecca Evans • 87 ORCHARD Pulse Vein, Burst Jugular / Her Simple Touch Of Myth / Last Meal Before Change Heidi Kraay • 93 Love Letter To A City Amber Daley • 96 Between The Lands Eric Wallace • 99 BARREL Please Remember When I’m 90 Laureen Scheid • 107 Time And Again / Passages Sheila Robertson • 108 Diagnosis Debra Southworth • 110 I Have Always Loved Poison Neal Dougherty • 111 Jean Cocteau’s Apples Grove Koger • 112 You Got Took Alex Fascilla • 115 Last Chapter Marguerite Lawrence • 120

INTRODUCTION At the end of the second grade my family moved from Kailua, Oahu to Idaho Falls, Idaho where we lived for a year and a half. The house we rented for the first three months was huge and haunted—white wooden siding, green linoleum floors, dingy beveled-glass doors leading from one echoey room to another. The house sat on an acre of land, squat between an overgrown apple orchard on one side and train tracks on the other. At night, while we slept, the train roared past, rattling the glass doors for what seemed like hours. Some mornings, droplets of water slid down the mirror over the fireplace in the living room. I slept on a mattress on the floor of the dining room with my younger siblings tucked in beside me. We held onto the dining table legs when the trains passed. We believed if we weren’t gripping tight enough, we’d end up carried out the windows by the force of the whooshing cars.

It was our first summer away from the ocean. I remember sitting under the apple trees, waiting for the trade winds, hoping for an apple to bloom from the branches above me and fall into my hands. But an apple never dropped. I don’t think any grew, either. My parents didn’t know how to live in a place like Idaho, let alone in a sprawling house in the middle of an apple orchard, so far away from their old life with all of its humid familiarity. Pruning the apple trees and spraying for aphids and mites with the hope of those trees bearing fruit was not something they thought about. Those apple trees were last on their list of things to take care of—there was too much work, and too many kids, and even less money to be able to do anything extra. But I loved those apple trees. I loved the possibility of those apple trees. I was from ocean and mountain, from sweet lychee fruit and mangos, their skin pierced with 1

my mother’s fingernail and then peeled back so we could stand there in our swimsuits and eat the insides like we would an ice cream cone. At our new house, with its dusty blue sunshine and the way I could see the heat rise off both the grass and the train tracks, those apple trees were a sign my life could change. I was only eight, but I already knew the ache of wanting out of my old life and into a new one.

That summer in Idaho Falls was when I started living my life inside of stories. With enough space in both house and yard, my imagination grew. I understood stories could do more than take me into a different life; stories made it possible for me to live a different life. There was the story of the girl who lived in the middle of an apple orchard, and there was the story of a girl who was still back home in Hawaii. When one of those lives got too much, I could close the page and wake up in the other.

The few months we lived there still feel like a dream place.

When I think of that house, I smell apples.

The house we live in now has two gnarled and unwieldy apple trees deep in the backyard. Our first summer in the house, I wanted to be the person my mother must have imagined herself to be all those summers ago; harvesting baskets overflowing with apples, slicing their sweet flesh thin as fish scales to build into a pie. But like my mother, and much like the apple trees next to the lonely white house in the middle of staying put and going anyplace else, the apples never grow past the hard, green ball stage, or bloom from the branches unpecked or un-wormed. The apples lie on the grass in the backyard with their scrunched up faces, gnawed at by the dogs or the two deer we’ve seen on occasion since we started staying home back in March.

Eve Ensler says apples are the fruit of memory. In her retelling of the story of Eve and Adam, Eve eats the apple because she wants to remember what came before the story that’s told—in her retelling apples become a portal into the possibility of another story—not one of temptation and sin, but one of joy and intelligence, of power and agency. Of love. I like to think of apples that way—by eating one I can choose which story I want to tell. Apples can be the possibility of something else.

I’ve been home since March 15; ten days before Idaho’s stay at home order was issued. On my first trip to the grocery during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, I bought a 2

bag of apples because I knew they would last for weeks in the refrigerator. They were something fresh and healthy we could eat, when we had no idea how long the stay at home orders would last, how long it would be before we were living in the world before this one. Those apples were a way of saying—this is how it is right now, but also, can’t you imagine what else it could be?

When I taught in the Cabin’s Writers in the Schools program, I started each residency by talking with my students about their job as writers. I told them every poem is an imaginative act. Every story is an imaginative act. I told them the power of the imagination is this—you’re able to visualize things in your mind that aren’t there. They learned the imagination’s language is the image, and an image is anything perceivable by one of the five senses. They knew writers used the five senses to be more alive on the page and in the world.

Between my weekly visits to their classrooms, they went out and tried it. They paid attention to the world. They wrote. And they came back breathless. They imagined a story one way, and then imagined it another.

Reading the pieces in this year’s WITA anthology is a way to remember the promise of something extraordinary in the ordinariness of an apple. Reading these pieces is to live in the memory of what we were doing before this global pandemic—when we were out and vibrant in the world—the temptation of a conversation with a friend, or dinner at a restaurant, tucked in the dark at a movie theater, or standing in a classroom full of writing students. Each poem or story uses the apple as a way into something concrete; sometimes funny, often times heartbreaking: from a memory of someone lost, to the desire for someone else, the hope and regret of things said or ignored, all of them grappling with the miracle of an everyday object seen for the first time.

There is still so much unknown about what’s going to happen once the world starts opening back up. So we tell stories. My friend K believes this pandemic can be the portal to something new, and this is the moment to plant the seeds of possibility to begin to live into the world we want right now.

There are the stories we wrote in the world before this, and the ones we can tell once we’re on the other side.

– Idaho Writer in Residence Malia Collins 3

BLOSSOM Comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love.

SOLOMON

GARNET

christy claymore On an April day—warming, flowering— my heavy bookbag pulling me to one side, you smiled as we passed each other with a few nice words on that university sidewalk, as we often did, met always with a slight, age-old charge we were too bashful to act upon.

Then, that July, I saw you downtown— I was with him and you were on your way to work.

And years later, at a summer concert, you were with pretty her, and I was eight months with child.

Soon enough, I began to fade into the backdrop even of my own life.

I pushed the stroller and you strolled by, looking straight ahead.

Eventually, word came of your own struggle.

Shortly after I was informed of it, I saw you standing alone on a street corner waiting for the light to change.

And I prayed for you— a healing prayer more fervent than the ones I’d been saying for myself.

A couple years later, I finally ran away from home, and you won your own battle.

The cruel years taught us kindness.

And one morning we said “hello” as if nothing took us away from that April afternoon more than a decade ago.

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You reached across the ages handing me a garnet, calling me Persephone, serving me pomegranate seeds and spiced apples.

It’s a story we’re familiar with, certainly.

It stretches back into the fourth dimension, and I see more now than I could have when it was spring and I was twenty-three.

I see the gems of your eyes, and I remember something ancient and still on fire.

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STILL LIFE

Anita Tanner for William Butler Yeats This still life Geraniums and a peach— I hardly see by looking, all life reduced to inanimate since my husband’s death— the worst of it that he remains stilled.

Still, life.

Those left behind know it, eternally stilled inside a frame.

Yeats frames a poem, Song Of a Wandering Aengus and cries he will pluck till time and time’s are done the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun— life become words, brushstrokes or a bit of paint, motion and form stilled, artificially placed.

My own still life yearns with Yeats to spark flame, to hear a rustling on the floor and someone calling me by name.

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HUSH

August McKernan Imagine:

an image of your lover in relation to nothing. an escherian stairwell embossed in golden

foil, a fervor to light up the brain.

Pinprick of heat

then golden light.

If I were to speak the word blue, a mass extinction,

exiting.

In the drawer of her desk, my harvest rots. I have not yet learned how to give.

In the stairwell,

time passing.

Head between the knees, neck slack, somewhere a root resembles a hand.

Body insulated, body in the room, sometimes it is enough.

Young, strong tissues.

My father drops a lightbulb, He digs a hole in the earth, A moniker loosely held,

phosphenes scatter. calls it my gift. damp soil in the hand.

The alternative to relation: an apple seed.

To let things take root, quiescent but for the possibility of brief light.

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APPLES FALLING IN THE ORCHARD August McKernan

the metronome’s groan / splitting silver polymers / a nerve / a tight swerve / see how things collide / the smell of spring on / the air / when I needed everyone to love me / a sheaf of glass / light licks through / intersecting the train’s midday whistle

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PARADIGM LOST Ruth Saxey-Reese

If it hadn’t caught the light, sun sparking off minute black scales like embers rising from a smoldering pit, she may not have seen it, jet tongue flicking, weightlessly looped around her wrist, consumed as she was by meeting his gaze through the leaves of the low tree, burning in its own right, but as she stretched to pluck one more rosy fruit from a high branch, she saw how it clung to her pale skin and laughed.

He doesn’t hear, bent now to lift full baskets, trudging them to the kitchen, bent on saving this small harvest from ravages of squirrels and decay.

She gently untwines the gleaming body, releasing it beneath a faded rosebush, trusting in protective thorns.

With one rustle, it disappears.

Within, he washes and rewashes bright apples.

She peers over his shoulder as the first skins coil away, dappled brown and white flesh revealing the lateness of the season, the question of worth, the hesitation of choice, his low voice speaking to itself.

They had smiled in the garden, alternately reaching and stooping, their bodies warming in the thin light, she enamored by a rare shared center, the intoxicant gathering of it all, 12

now, slick peels pile higher, slithering onto the floor, sticky juice congealing everything. She removes her ruined shoes with the slightest reptilian smile, slipping away from his fuss and toil over spoilage.

Reopening the door, she fades into the coolness, the last rays illuminating the blown roses, the still-green leaves of the apple tree, the final fruits too high on thin branches, delectable in their wholeness.

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IRISH APPLES, CROW SPEAKS Alexandra Ellen Appel

the taste of a bitter apple longing to be sweet, the past arrives with a silver tang anticipate the open arms of gratitude regardless of the point expectation is everything, you ask why should I not toss aside the bitter continue the journey of gratitude into the finite present you and I are experiments in living the Irish Apples of longing even the caw of a rook on the chimney of sorrows.

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CÉZANNE’S APPLES Cheryl Hindrichs

“Your head’s too small.” I looked up from the open pages balanced on my lap into marvelously wide eyes. She sat perched expectantly, her knees very close to my own, waiting, I suppose, for an explanation.

Which was easy enough, but a rejoinder ripped across my mind—“Your legs don’t work.” I swallowed it down. Her mother glanced up with latent hostility from her phone. A fouryear old, a treasure, I smiled at her, they say what we won’t, don’t they? See what we no longer can because we have strangled too many thoughts. Her phone dinged.

The girl wheeled herself adroitly around my island of waiting room chairs. After a serpentine tour, she sped back, leaning far over my knees. I hoped she would ask about the book in my lap, comment on its bigness perhaps. But, here it came again, insistent now, a note of concern, “But… your head.

It’s too small.”

I could smile now, “Yes, it’s rather small. But I’m rather small altogether.” She looked at my legs, skeletal knobs sheathed in jeans, looked at my gloved hands and heavily muffled torso.

She fixed her eyes again on me with a look of consternation. A woman that was tall, quite tall, but also small somehow, and so there was something not quite right—perhaps it was the head that didn’t quite fit?

The nurse called my name. The girl had wheeled away like a shot, and I followed Mustafa into the hospital’s bowels, sharing in a certain rue familiarity as we passed the apprehensive first-timers—their wide eyes, sudden yawns, clutched phones, and fretful tossing of magazine pages. “I’ve got – full head CT, sound right to you?” In the room with the massive machine like a humming portal, Mustafa arranged blankets and pillows as best he could on the plank, a kindness that would dull the bones of my pelvis and spine against the unforgiving plastic. Now there would be time to think, during the rituals of the CT scanner. The whooping of the ghost in the machine’s ring began circling my head furiously, then stillness, then the ferocious knocking and rapping—flaunting the civilized disembodied voice, “Please hold your breath.” A poltergeist, it would pierce the veil, tell the truth beneath the flesh of the skull which, for two years now, began to appear, clearer and clearer in my bathroom mirror.

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I arrive to the classroom early, to set up a video slide ostensibly. But I sit in dimness, check my email and open the hospital account with the results of the morning’s test. My eyes skim a jagged paragraph of diagnostic language (complete mandible resorption right, severe resorption advancing left mandible, osseous skull incursions) and skip down to the conclusion. “Acute degeneration. CVID comorbidity with Gorham’s Disease suggested.” I Google the latter, having lived, or rather foundered under CVID for the past six years. My fingers trace the interrupted bone of my jaw as I read, “Vanishing Bone Disease,” and my graduate students begin to filter in with a subdued merriness. To my delight, they have purloined the upholstered hallway chairs again. For the next three hours, at least, I will not recall the skull beneath the flesh, the trap of it, the existential vertigo I’m teetering on. Here are twelve young, intelligent, creative minds passionately hungry to think and to feel.

I project the slide, one of the four Cézannes that John Maynard Keynes bought in 1918 and brought home to Bloomsbury, where Roger Fry was “intoxicated” by them along with Vanessa Woolf and her sister Virginia—the subject of our class.

The students had read Woolf’s short fiction for today, essaystories that offended with the same degree of outrageousness as this postimpressionist art. But how had the unconventional stories struck them? Had they rebelled? Having realized there wouldn’t be a finished portrait at the end, had they attempted to see something for themselves?

Cézanne’s apples filled the screen in the darkening room that smelled, pleasantly, of chalk and dust. I let the silence deepen, widen, make a space. Finally I asked, “Is that what an apple looks like?” The silence charged. An answer was compelled.

“Well. Sort of.”

“Is it a very good picture of an apple?” More silence, what agenda did I have? Their thoughts flicker, dart ahead, but they hold the silence waiting for cues. “Say you were marketing for Albertson’s, would this be a nice advert for apples?”

“Maybe at the bourgeoise Albertsons.”

A happy rout of laughter, and off we go—into Kantian philosophy and Plato, and how Woolf and her group debated these philosophies, the subject and object and nature of reality.

We take up our own debate of whether a table, the one before you let’s say, is real when we are not here. After voices have 16

deliberated from both sides and a table thumped for emphasis, I declare an impasse. Answering the truth of the nature of reality is less important than asking after that truth, I say, in continually unsettling our perception of it, of making us see our perception so that we can see otherwise. That is the artist’s work. Cézanne wants us to see something in an apple that we do not see when we look at a glossy image. How is Woolf doing something similar?

Students begin to comment on the painting’s perspective, how its use of color and form correlate with Woolf’s lyrical sentences. I ask for lights, put them in pairs and ask them to brainstorm on examples from Woolf’s stories of such attempts to get at the subject and object and nature of reality. And, further, what do they take away from what they see there?

The students turn their desks inward toward each other and a warming murmur fills the room. I move between the binary stars in the glancing arc of a comet, listening, affirming, then fade into the space at the front of the classroom, half sitting on a table; the ghostly image of Cézanne’s apples persists on the screen behind me. It is six thirty, and Bailey dips into her satchel for two items, as she has in every evening class. She is hungry; she has taught elementary children all day, brightly, smartly, in outfits that tend to evoke the 1940s. She arranges on her small desk an apple and a small Tupperware container of some rabbity mix. The mix changes; the apple is infallible.

A flutter of amusement ripples through the groups as the sudden presence of a real apple, the ding an sich, becomes known. We are all now looking at the apple, which Bailey sits over with a proud parent’s half smile. I suggest a break after which we can discuss what the pairs have found. Several students depart for coffee or water, a few stretch, mill. My eyes fall on Bailey, just as she bites into the apple. This action, the fact of it, seen innumerable times, now seems to have happened in slow motion, or cubist fractals. The apple’s skin, a polished red with a warm golden blush at its hips, is neatly pierced in a clean, deeply satisfying bite—two sets of perfectly white, straight teeth that excavate a little hollow into the flesh.

I break my gaze as overwhelming desire lances my cheeks. It is as if I have been struck, so out of proportion is my physical reaction to the sight. I rest my eyes on Noah and Lillian who are scrolling through internet images of Cézannes, and question the distinct taint of envy making a bitter, phantom 17

ache in what should be my jaw. Until today I’d observed others biting into all manner of things impossible for me now— sandwiches, oranges, bruschetta—with a kind of rationalized, detached amusement, one based on my secret knowledge of the fallibility of the bone, the inconstancy of pleasure. The apple seems to defy either, and perhaps that is why we consume it with a mirrored righteous defiance. Note any first bite of an apple, you’ll see it.

But the nature of an apple, however it may appear in all its promise and the satisfaction of its roundness in the palm, is not so different from the nature of a body. I see, in memory, the kitchen witch that hung above my grandmother’s cellar door.

Its straw body straddled a wee broom, but its head was chillingly real—a wizened old woman’s face, deeply creased and peering from a Slovenian wood. Granny claimed it was a good witch; it guards us from hunger and greed. My four-year old self stood beneath it, peering into the puckered-up face, uncertain. “The head,” she explained, fishing out russets, “is really an apple.” “An apple?” “In the old country, a good carver would peel an apple into a beautiful woman’s face, and then hang it from string, and after a year… there she’d be.” “The head gets smaller.” “Right. But wiser.”

Noah and Lillian have turned their heads from a laptop to look at me, “Look at this ‘Still Life with Skull’,” says Noah.

They have been looking at other Cézannes. “What’s wrong with the skull?” he challenges me.

I feint, “it’s missing a lower jaw.”

He dismisses that offering. “Jaws often go missing. What else?”

I wait.

Lillian murmurs, “the skull is too small.”

“It’s difficult to say,” I pause. “The flesh deceives.”

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THE CONVERSATION Rebecca Weeks “Oranges,” he said, “are superior.”

“By far,” he added.

I could take the challenge.

“No,” I countered, “apples win hands down.”

I couldn’t believe this is what we were doing, comparing apples and oranges. Isn’t there a rule about this? But we were in.

And it was playful. And I knew where I stood.

“Oranges,” he said again, nodding to himself in confirmation. He didn’t move to defend, as if just saying their name was enough.

I clambered into the barrel and took my place amongst the humble fruit of my heart. Apples. It was obvious. Apples are better, but was I really going to have to defend them? Sure, apples have history and it’s loaded. We all know this. They’re complicated and I love that about them.

What would my life be like now if he had said he preferred apples – their blushing skin, the vast variety, their tenderness, the bruising, the utilitarian charm? And what about the diversity of texture, hue, size, shape, and storability? Can you bake an orange? Can you stew, compote, sauce, freeze, dry, can, or store an orange? Can you make a pie? There is no orange pie.

There is no orange on the teacher’s desk as a token of gratitude and good will. There is no orange tree of knowledge of good and evil. Fig or quince or stone fruit – maybe – but not orange.

The apple’s greatness is undeniable. Even the influence of a rotten apple is huge – spoiling the whole lot.

I was stubborn. I knew full well the value of oranges.

I was no idiot. But, I would not admit my appreciation for the sparkling magic within a self-contained and sweet spicy ball of gold.

Here was his argument: oranges are superior to apples because they come in their own packaging and can be neatly kept in a lunch bag or backpack. They’re full of vitamin C and laden with juices that hydrate the body. The spray of burst open orange peel is tantalizing, seductive, like perfume upon the skin. Every Christmas one of the exotic globes was in my stocking, old time symbol of a world beyond the daily relevance of apples.

I drool a little thinking of them – even now – but I will 19

not betray.

Soon after this conversation he would leave. Move across the country. Start school in New England where oranges are sunshine from a climate far from ice storms and salt sand and woodstoves creaking with the quick start of maple or the slow burn of oak. He was headed to Maine, a land that years later would be my home with another man, birthplace of my daughters. Where I would bake pie and pandowdy and make applesauce. Where I would dry curling lengths of spun-off skins like laces. Where I would feed apples to chickens and hogs and a chestnut calf named Mozart. Where I would understand, finally, the relevance of oranges as treasure.

“Oranges” he said with such confidence. My heart sank and I collapsed a little inside. For what I knew was this: I was an apple.

It was a first moment of stepping away from each other.

We were wise, we thought. Smart, at least, vowing not to make decisions about relationship so young. He went to Maine. I went to Oregon. We said our goodbyes pleasantly. Later, he finished school and moved to Colorado. I finished school and moved to Maine where I would dig deep and feel real, purposeful. Where I would valiantly defend the apple and define myself.

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FOO DOG

Dené Breakfield I knew I’d never make it through the weekend without a healthy stockpile of apple fritters, whiskey, and Camel menthols. My final stop after securing supplies was the vet’s. I sat in the parking lot, gnawing on a fritter, waiting for the sugar buzz to carry me inside and prop me upright long enough to pick up Farley’s ashes.

Once home, I stood in front of the fireplace mantel, hugging the small wooden box, trying to find a place for it among the others: four dogs, six cats, two rabbits, one parrot, and a husband. They were flanked on either side by decades-old high school pictures of my two children, now grown, living busy faraway lives, calling and visiting less frequently with each passing year.

I should’ve planned better.

I set Farley down on the coffee table, cracked open the whiskey, and raised my shot glass to him. After the third toast, I went out back to have a cigarette and eat a couple fritters to absorb the alcohol. That’s when I saw the clay pot and surrendered to an idea.

Soon, I was prying the boxes open with a screwdriver and pouring everyone’s ashes inside the pot. The plan was to add mine to the mix, then have something substantial planted of top us, something that would last—an apple tree, maybe. I pictured our spirits living together inside the tree, becoming its roots, its branches, its fruit.

This made me feel a little less hollowed out. I went back inside, poured myself a double, turned on the TV, and sipped my whiskey while mindlessly flipping through channels. I paused at a commercial that was advertising heartworm pills.

A young woman sat by a fireplace, reading. By her side lay a golden retriever who kind of reminded me of Farley.

“Oh, what a cute dog!” I said, feeling a familiar ache behind my eyes.

He walked toward the camera and started whining. The young woman looked up from her book. “Ollie,” she said, patting the side of the chair. “Come here, boy.”

Ollie turned his head briefly toward his owner and wagged his tail, then looked back into the camera and said, “You need a dog.”

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“What the hell kind of commercial is this?” I said. In the background, the dog’s owner grew more agitated. “Oliver! Quit barking at nothing—you’re freaking me out. Get over here.”

“Gotta go,” Ollie said. “A dog will save you.”

Before I could argue that I didn’t think I could survive surviving another animal, Ollie had returned to his owner. The scene faded, and a banner for HartGarde Chewable Tablets filled the screen.

Wouldn’t hurt to look.

I scrolled through dog photos on the animal shelter’s website. The very last one was Nash, a basset hound mix who looked like he’d been cobbled together by a mean drunk. He had the long torso, floppy ears, and squat, crooked legs of a basset, but plopped onto his shoulders was an oversized bulldog head with way too many teeth jutting out of its jaw and random tufts of rust-colored fur sprouting across its brow line. The dog’s muzzle was white, his eyes the color of spoiled milk. He reminded me of one of those ugly-ass statues you see at Chinese restaurants.

I read his bio: Nash is an older neutered male who was brought to us as a stray. Even though he is losing his sight, this resourceful senior should have no trouble navigating his new home with a little initial guidance. Although gentle, he has demonstrated a dislike for cats, children, other dogs, and adult males, and also suffers occasional bouts of incontinence. Nash has lots of love to give the special person who adopts him!

Come see him today in Kennel 13!

If not me, then who?

The first thing I did when I got Nash home the next morning was escort him out back so he could do his business and start learning his way around. Cautious at first, he walked along the yard’s periphery, guided by the fence. It didn’t take long for him to build up confidence and speed, and soon he was zig-zagging across the lawn. “Go, Nash!” I said, prompting him to change course and start running toward my voice. He bounded onto the deck and slammed head-first into the planter stand that held the clay pot full of remains. Chunks of terra cotta exploded across the deck, and the ashes disappeared between the deck’s wooden slats.

Unfazed, Nash excitedly sniffed and snorted through the debris, and found a longforgotten tennis ball that had somehow made its way inside the pot. He rolled it around with his snout, 22

then plopped down onto his haunches, set his front paw on top of the ball and faced me, wagging his tail and grinning.

I gathered pieces of the ruined pot onto my lap, taking stock of the damage. We sat there like that for the longest time just looking at each other, taking each other in.

23

BRANCH The sweeter the apple, the blacker the core. Scratch a lover and find a foe!

DOROTHY PARKER

WHEN PICKING AN APPLE JoAnn Koozer

To contemplate her own apple experience meant gazing again into deceptive reptilian eyes, hearing sibilant come-hither words, fixating on and fingering tentatively that which is denied, flinching inwardly remembering a garden gate being slammed, locked shut Alternatively Curious teeth bite tactile firm fruit, exploding juice onto her tongue “Oh!” Reflexive lips smacking, hand wiping sticky chin, cautiously catching sweet droplets Palm to tongue a reclaiming, learning that flavor, memorizing sensations, apple peel teeth-pierced, white-fleshed fruit resisting, giving, crunching, crisp, a drench of sweet liquid “Oh! Oh! Oh!” Small hard inner objects seminal? critical? eat or discard?

Eagerly licked palm reveals shifting, shortening life line, 27

branching, pulling, uprooted with pricking pain A sickening in the stomach a womb waiting to swell a birthing scream toward high heaven Flickers of light beyond that original gate, beyond that vital first light Light to colors colors to shapes shapes with depth depth imparts apprehension comprehension fruition Her new kaleidoscope world dazzles, she would not turn back if she could

28

GENESIS UNDONE Judith Steele

The apple drops, unbitten, hisses in blameless grass. He snakes one limb over, pins her to a fresh­ pressed bed. She writhes, palms flat against his heated chest, twists from his grasp.

Feels lines dissolve on her left hand.

The artist in her smoky cave feels lines dissolve on her right hand.

Drops her flaming brush as horses born of paint fade to common stone.

Spring does not come.

She feeds on brittle nettles, sickens in the wind.

Sickening in the wind, the cartographer lays down his pen. Land shifts beneath his feet. Dragons drown in unnamed seas.

Ships founder on hidden shoals, fires lick pages of unwritten books.

Licking pages of unwritten books, the yogi hungers for lost holy vows. Bereft before his wordless prayers, he wanders through desert rain compass points unmoored.

Compass points unmoored, turtles leave their golden, yolkless children 29

on the outer rim.

Radar bending in their earholes, they swim through humming air under unattended sun.

Under unattended sun, waters rise shores unhinge. Birds fly north to die. Somewhere far from home, air chokes the final salmon sliding from the fisher’s net.

And Adam slides from Eve’s dark bed before they ever meet.

30

TOGETHER AGAIN Susan McMillan

The rotten apple on the kitchen counter could be a clue, but since I’m not a sleuth, it’s just a mildewy fruit rather than a spoiled after thought, or a forgotten thought.

Is it mine? It could be Ted’s, or the repairman’s. So I leave it on the counter only to recall, later, that Ted is dead and that the repairman, well, I don’t know that there ever was a repairman. The kitchen faucet still drips. Did I call anyone about it?

The point is… Perhaps you get the point. I’ll possibly miss the point again, later, when I wake up from my third nap of the day or finish reading the chapter in the book on the coffee table, the book that I began reading today or that I’ve been reading for days, I just don’t know. Anyway, I’ll wake up, or I’ll put down the book, and I’ll wander into the kitchen and there will be the apple, lying in an even more rotten repose.

I know that Ted is dead. But that doesn’t extinguish him. In the night, if I listen closely, I can hear a soft snore and snuffle next to me, then the mattress tilts as he shifts in his sleep.

Some days I don’t get the morning paper because I feel the draft when the front door opens and hear the rattle of coat hangers in the front hall closet upon his return. When I meet up with friends, I see their gazes shift to my side, looking for Ted but seeing only an empty half of a now-nonexistent whole. With just three weeks gone since his stumble and gasp outside the coffee shop, the clamor of sirens and voices, the knees of my tights torn from kneeling on gritty pavement, I may still be able to tug the fraying remnants of time back, to wind them into a tight enough ball so that if I leave them alone they will mend of their own accord and in the morning Ted will rise, put on his slippers and shuffle into the bathroom. We’ll start anew, the same old same old, like water dripping from the faucet.

The point is time.

The point may also be memory, although I can’t recall for sure.

Sometimes I remember the credit card receipt I found in his pants pocket when I pulled them from the dryer. The receipt, soft and frayed around the edges but still legible, was for a beachside hotel the week he said he was in Des Moines for business. I’m not proud that I searched his computer for clues, 31

although I was bemused that the first password I tried (Secret) worked and that he populated his Instagram account (created using his childhood pet, Roscoe, as a pseudonym) with Glamour Shots of his lover. But after the recriminations and pleading (mine; his), I put it all behind me. It’s in the past, and not worth remembering, primarily because it never occurred.

Nor did my affair. If I’d had one, it would have been with a golf pro, one at least ten years younger. Some mornings, sitting in the living room drinking coffee, the morning paper forlorn in the driveway, I imagine how the pro’s golf shirt rippled across his shoulders as he demonstrated a putt, or how he stood behind me breathing into my right ear and holding my wrists to coach a proper swing. Ted broke down when I told him I was leaving him for Leif (a name I’ve always adored), and that I’d qualified for the LPGA. If only we’d joined a country club and I’d taken up golf, Leif could have been a reality.

This is what I contemplate as I lean against the kitchen counter, the apple and I watching the faucet drip like grains of sand through an hourglass. The torrid rendezvous at the beach, the clandestine golf affair: they would have been much more interesting than the quiet disintegration of a marriage. How to pinpoint when I stopped telling Ted my days’ minutiae or when he ceased to recall my favorite dessert? Does it matter that the years during which he left me random love notes numbered far fewer than the years in which he didn’t, or that his habit of abandoning half-eaten apples on the kitchen counter, the coffee table, the garage work bench went from charmingly eccentric to annoyingly piggish?

Outside the coffee shop the warm spring day was in full swing. The plum trees cast a heady scent just shy of cloying, so when Ted crumpled onto the sidewalk it was ridiculous that I looked to see if he’d slipped on a patch of ice. The EMT’s worked on him for thirty minutes, and then for another ten minutes after I alternately pleaded with them and harangued them. “Heroic” and “futile” I heard a bystander whisper, but he skulked away when I turned and glared at him. I knew it was futile: the EMTs’ grim expressions: Ted’s gray mask. But to stop was so final, a defeat consigning me to a future with only myself to critique. And for Ted, much worse, of course.

When time knits itself back together, Ted and I will have a good row. I’ll throw a plate. He’ll stomp around in the iris beds. I’ll demand that he introduce me to his slutty paramour, 32

and he’ll threaten to have the country club axe the golf pro. I’ll pour Scotch on his computer. He’ll accuse me of ogling the repairman. Somewhere in the fury, perhaps when we stop to catch our collective breath, there’ll be a glint of happiness at feeling jealousy and rage and betrayal, at feeling something other than tedium, and regret.

For now, I’ll keep shifting the memories and figments around as I move from bed to couch, to picking up the book then putting it down, to conjuring things that might have been and mourning those that will never be and to being confused as to which is which. I’ll collect clues and pretend I’m not. I’ll let the sink drip. I’ll leave the apple a bit longer.

33

MANZANA

Julia McCoy Lucy did everything last minute. She worked well only when she had to. Which was why she was studying for the Spanish exam on her way to school, vocabulary list twisted up in her hand.

Lucy folded and unfolded the paper, covering up one half and then the other. Vocabulary word hidden, then revealed.

Apple was manzana. Easy. Banana, plátano. Or, banana.

Both pretty simple. Pear, just pera. But if you added that extra r it was perra, and that meant bitch. Sometimes she’d whisper that at people under her breath, like the girl who’d laughed at her in the locker room for not having enough breast to wear a training bra, or the boy who slammed her locker shut just after she’d opened it.

In her pocket nestled a small wooden box she’d won during lotería on the first day of seventh grade. Inside sat worry dolls, Señora Diaz had called them, figurines in brightly patterned cloth no bigger than her thumbnail. Supposedly, if you slept with them under your pillowcase, and wished your worry on them, the worry would disappear. Hadn’t happened, not just yet. Maybe she had too many worries. Still, she kept hoping.

As usual, Lucy stopped by Kat’s house to pick her up.

She knocked on the door. No response. She could see through the front window into the vacant living room, where only a TV stood on an ice chest. Sometimes they watched Survivor on the carpet, while her little brother ran trucks over the edges of the cooler.

There were days like this when Kat’s family wasn’t home. She told Lucy her mom let her skip. They went on grand adventures to amusement parks and ice cream parlors, the kinds of things that happen in movies. Once she even got to pet an elephant at the zoo. One day, she promised she’d let Lucy come along. Kat’s mom wouldn’t mind.

Lucy didn’t want to be Kat, but she did admire her. Hair dyed black, skin pasty, she wore shades of clothing only darker than blue. She had four piercings in each ear, and wore long gloves to hide cutting lines, which she’d once shown Lucy at lunch break. She talked freely of smoking cigarettes, and made Lucy stand guard while she and her boyfriend made out in the ditch behind the school during breaks.

34

Without Kat at school, Lucy waited in the cafeteria for the bell to ring, scripting careful glances back at the door, as if expecting her friend to arrive. The last thing she wanted was to get noticed by the teachers, get singled out as friendless. Better to just fade into the background of 300 middle school children.

She did this any time Kat was gone. Or anytime she was there, but had other things to do. Homework, she said. Later, Lucy would pretend she knew it was a lie all along.

First period was Spanish, her favorite. Except, today was the examen. Foods and food related words. Spoons, forks, cups and plates. Fruits and vegetables. Manzana. Plátano. Pera.

The test was simple. Blank space. Clip art drawing of food. Escribe la palabra en español, por favor. On reaching onion, her mind went blank. She drew her hand into her pocket, ran her fingers around the edge of the Worry Doll’s box. Cebolla.

The door to the classroom opened. An office aide, a redheaded eighth grader she’d seen around, delivered a summons.

Señora Díaz placed it on her desk.

It directed her to Ms. Adams, the school counselor. But why? She hadn’t done anything wrong. Was it that they had noticed her sitting alone? Her throat tightened, lungs refusing to fill all the way. She clutched the note and stood up, pushing the chair back just loud enough that everyone stared up at her.

“Can I go?” she choked out.

Señora Díaz smiled, like all of this was normal.

In the office, Lucy sat on a blue, padded chair just tall enough that she could swing her legs. She swung them to the rhythm of the hanging Garfield clock on the wall. After enough ticks that her legs began to tire, Ms. Adams came out.

“Lucy. Come on in.”

Ms. Adams was petite, almost Lucy’s height. She had on a floral-patterned shirt, and the lanyard around her neck was decorated with tie dye. Her office was covered with smiley faces.

Even the clock was a round yellow sun, beaming down at her with a buck-toothed grin.

Lucy didn’t know the rules of this room. She sat in the wheely chair opposite Ms. Adams’ desk, but didn’t dare push it along the carpet like she normally might. She crossed her arms in her lap, then readjusted them to the arm rests, then settled on one on her lap, the other on the rest.

“You’re not in trouble, Lucy,” Ms. Adams sat opposite of her, wheeling her chair back a little. “I just wanted to ask you 35

about Kat.” Lucy picked at her cuticle. “She’s not here today.”

“That’s okay. How about when she is here? Anything you want to share?”

Later, she realized this was a focal point of her life. She would, from then on, be trapped between speaking and silence.

“Like what?”

“Anything that maybe worried you?”

Lucy felt a surge of loyalty. No way would she be the one to get Kat in trouble. Once maybe, but she’d put that self behind her when she started seventh grade. Nobody liked the sixth grader who cried when their teacher struggled to control the class, or the one who tattled on the boys when they’d scratched swears into their desks.

“What about Kat?” “I was just wondering if you noticed anything that might be out of the ordinary. Something that made you worried, or something that seemed like it might be dangerous.

Anything that might hurt her?”

There were seven worry dolls in the box. Lucy counted them every night before placing them under her pillow. She rotated her worries through each doll, hoping that one might work better than the other. Now, she imagined all seven of them as Kat. Her scars. Her boyfriend. Cigarettes. Missing school. Skipping lunch. And now, the new one, in trouble with counselor.

“Is she in trouble?”

Ms. Adams pressed her lips. “No. She’s not in trouble.”

“Will you tell her what I said?”

“I won’t tell her you said anything.”

There would come a time, in later years, when Lucy would imagine herself revealing everything about Kat. Her mother’s boyfriend, the razor she hid behind the toilet. And other times, she’d imagine herself locked tight. Would Kat still have come back? Would she have hated Lucy? Would she still have left to live in a foster home, not a year later? Would Kat be a different person if Lucy had chosen to speak one way or another?

Instead, she planted herself between telling and keeping, the beginning of a pattern that would take years to break.

“She has these scars under her gloves. I think they’re old, though. She told me she got bit by a dog.” Lucy blushed and stared through her knees. “That’s all.”

36

Ms. Adams rested her hand on Lucy’s shoulder. “Thank you, Lucy. That’s very helpful.”

“Can I go back to class? I have a Spanish test.”

“Claro.”

Though Lucy tried, the rest of her test remained blank.

Even the images blurred into nonsense, and she turned it in not even half finished.

On her way home, she stopped at Kat’s house, this time, going in. The rooms were still vacant, though unwashed dishes lay in the sink, and the fan in the bathroom had been left running. Lucy opened the door to Kat’s room, sat down on her unmade bed, a mattress without a box spring. Posters lined the walls, crooked and faded with sunlight. Bands with long, dark hair and heavily shadowed eyes. Her school binder was discarded on the ground, the cover inked nearly black with words; never love, eternal anguish, alone.

The only thing in the room that looked cared for were her gloves, resting on top of her pillow. Elbow length and satin, they looked like they were from an old movie. Lucy slipped them on. Too long, the fingertips hung out over her own, and they gapped too wide at the wrist. Still, she would take them.

She would keep them after Kat came back, and after she left again. She’d leave them in her jewelry box, where her own children would take them out and pretend to be ballroom dancing.

In exchange, Lucy took the worry dolls out of her pocket, and laid the box on Kat’s pillow, hoping that if they worked just once, it would be right here.

37

THE ORCHARD Julia McCoy

I was made immortal so long ago. My Lover kissed it onto my lips one morning while we lay together underneath the canopy of the Orchard, our legs entwined. My eyes were closed as my Lover brushed their lips against mine. Feigning sleep made the kiss more precious. Light shone through my eyelids, and weightlessness filled me, as my back arched in a moment of ecstasy. Then an ache struck me and tethered me to the ground of the Orchard. Without opening my eyes, I knew my Lover returned to the heavens. For so long I’ve asked if they will come back and I am met with silence.

My Lover made me Steward of the Orchard. Nearly endless rows of apple trees, forever bearing fruit, forever greenleafed and under my care. The apples carve into faces, people I never meet but know from their inception. They change as they age. Infant, child, adult, elder. Then they drop. Of course, not all are lucky enough to last that long. Some drop much sooner. I gather the fallen in a basket, rejoicing to find one withered with age, mourning faces still fresh. At sundown, I place the basket on the back porch of the cottage we once shared, and when the sun rises again, it is empty.

The Orchard passes through its own seasons. Sometimes, apples drop everywhere in droves, young and old alike.

Other times, they are rain clouds, groups of trees shedding apples for years in great quantities. In time, the young faces fall less frequently, the old apples grow more wizened. I gather them all.

One day is like another, one sunset as meaningful and meaningless as the next. But today makes me pause. Today is new.

His apple is broken off the branch, but hangs frozen in midair. A man’s face, middle aged. He has wide eyes, a half smile, light wrinkles at the edges of both. I reach out to take it, but can’t. The apple is hot to the touch and leaves my palm red.

From the door of my cottage, someone cries out.

No matter how far I am in the Orchard, my cottage is steps away. I set my half-filled basket down on the porch, the sun nowhere near setting. I crouch behind the front door and peer out my window, to see my porch and the world beyond I can never reach. They are a man and a woman. The woman sup38

ports the man as he clutches his stomach, red sprouting underneath his fingertips. They have lacerations across their faces and arms, their clothes torn. The man is the apple.

No one has ever found this place. My Lover told me once, while I was cradled in their arms, that this was our sanctuary. No one could enter. Of course, neither can I leave.

I decide to open the door.

The woman relaxes when she sees me. “Oh thank God. We were in an accident. Our car slid down the mountain. Do you have a phone we could use?”

I swallow. I haven’t spoken in so long, not because I can’t, but to preserve the last words I said to my Lover. Closer.

“Please. My husband is injured. A branch went into his side. He needs an ambulance.”

His face is strained and drained of color. Even his lips are muted. He is dying.

“Come in.”

I leave the door open for the husband and wife and go to the kitchen to make them tea. I need to think. Though I don’t need to eat or drink, my Lover left me mortal things as comfort.

I watch the couple in the front room. The woman props her husband up on my couch with pillows, wipes sweat from his forehead. Affection is too blinding, and I look away.

No one comes to the Orchard without being brought.

Lover, I wonder, have you brought them, too?

I pretend not to hear the woman come up behind me.

“Please. Do you have a phone?”

The woman, like the man, has smile lines at the edge of her eyes, the joy she has seen written on her face. Not since mortality have I felt so envious.

“I don’t have a phone.”

The wife’s face falls. “There must be something you can do.”

“Who are you?”

“Kristin.” She nods at her husband, now sleeping. “My husband Reggie. Do you have a neighbor we could get a hold of?”

“How did you get here?”

Kristin takes a moment for herself, pulling nature from her hair. “When we rolled down the mountain your cottage was there. I thought we might hit it, but we stopped just in time.”

To find me. “How is he?”

39

“He’s stopped bleeding.” Kristin is pale, panic just below the surface. “I don’t understand why.”

“He won’t bleed here.”

I was dying from illness when my Lover found me. My family had abandoned me to save the rest, left me on an empty road. They sacrificed my life for time. I remember my lover picking me up. The next time I woke, I was in the cottage, lying on white linen sheets, a warm breeze playing across my face.

“Please.” Kristin takes hold of my hand. My eyes tear with the memory of it, my Lover’s hand squeezing my fingertips, pulling me off of the bed and into their embrace. I understand in a rush like the moment my Lover left me-- they are here so I can save them.

I pull Kristin close and she relaxes in my arms. “I can help you. But you need to come outside with me.”

My Lover waited weeks before taking me to the Orchard. I looked out from our bedroom window every morning, watching them gather the apples from beneath the trees. I noticed how different the apples were, how the sun rose and set with their harvest, but I waited to understand. I knew one day they would explain.

I see myself reflected in Kristin. Wide eyes, open mouth. Except, my Lover held my hand, kissed me when they found my apple, frozen mid fall. We lay in the grass beneath it, coming together for the first time.

“What are they?” Kristin reaches out to touch an apple, but I pull her back.

“They are all of you.”

I take her to the next tree. There is her husband’s apple, still hanging midair. “When they fall, you die. His apple is falling. He’s going to die.”

Kristin grabs the apple, but it doesn’t budge. She strains, knuckles bloodless. “Please help me.”

I shake my head. “I can’t take it.”

“Please!”

“Kristin,” I peel Kristin’s hands from the apple. “Stay with me. Both of you. As long as you stay here, you’ll never die.”

“Stay here?”

To our right, an apple falls. Kristin picks it up, runs her fingers over the apple’s eyes and mouth. The face is young, just out of childhood.

“Who is it?”

40

“Someone who died, Kristin. Like Reggie. Like you will.

Unless you stay.”

When we awoke in the grass, my Lover told me the truth. Will you stay with me? What choice was there between death and my Lover?

Kristin drops the apple. “What will happen to us?”

“You can live here with me. You can help me tend the Orchard.” I see a new future of companionship and love, beyond my loneliness. My Lover taking care of me as he did before.

Kristin traces a line from her husband’s apple to the branch. Her own face is not far, but she doesn’t linger. She reaches out for one below. She strokes a young woman’s cheek with her fingertip.

“We can’t stay here.”

“You have to.”

“No. We have children. Grandchildren. They need us.”

I grab Kristin’s shoulders. “He will die! And his children will lose their father and you will lose your husband. You’ll be alone. Do you understand what that means?”

“I won’t be alone. I have my family.”

“I could make you stay.” I can. I feel it. My Lover is at the back of my neck, breathing into me. Just out of sight, but there. They don’t need Kristin’s permission to do this. I hear my Lover whisper, I did this for you. You’ll never be alone again, love.

Just say the word.

Kristin doesn’t move. “Please. Don’t.”

None of us alone, and all of us trapped. Her children, left wondering. Her life, gone, like mine. Lover, you took too long for me to believe you. Let them go.

My Lover no longer stands beside me. His absence doesn’t hurt as much. “Someone will be coming for you.”

I collapse against the trunk of the tree. In the distance, we hear sirens. I can’t watch Kristin when she turns to leave.

The apple falls, and I reach out to catch it. I won’t harvest it yet. I am the Steward of the Orchard, and this apple will fall when I let it go.

41

QUEEN

Sandy Friedly Cortney sat high in the apple tree, watching the back door. Jake had come home from the ranch stinking of manure and bourbon and wrapped his big angry hands around her neck, all for asking him to wipe his boots better. She’d bolted for the car keys, but he grabbed her purse. When he turned, she billyclubbed the back of his knee with the fireplace poker. She ran for the tree. No way would he look up there. He never has.

Fighting back wasn’t something she ever did, so it took them both by surprise. It was leaving that she was good at. She’d left Jake many times, but he’d always convince her to come back. “I can change,” he’d say. “I will change.” Each time she’d look into those startling blue eyes, him crying, and see the man she loved, the one who didn’t try to kill her most of the time, see the kid whose own father had actually roped him like a calf.

Even the draft had rejected him, a thyroid problem of all things.

How could she, of all people, let him down?

Three branches below her in the apple tree, hung a bee swarm throbbing like a beating heart. It was the size of a holiday ham, about five pounds, she figured. Cortney knew the behavior of bees, their honey-filled bellies, their female stings, their need to move on. On warm days like this swarms loosen, letting the bees free to fly about. Some even crawled on the ground.

A bee circled her knee. Another marched up her arm.

Her hair tingled with bees.

Cortney slipped her ponytail down the back of her shirt and popped up the collar. She missed her father, a beekeeper back in Idaho, and thought how it didn’t seem that long ago, really, that she’d helped him harvest the honey. She remembered licking her sticky fingers, chewing on honeycomb, always so calm in that buzzing world.

She had been in that apple tree many cold nights, the branch on which she sat her cradle of safety. Now it was warm, the scent of apple blossoms filling her nostrils. Above, through the sun-dappled canopy, soared a perfect blue sky. Thousands of cellophane wings vibrated, filling the air with electric hum, and somewhere in that dark swarm a patient queen waited.

She touched her neck where Jake had choked her, swallowed the soreness in her throat. Movement inside the house caught her eye, Jake peering out the bedroom window, calling 42

her name. She’d met him at a rodeo, a ranch hand who chewed clove gum instead of tobacco, who liked Beethoven as much as Johnny Cash. Early on he displayed a temper, but she brushed it off as moodiness, something she could smooth out with love.

How could she have known it would turn into this?

Cortney studied the swarm, remembering the time she jabbed epinephrine into his thigh after he’d stepped barefoot on a bee. She had to move fast or he would’ve died.

The bees kept landing on her, testing her stillness. A shoulder here, a finger there. One disappeared in the cuff of her jeans.

She knew to let them go about their business. She and her father would count the stings to see who got the most. Now what was she going to do, compare bruises with her husband the rest of her life?

Cortney glanced back at the house. Jake. Filling up the doorframe, dusty hair stuck out like an explosion frozen in time. She stiffened. He walked to the side of the house tipping back a bottle of beer, favoring that right leg. He took a piss on the asparagus. “Cortney!” he yelled. “Cort! Where’re you?”

She couldn’t see all of him through the branches, but the further he walked away from the tree, his whole self came into view. He took the path to the barn and disappeared inside.

Tired of straddling the branch, she swung a leg over sidesaddle.

Her body ached as if it’d been in a car accident.

Jake walked out of the barn, rolling up his sleeves in the hot sun, a coiled rope looped over his shoulder. He stopped to hold the beer bottle against the back of that knee for a moment, glancing around. “Come out come out wherever you are.” He drained the last of the beer and tossed the bottle into the weeds.

What a waste, she thought, like apples rotting on the ground. She’d go back to Idaho. Work at that restaurant where the tips were so good. She imagined herself in college, anywhere but Winnemucca. She had to be brave, to end this. Her pulse raced. A dull headache thumped against her skull. When Jake reached the edge of the yard, she yelled, “In the tree!”

He limped closer, scanning the branches, mouth an oval of surprise. He cocked his head. “What’re you doin’?” he asked.

He stepped forward, then noticed the bees orbiting the tree and moved on back. He craned his neck and through a wider opening in the branches they found each other. A rosy sunburn colored his face, except for the white band across his forehead always shaded by a hat.

43

“It’s okay,” he slurred. “No one’s gonna hurt you.” He beckoned her down, scooping up the air with his long, hard arm.

“No thanks,” she said, her voice dry and raspy. She breathed, steadied herself. “Don’t need any matching accessories.” She pointed to her neck.

“Come on,” he said, letting the rope slip from his shoulder and down his arm. He hooked it with his fingers. “Didn’t mean to scare ya.”

“Like the time you pulled that gun on me.”

“It wasn’t loaded.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Watch this,” he said, and began feeding the rope through a loop at the other end to make a lasso. He widened his stance, an attempt to gain better balance, but that knee troubled him. “Got me good didn’t ya?” He tilted his chin at her, sneering.

“I aimed for both legs, but I’ll take it.”

“Let’s call ‘er even, then, drive into town. Drink a few beers, put some quarters in the Jukebox.”

“I think you’ve had enough.”

He cast the rope out with a flick of the wrist and twirled the flat, sloppy circles of a drunk. “Watch,” he said. “I’ve been practicing.” He twirled the rope faster but it hit his leg, so he had to start over.

Courtney noticed the bees stirring on the ground. One traveled across the toe of his boot, another danced knee-high between his legs. It only takes one, she thought. Only one.

Jake fixated on the rope and whisked his hand faster. He twirled the rope higher into a wider circle. Around and around it went. He dropped it over his body, raised it up and down, up and down like a yo-yo, sucking a bee here, a bee there, into the whirl. “This here’s called a wedding ring.” He began whistling The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Cortney watched his face, saw him wince, an arm flinch against a sting. But he kept twirling that rope.

“Ya coming down or what?” he asked.

“In due time,” she said.

The rope spun above his head. He eyed her like a calf.

He started to say something else, but coughed.

“Can’t stay up there all—” He coughed again, struggled to clear his throat. He coughed again, strained, “Can’t stay—” He cleared his throat again, a gritty whisper this time.

Then came the hacking, the wheezing. His eyes filled with panic.

44

His lips swelled into fat tubes. “Cort!” he choked, hobbling, tripping on the rope.

Courtney slapped both hands over her ears and looked away. She heard the wild gasping. Saliva coated the inside of her mouth. A cold sweat beaded her forehead. She pressed her hands harder against her ears until they hurt.

It felt like forever, but when the only thing she could hear was the electric hum of bees, she climbed down, branch by careful branch. After dropping to the ground, she couldn’t move. She didn’t want to move. She doubled over, hands on her knees, taking a moment to gather herself, to take the first step forward. And when she did, it was if she had occupied someone else’s body. Her legs carried her but she couldn’t feel them.

Jake’s eyes had swelled shut, his face like risen dough.

She bent a knee, checked his limp wrist for a pulse. The only things moving were venom sacks still pumping poison into his body. An acne of blisters crawled along his arms.

Cortney stood tall, wiped her eyes, her nose on her sleeve. Burning climbed like a fever on her left thigh, her arm below the right elbow, the flesh where a bee had found its way in at the neckline. But what was that after all? A few stings were nothing.

45

LITTLE SAPLING

Christina Monson Anna sat in the deck chair, staring at the empty backyard, smoking a cigarette. The long tendrils of smoke floated above her head into nothingness. Anna’s hand laid over the empty void of her belly, and a noiseless sob shook her body, dropping ash onto her ill-fitting jeans.

Grimacing, she brushed the ash off before stubbing out the cigarette on the deck with her sneaker. She picked up her glass of wine and took a long drink, trying to burn away the cold feeling in her abdomen.

The apple slices her husband had brought out to her were turning brown, but Anna continued to eat them anyway.

She thought of how he had set them on the table next to her and walked back inside, away from her, a reminder of all that they had lost. She would have been the size of an apple, according to her baby app. A little apple in her belly, but now that she’s gone, Anna felt like she was missing an entire universe inside of her.

Anna spit out a black shiny seed into her palm, and looked at it from all angles. This is how life begins, she thought.

Just a little seed. She stood up and walked over to the small box of gardening tools that had been sitting there since they purchased the house. She found a trowel and walked to the center of the yard with it in one hand, and wine glass in the other, the sun beating down on her back as she dug and dug, deeper and deeper into the earth, making a home to harbor the little universe inside the apple seed.

“Anna, what the hell are you doing?” Michael cried out, papers in both hands. He had been watching her from the kitchen table while he paid the bills.

“I’m planting!” Anna shouted back. She jumped when he slammed the sliding door, but she was focused. She would raise an apple tree in honor of her daughter, she thought, as she tucked the little seed into the earth and covered it in dirt.

What a tribute! As she sat back to admire her work, her hand fell upon her wine glass, and shattered it. As she walked back inside the house to bandage her wounds, small ribbons of her blood seeped into the earth and joined the little seed, unbeknownst to Anna.

46

* “Michael, it’s –” Anna began. But she realized Michael wasn’t home yet. He should have been home by now. Well, she would enjoy the little sapling alone. She sat in the moist grass, marveling at the small leaves, looking almost like a weed, but she knew that it was her apple tree.

“Oh!” Anna said, and ran to the gardening tools. She pulled out an old red watering can, filling it to the brim with water. She thought about something she heard once, that it was good to talk to plants. They grow better, apparently. So, she whispered to it, “I’m here for you, little one.” The leaves rustled a bit, and Anna smiled to herself thinking, maybe it’s listening. * “Anna, come to bed,” Michael said, standing just inside the glass sliding door. It was dark outside, but Anna sat in the grass, brow furrowed. She bit her lip in worry over her little sapling out there in the cold, all by herself. How do plants like this survive when it gets this cold?

“Anna, seriously,” Michael said. All she could see was his silhouette against the bright indoors. He was faceless standing there, a cold nothing. She’d stay out here with the sapling for a while longer. Just a little while longer.

That night, Michael’s half of the bed was cold. Anna held herself as she lay in bed, not able to get warm, not able to sleep. She gave up and threw the covers back, and looked out the window. The little sapling stood taller than before, and shook, leaves rustling, trembling in the cold, the same cold that seeped into Anna’s bones.

Just as Anna was about to tuck herself back into bed, she heard a whisper, “Mama.”

Anna clutched the curtain tight, but she heard it again; she could swear she heard it again, “Mama.”

Anna woke the next morning in bed, covers tangled like gnarled roots around her legs, and felt confused for a moment.

She was sure she must have been dreaming when she heard the voice last night. She shook it off and went downstairs to check on Little Sapling. Maybe she’d put a pink ribbon around one of the branches. Just for fun. In honor of her daughter. * “Anna, please talk to me. I’ve watched you with that tree, and it’s like you’re hearing things. You need help, Anna. I need you to see a doctor. I’ll take you,” Michael said.

47

Anna just shook her head at him, “No, Michael! I’m fine, really. If you would just listen to her…” Anna crossed the room, arms extended to Michael, but he pulled back, a twisted grimace on his face.

“Her? Her? Anna, I’m done. I can’t do this anymore,” he said, and headed upstairs to the bedroom to start packing the big grey suitcase. The one they had bought for their honeymoon. The matching carry-on still had her clothing she had worn when they had rushed to the hospital last summer. Last summer? How much time had passed? Her bloody underwear still lay inside there somewhere, in a plastic patient belonging bag. Why did she save those and bring them home? She couldn’t let go of what happened to their daughter, and here Michael was leaving. He clearly did not care about them.

She wouldn’t stop him. He was turning her back on her, and Little Sapling. Now a little bigger, taller, she had survived the winter, which was thankfully rather mild. Anna’s gardening books sat in an organized tower in the corner of the room. She looked over to them, and Michael, following her gaze, walked over to the pile and kicked it across the room. He zipped up the bag and stormed out, slamming the door behind him as Anna crouched down on the floor, hands shaking as she straightened the books. * The noise of the superstore had Anna on edge as she made her way through the aisles. So many people pushing their carts around her, shoving her. She threw a couple of packages of water into her cart on top of the wine. But then she made her way over to the gardening center and felt herself relax a little, thinking of spending her alimony checks on her baby.

“Anna?” Michael said, looking nice, in his black trench coat and business clothes, checking out the sprinkler section.

She hadn’t seen him now for several years. She looked down at herself, just now noticing what Michael must see, how thin she’d gotten, her dirty clothes, her leathery skin, sharp cracks in her flesh from so much time in the sun with Little Sapling.

“What happened to you?” Michael said, brow furrowed.

Anna just shook her head and backed away, but Michael took a step towards her. “Anna, please, let me get you some help,” he said, but Anna left her cart right there and ran out of the store.

When she arrived home, she heard her right away, “Mama, I’m so happy you’re back.”

48

“Me too, honey. I saw your horrible father at the store,” she said, touching the leaves, grabbing the watering can and watering the thick roots.

“Oh, Mama, don’t worry about him. I love you. I will love you forever.”

“Yes, you and me forever, my love,” Anna said, and wrapped her arms around the tree. The leaves against her face felt like the smooth skin of a baby, her baby. The tree moved its branches inward, and held her close, so close. Anna realized she was short of breath, but oh, it felt so good to be held so tightly by her daughter. Oh, it was hard to take a breath in her loving embrace. Her daughter would never let her go like Michael did, would never run from her. No, her daughter held her so close, it took her very breath away. * Michael handed the keys over to the realtor, frowning.

He could see the tree in the yard, that wretched tree, twisted and gnarled, bark whorled in way that reminded him of a screaming woman. No one had been able to find Anna. No search party, no police officer.

“I know this is hard for you, being here, after everything that happened. Can I give you some advice though, if we’re going to sell this place quickly?” the realtor asked, a hand on his forearm. He shrugged, and she continued, “Can we get rid of that spooky tree?”

“Sure. The tree never bore fruit anyway,” he said, and walked back inside to sign the papers.

49

FRUIT A plate of apples, an open fire, and a jolly good book are a fair substitute for heaven.

LUCY MAUD MONTGOMERY

INDULGENCE Eileen Oldag

The crop made good.

Apples overabundant were stored in every box and bin last of them in the barrel of old wood and cracks, unlidded by the back door. By morning the coon had helped himself beyond capacity.

He lay backside down, half-buried in the cores and discards furred belly bloated upward his eyes too teary for plea or apology.

Mmmm.

I remembered such pure indulgence.

Up the mountain ignoring the snow we’d come for as well as food or fire our intentions discarded by the bed in the pile of boots and wool the white sheets and feathered comfort an igloo against the cabin’s cold.

It was a minute. It was an hourless day.

You could hear the snow fall. I could see your thoughts.

It was too much. It was not enough.

We turned away. We turned back toward.

So I turned the barrel over its unprepared slats popping in complaint.

I sent the coon suffering its way back to the woods sorted out the spilled apples found a fine one still cool, its smooth skin tight and I bit.

53

SHINE

Eileen Oldag You returned home sweetly, tartly delighted, having parked your truck under a neighbor’s apple tree to let our children climb up the cab and then, defying conventional wisdom, stretch for the highhanging fruit— the take was more than your modest expectation.

You put a fruit to your summer sleeve, polishing the apple and the apple pickers.

There is much you could tell them— Keep good manners, clean clothes, clean words, clean hands.

Don’t take hot, running water for granted.

Read. Memorize Desiderata even if others don’t.

Work. Play. Be honest in both.

Stay plumb, even as the world around lists.

Be kind to every living being. Never wage war.

Don’t even wage anger. Forgive everyone!

Life is a wheel and this family the keyway.

We turn, one with the other.

At times, we turned our backs on the better.

Forgive us! Repair us.

Make friends, honest and kind. Make one friend to keep for the decades ahead, the one to call on the day we are unreturned.

But today— you returned home sweetly, crisply delighted because in the shade of a tree and the buff of an apple there was nothing to tell that they could not see— the alchemy of ripening the reward of reach their own shine, awaiting.

54

BATHING THE CHILDREN Anita Tanner

Their rowdy heads perch like apples above an oval bowl, the flow of laughter splashing from white porcelain nest where these small sparrows lodge like altarpieces after feeding on finger food: nuts, grains, seeds—small things.

I drop to my knees to scrub the smell and flavor of earth from hair, nails, ears and to savor the saltiness of rambunctious sunlight oiling their skin— memories of earth, salt, and mustard seed turned to blood within them, their voices rising in the moisture that collects on mirror and tile like warmed yeast. Here and now a kingdom. Reluctant, they emerge, their withered fingertips flesh out like miracles, miniscule loaves of leavened bread.

55

BASED ON THE OLD NORTHWEST OF ONE HISTORY (invasion by the sweet potable hardness of cider) Kim Monnier The fruit I picked was nothing like one from which I took the seed helixed traits unfolded pushing branches toward wilding buds How far back into our branching did we feel the need to cut ourselves into stumps to take a favored identity like apples slice angles across branches our pliant flesh for their green cambium

mate and wax over and call what future arrives “good” Wandering onto soil we now call ours forgets it change upon us making us (obstinately) neglectful of the pairing of old and new I want the sweetness in my eyes to be as intoxicating as that upon my tongue

56

APPLE PIE MORNING Lisa Flowers Ross

A hint of peach tinges the sky as the sun sneaks through the dark clouds.

The frosty breeze envelops my body that awakens to the season’s change.

Rust, maroon, yellow, orange grasses stand tall in the morning light bending slightly to the will of the wind.

Cinnamon, crisp apples, flakes of dough, a wisp of steam – the first pie of the season announces the arrival of autumn.

Savoring the taste on the gray, weathered wooden boards, I listen to the leaves whisper and a chorus of birds, with nothing to do but be.

57

AN EXERCISE IN ROMANCE Margaret Koger This fall tucked beneath his plaid shirt collar he’s wearing my name tag on a string.

I haven’t told anyone he’s taken a shine to me, but it seems everyone knows this tease of how we feel because we’ve been paired up together.

We stand beside a galvanized tub filled with clear water and apples our hot breath mixing and misting in swells of crisp air, our hands tied behind our backs as we lean into the bobbing apples.

We lower our faces, trying not to laugh or choke, angling to trap a red floater between our two chins without losing it as if kissing, but with our teeth sunk into red skin, white flesh, juice dripping onto my wet breasts, his broad chest.

With mouth and chin we resist drowning for love, blushing before cheering neighbors.

Still, I never would have guessed how when our hands were untied he’d pull out the name tag and raise the string up high for all to see this engagement ring winking in the sun.

58

WALKING ON THE BOISE RIVER GREENBELT ONE SUMMER EVENING Liza Long Old people pass on candy-colored bicycles (alone or in pairs), wrinkled, smiling, baskets brimming with books, fresh-cut fragrant lavender, homemade apple pies corseted in clear Saran wrap.

As I nod and smile, a sudden vision of my death visits me.

I am eleven (again) nestled birdlike, secure in the crook of my grandmother’s apple tree, (the one from which we hurled half-ripened fruit at those boys that summer).

On the wind, the far-off chime of bicycle bells tolls (ask not!) as words of the Blue Book of Fairy Tales (Oh once! Upon a time!) swirl in the swelling shade and blur and fade.

59

WHAT BECAME OF THE APPLE? John Barrie You already know the first part of the story. A jealous queen, a poisoned apple. A kiss that broke death’s spell. But magic doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There are ripples. A mouse who becomes a carriage man doesn’t see the cat in the same way he used to. The merchant who trades away magic beans is forced to reexamine the way he does business.

And so, as Snow was taken from her home among the Dwarves to be encased in glass and gold until the fateful moment the prince would find her and free her from the evil queen’s spell—what became of the apple?

To know that, we must first look to Cole, the sleepy little village at the edge of the Seven Mountains. In this city, there lived a butcher, Per Alouette, and his wife, Mary, who was as timid as an unmagical mouse. She possessed no fairy-blessings, no sign in the stars, no hidden royal blood. The only thing she had in her life was a beast, and alas—he was but the ordinary kind. The kind who filled his gullet with drink and flew into a rage, the kind who could smile so sweetly to his customers but said such awful things with his fists.

Per Alouette worked from sunrise to sunset, six days a week, and then fell into the bars along Main Street. He came home just before the witching hour, redolent of cheap ale and the stink of the butchery and crawled into bed to take what he took to be his, and that was if he was in a good mood. Some days he would drink so much he’d get into fights with the Dwarves from the mines— “Let them stay under mountain where they belong,” he’d say. More often than not, these were fights he’d lose, until he came home to his wife to reenact them.

Their marriage had gone on this way for years, and Mary anticipated that it would continue so until one of them was dead. It had been the same for her own mother, until the sickness had taken her. She had always counseled Mary to remain obedient to her husband, for, “What is a husband but a king unto the home?” On the worst days, Mary thought of her mother, and prayed to the creator for her wisdom and strength, though she felt certain those prayers were unheard.

She was thinking of her mother again on that fateful morning, as she made her way to the market, until her thoughts were interrupted by the sight of the greengrocer, crying into his 60

apron.

“Oh, Monsieur Blanchette, whatever is the matter?” she asked.

“It is Snow,” he said. “She has been poisoned with a tainted apple.”

“That’s terrible,” Mary said. She did not know the girl who tended to the Dwarves’ homestead, but she saw her from time to time in the street, a sweet, sad looking thing. Per would talk about her from time to time; speculate what must be going on behind closed doors in the cottage. “It isn’t right,” he’d rant, poking Mary in the forehead with a finger still encrusted in dried calves’ blood. “Pretty lass like that, she could be making someone quite the wife.”

The grocer continued to set the scene. The previous attempts on Snow’s life. The Dwarves coming home and finding her dead on the stoop. “They say it’s the doing of a witch,” the man said, blowing his nose into his sleeve. “That she was some kind of deposed princess.”

Mary hardly heard the man. An idea had come over her, a wonderful, terrible idea. She placed her basket on the counter.

“You know, I just realized that I forgot my coin at home,” she said. “I’ll have to come back later.”

It was nearly evening when she reached the Dwarves’ cabin. It had been too much to wish for—for who was she to have her wishes granted—but the tainted apple was still on the ground by the door. It was the reddest apple Mary had ever seen, a vision of perfection except where Snow White’s teeth had pierced the skin and revealed the corruption underneath.

There, the apple was black, and the flesh looked less like fruit than an infected wound.

She crept forward, picked it up. How could Snow not have felt its power, she wondered. Even she, a lowly butcher’s wife, could feel the way it pulsed with malice. Or maybe the greengrocer was right, and the dead girl really was that sweet, that innocent, that she could not conceive of such hatred. Mary lifted the apple to her lips. Her stomach roiled at the thought of what she was about to do, but she knew that this was it. The answer to her prayers.

She was about to bite into the fruit when the cottage door opened. One of the dwarves—she didn’t know which one—stared down at her. His eyes were red from crying.

“I’m sorry,” Mary said. “I wasn’t—” 61

“Hold,” he said, and went back inside. She sat on the stoop, heart beating fast. It took all her power not to drop the apple and run into the darkening woods.

She expected him to return with his brothers, to scold her or even blame her for what had transpired that day. Instead, he handed her a box.

“These were Snow White’s,” he said. “You should have them.”

She pulled open the lid and saw a glass baking dish. A tin of flour. Nutmeg. Fresh goat’s butter.

“Thank you,” she said, but he’d already gone back inside.

Mary Alouette went home, trembling the entire way.

She put on a pot of beans for supper. And, singing for the first time since her father had given her to this man, she baked a pie.

She did not rush. She rubbed the butter into the dough with her fingers. She cut little bluebirds out of the scraps of dough, and placed them on top of the lattice, and washed them with egg.

Bluebirds in cages on one side of the pie, and bluebirds in flight on the other. And if Per Alouette noticed, in his drunken stupor, that the apple had gone darker than the caramel surrounding it, it didn’t stop him from tucking into a great big slice.

Per Alouette’s death was ruled a consequence of heavy drink, and—since he had no children or living male relatives— his shop went to Mary, who went on to have a long and successful life. In fact, it was she (long after the dwarves had gone back under the mountain and magic began to dwindle in the lands) that recounted the tale of Snow White to the traveling storytellers, and she told it true, except for one bit.

There was no true love’s kiss, or at least not until Snow had already been revived. She wasn’t dead at all, just put into a deep sleep, and if it hadn’t been for the Dwarves’ decision to display her above ground, the witch queen’s true plan would have come to fruition. The fairest of them all would have awakened to find herself buried alive, unable to claw her way through six feet of earth. But that didn’t happen. The traveling prince heard her cries, the pounding on glass, and he came to her and set her free.

And everyone lived happily ever after.

62

“APP’M”

Kyle Boggs He cried for the first six months of his life and we never knew why. Colic? Reflux? Constipation? Was it something in the sauce? He didn’t sleep. Nights blurred into days. We tried everything. We read everything. Advice felt like attacks. Family came in shifts to help, but nobody really could.

Two years later, I do not take his laughter for granted as I shuffle the shopping cart into the checkout. He pushes the nylon seatbelt taut in both directions, trying to reach a Snickers on one side and the impulse buys on the other--5-Hour Energy, Chapstick, eyeglass repair kit. The isle is too narrow for this; when I move the cart away from his grasp on one side, the other becomes an easy target. He thinks this is funny. I continue this dance, his messy afternoon nap hair waving back and forth while I place items onto the conveyor: almond milk, a dozen eggs, bananas, a handful of apples, and a lavender/chamomile infused bath bomb--my own impulse buy.

“App’m.” He hands me a sticky, bruised, and partially eaten apple I forgot he had. Apple is both one of his first words and one of his favorite foods, so I didn’t hesitate to let him hold one so he wouldn’t cry.

He is still a bad sleeper, and I have zero faith in the bath bomb’s promise of “peace, restfulness, and serenity.” If he has even one “boog” in his nose, he won’t sleep at all, which is the main reason for the bath. It is better now, and I remind myself of that, watching the bath bomb mingle with the apples as the cashier begins to scan. “Gotcher hands full there.”

Back before any of his mysteries were solved, I discovered one evening that I could make him quiet and drowsy by doing squats. Not the quick up and down jiggle that daddys are supposedly so good at, but full-on strength-training perfect-form squats one does at the gym. We alternated, doing hundreds of them. It worked for a while until it didn’t. “Move his bedtime up,” they’d say. He cried longer. “Add epsom salts to his bath,” they’d say. Nothing. “My little one just falls straight to sleep in the car.” Really? Cause mine just screams. “Did you try turning the lights low, and reading him a book?” Are you kidding me? Nearly every single person over 65 in our life told us about how back in the day they’d drop a little whiskey in baby’s 63

mouths. “You know what, it worked,” my dad would joke but not joke.

We didn’t try whiskey but we tried anything else our late night Google searches suggested. We bought a sound machine. He cried. We hung black-out curtains. He cried. We adjusted his diet. He cried. We bought an essential oil diffuser and alternated lavender and chamomile and in the morning we discussed which one seemed to make him cry less. If we let him cry, thinking he’d surely stop soon, he would cry so hard he’d throw up. The crying made us sick too, not the cry itself as much as the fact that we were the ones who were supposed to know how to make him stop, and so often we couldn’t. We bought the “Baby Merlin Magic Sleepsuit.” Still he cried, now a frustrated cry because he also couldn’t move. We longed for real magic, a pill, a spell, a tincture. How peaceful Snow White looked in those cartoons, laying on a pillow with pink petals falling softly all around her.

“There must be something we can give him,” we’d ask the doctor, the Internet, friends. But there wasn’t. But there were occasional, and short lived, breakthroughs.

I remember when he nearly fell asleep on me as we swayed slowly in the kitchen listening to Nick Cave, so I played The Boatman’s Call every night for a month even though it never worked again. On a particularly bad evening, I thought I’d bring him outside, and to my surprise he stopped crying and I softly sang my own version of “Danny Says,” which was in my head that day when we learned we were moving. Daddy says we gotta go | gotta go to Idaho. It worked. We took him outside with the dogs every night and he would doze with orange blossoms on the evening breeze.

“He can hold on to that one,” the cashier gave a sideways grin as she double scans one of the other Fuji apples. He raises it above his head, “App’m!” The woman behind us laughs so he tries to give it to her.

“No thanks, honey,” I have my own apples. She points at her bag of Granny Smiths. I smile back at her in the same way I smile at anyone who lovingly humors us in public and I swipe my credit card. While making faces at him, she tells me about her grandchildren; one of them she says is about his age and she is on her way to see them. The other contents of her cart indicate a cobbler or perhaps a pie might soon be in the works.

I imagined her stepping up to some door, knocking as she en64

tered to the sound of dogs barking, kids yelling, and the TV on.

“Oh, this is someone else’s Mimi,” I tell him, expecting to blow his little toddler mind as I gesture to her. I watch his expression go flat and I wonder if he is thinking of my mom on the other side of the country. The last time he was in Tennessee, we were in the middle of moving from Florida to Idaho. We’d stopped there for a week to visit and regroup. On the day we left she helped us pack, and said she was happy for us. There would be job security, and oh how we had missed the mountains. Yet the sadness in her eyes told a different story.

The trauma of the move erased any of the progress we thought we made. Nobody slept for weeks. Was it the time change? The change in climate? Did our anxiety affect him? New city, same mysteries. Months later, when our adopted city froze over, we still believed in the late night walks, and joked that our new neighbors would see us out in the cold and call CPS. We were on our own, wandering aimlessly on little sleep below the sway of bare apple trees.

Later that night, when the weight of the day boiled over, signalling to us to begin the familiar “bath, book, bottle, bed” routine, I enticed him into the tub with the promise that he could throw in the bath bomb and that it would be “like magic.”

From behind my back, I present the bomb, an orb swirling with green and purple, and his blue eyes grow larger. He looks at it with all of the wonder of a two year old, grabs it, and puts it to his open mouth, triggering my reflexes.

His smile fades quickly.

“No, no, baby; this is not food.”

“App’m!”

“No, watch, remember? This is magic for your bath.”

He cries as I plop it into the warm water. The ensuing fizz snaps him out of it and we both stare as a deep purple swells up around him.

He grabs at it in the water and watches it turn into nothing in his hand.

“Maag.” He looks up at me and I whisper back.

“Magic.”

65

APPLES FOR LIFE Howard Olivier

My first apple memories, age seven, are with my Dad. We’d go shopping at the Alameda Flea Market which was held on Sundays, by AC Transit bus from Berkeley. Each of us pulled a collapsible ‘granny’ shopping cart, and usually returned with them both full to the top. I followed Dad around the drive-in movie parking lot full of rows of goods. We’d shop for musical instruments, valuable books, other treasures, and sometimes a case of apples. If there was a vendor selling apples and room in a cart, Dad would request a sample be cut, with the promise of a full-case purchase in the event it met with his approval. I never saw anyone refuse him this taste, and that in itself was a valuable life lesson not lost on a young, attentive and openly curious Howard.

In my 20’s, my first ‘real’ job was as the Cashier/Bookkeeper at the California School of Professional Psychology. Living alone for the first time! On lunch break I’d ride my bike to shop for the week’s produce. Monterey Market was a huge place dedicated purely to produce. They had many varieties of apples.

What’s more, for popular varieties, they offered two or even three sizes, so you could get exactly what your heart desired.

I never saw my father take a bite out of a whole apple.

Dad always cut an apple to eat it, so I did too. I carried a Swiss Army Knife for this purpose and I enjoyed two apples a day, while at work. People at CSPP sometimes teased me a little bit about eating two apples a day. I’d say that there were a couple of doctors I was intent on keeping away.

Watching me cut out the core, a coworker commented, “The core is the most nutritious part, blah, blah, blah,” which I ignored, the first time. A few weeks later she repeated her pith advice as I cut another apple. I said, “Here,” reaching forward, “You can have them,” depositing the core sections into her hand.

She accepted them in silence. I don’t suppose she ate them.

What is certain is that she left me in peace about apple cores after that.

In my 30’s we lived in Boise and I had access to wholesale produce. I followed my Dad’s example of buying apples by the case. I’d store as many as possible in the refrigerator, and the remainder in a deep, low kitchen cabinet which stayed cooler than the rest of the kitchen. I reliably ate 2-3 apples a 66

day, and the rest of the family might eat one per day.

At Flying Pie, an employee who had watched me prep perhaps 100 apples over the years murmured as I cut one, “You do that amazingly well.” I followed my Dad’s pattern. First the apple is cut in half vertically (stem-to-bud). Next the core is removed from each half, leaving each half with a ‘v’ shaped groove. For extra style points, before the first cut, you glance at the apple, until you see a straight line which transects from blossom to stem. Cut along that axis. The result may not be half the apple, but it will be half the core and according to my Dad’s pattern, that is the more important thing.

In my 40’s, I continued to buy apples by the case.

One day, I happened to glance into the nearly empty produce cabinet and caught a glimpse of something waaay in the back. I got down on the floor, reached into the farthest corner and with astonishment retrieved a completely dried out apple. It was the size and weight of a ping pong ball, wrinkled as a raisin and pure black. Somehow, this apple didn’t rot when it rolled back to the deepest corner. It was perfect, a small stem, completely dried out. A little sticker still clung to the deeply grooved surface, proudly proclaiming ‘Golden Delicious’. Chance conditions had aligned and allowed it to dry up and wither, completely intact.

I was absolutely enthralled by this little miracle. I showed the family and then put it on a kitchen ledge. At times I’d admire it, pick it up and stare with wonder. I treasured it for ten years.

Until…

In my 50’s, I realized it wasn’t in the kitchen, anywhere.

I searched all the kitchen shelves and then asked my partner if she knew where it was. She replied vaguely, “I don’t know what happened to it.” I resisted the urge to scream. I had never disclosed how much l loved this little marvel; it was a secret even from myself. I mourned silently, said nothing, partly out of shame at the ridiculous circumstance of treasuring a dried-up apple.

The Persian mystic poet Rumi said you cannot know a thing without its opposite. You cannot really know darkness, without light; cold, without heat; separation without love. Only through its absence did I accurately understand the depth of meaning that apple held for me. Yet even with this lesson, I have fallen into the same complacency with far, far greater treasures which are now beyond my reach.

Nothing lasts forever, but that apple came damn close!

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In my 60’s, the prompt in Heidi Kraay’s writing class was ‘Apple’.

I searched an interior landscape for connections and memories triggered by ‘Apple’. Several I hadn’t thought of in decades showed up. This one held up its hand the highest and said, “Pick me!”

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PIPPIN

Carol Lindsay Marielle lay floating in the water below the sheer cliff wall, hundreds of swallows darting in and out of their mud nests, up, down, left, right, with lightning flicks of their wings.

Frenetically, she thought, an apt use for her ‘word of the week’, assigned to her just yesterday by her mother. She would be sure to describe this moment to her parents at dinner tonight, dropping the word casually, impressing them with her ability to quickly fold such a word into her vocabulary.

From flat on her back, the sky was a blue dome hung with brilliant white cumulous clouds, their underbellies flat as a ruler, as if a wire had been drawn clean and straight across their base so they might scoot above the earth with no friction.

The white was of such intensity she had to squint to stare at the clouds, so she closed her eyes and waited for one to pass over her, the shadow turning the inside of her eyelids from blood orange to almost purple, then back again as the cloud moved on.

She slowly drifted, pondering the rooted nature of humans, ever tied to the earth by their feet. What might it be like to enter the three-dimensional freedom of the atmosphere, released from the ground to look down on the world from the air? She knew people flew in airplanes and hot air balloons, she had seen it in National Geographic magazines, and had read that one could even see the curvature of the earth from high altitude. But to defy gravity and fly on one’s own power, like the swallows, to maneuver through and with the air, not just breathe it or feel it on one’s skin when the wind blows.

She swam to the cliff and climbed to a ledge six feet above the water, causing an uproar among the swallows as they flew in alarm from their nests. She stood on the threshold of the rock shelf, curling her toes over the rim, focusing her vision on the far shore to calm her breath. Drawing her arms out wide, she launched herself as high and far as she could, eyes wide open, seeking the moment when she might escape the pull of gravity and hover in the atmosphere, even if just for a second.

The afternoon wore on and Marielle climbed higher and higher up the cliff face, finding small footholds and rock projections from which to leap into the water, her stomach tumbling with every plunge. Each time she found a reference point on the 69

opposite bank to determine if she floated mid-air before falling, each time disappointed that she sank like a stone.

With the last of the sun, she climbed to the uppermost reaches of the cliff, over twenty feet high, the contours of the lakebed clearly visible through the haze of the water. To jump from any point on the cliff was strictly forbidden by her parents, let alone from this height, the danger obvious even to her at age thirteen. She knew she ought to head home but instead found herself weighing options and consequences while peering over the edge, the sound of her heart pulsing in her ears. A swallow flew up and over the cliff top, inches from her knees, deftly veering back down the rock face and over the surface of the water, effortless and nimble. Marielle took ten steps back from the edge and ran full steam over the precipice.

When she crawled from the water, the western horizon held but a waning strand of orange and the cool air from the upper canyon was moving down the lake, chilling her wet body.

She put on her shoes and hurried home through the meadow, conjuring multiple explanations for her lateness, all of them involving swimming and losing track of time, none of them entailing her feet leaving solid ground. She had never lied to her parents before but knew her antics on the cliff would be sure to cause worry and a certain measure of punishment, so she practiced her excuses as she ran.

Nearing the house, she saw there were no lights on, both puzzling and surprising her. As she stepped foot on the front porch, her mother’s voice called from the darkness.

“There you are, come sit with us. The moon just crested the hill.”

Steam rose from coffee cups at the far end of the porch, smoke-like in the amber glow of moonlight, her parents’ hands visible but their faces concealed by the shadow of the eave.

“Oh hi, I didn’t see you guys,” Marielle said brightly.

“You scared me!”

She immediately regretted her choice of words, imagining their fear at her lateness and opening the door to a reprimand. Instead, they remained oddly calm and invisible in the shadows.

“Dinner leftovers are in the fridge. Help yourself,” her mother said, followed by what sounded like a suppressed chuckle.

Marielle went into the kitchen, suddenly ravenous. On her third 70

helping of food her mother appeared by her side.

“My, you’re certainly hungry. You must have had an active day.”

“Uh…I guess,” Marielle stammered, her cheeks reddening. “Just the usual. You know. It was so hot I did a lot of swimming.”

“It was a good day for it,” her mother replied. “By the way. Your Dad and I found a new ‘word of the week’ for you.

Come up with definitions tonight and use them in sentences, then we’ll go over them tomorrow morning.”

“Yeah, sure,” Marielle said, now completely flummoxed by her parents composed behavior.

Upstairs in her room, she found a piece of paper on her desk with the word ‘mendacious’ carefully written in her mother’s best handwriting. She got out her dictionary and was shocked at the definition: ‘…not telling the truth, lying’. Marielle laid back on her bed, suddenly feeling hot and ill, her stomach in knots. They knew.

She slept sporadically that night and woke early to her mother peeling apples for a pie.

“Come help me,” she called to Marielle. “I just picked these pippins and they’re exceptional.”

Together they skinned the apples and cut them into small pieces, tossing them with sugar and cinnamon.

“Go ahead and have a bite,” her mother encouraged.

Marielle popped a chunk into her mouth, the sweet followed by a surge of intense tart on the back of her tongue.

“I love pippins,” her mother said. “It’s as if a normally sweet apple gets to have a little adventure, be a bit naughty,” she said, winking at Marielle before folding the apples into the pie crust. Marielle burst into tears.

“I’ve been mendacious!” she sobbed.

After a full confession of her cliff jumping sins, she and her parents sat on the porch eating hot pie straight from the oven. They discussed the hazards of the cliff and the potential for hidden rocks below the surface, the importance of checking underwater before jumping, and above all, being truthful with her parents about her activities. As they sat and talked, the land around them slowly woke up, birds and dragonflies drifting by, Ponderosa pines emitting a sweet, resinous scent with the warming sun, and in the distance, the heavy chopping sound of a piliated woodpecker. Marielle inhaled deeply. She listened 71

to the voices of her parents and the familiar sounds of the woods and felt a comforting sense of being cradled in this place, protected and safe. Forgiven.

That night she was jostled awake to her mother sitting on the side of her bed, looking otherworldly as the moonlight through the window backlit the halo of her wiry hair.

“Marielle,” her mother said urgently. “Get up. Come with me!”

“Mama, what’s wrong?” Marielle said.

“Nothing, love. I just need you to come with me. Leave your nighty on but put on your shoes.”

The porch outside was draped in full moon shadows, trees, branches, and needles lying in perfect black silhouette on the ground. Her mother turned abruptly and walked down the path through the meadow without looking back, then climbed up a steep game trail that led to the top of the cliff. A slight breeze blew across the lake below, scattering the moonlight into thousands of shards on its surface. They sat in awed silence, side by side, watching the splinters of moon undulate and ripple.

Her mother reached for Marielle’s hand.

“Why did you jump from here?” she asked without verdict.

Marielle thought for a moment. “Because I wanted to glide in the air, without gravity. Like the swallows.”

“And did you?” her mother asked.

“No. Well, maybe for a second. I’m not sure,” she answered.

Her mother stood up and pulled her nightgown over her head, naked and stark in the moonlight. “C’mon then. Show me how, Pippin,” she grinned.

Marielle took off her pajamas, held her mother’s hand tightly, and together, they leapt.

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SUNDAY DINNER Marsha Spiers

It’s one of those warm, fuzzy memories. You know the kind. They bring a faint smile to your lips and, if you can keep the things that follow in later years at bay, a tug to your heart.

We would all be loaded in the car. No small feat for there were seven of us kids. The trip to the ranch around the winding mountain road had been taken so often, that it seemed to go by quickly. The ranch sat nestled at the base of the hills surrounded by fields of hay, with the creek meandering through the middle. Horses and cattle dotted the landscape. A few miles away sat one of those sleepy small towns that had seen prosperity once, but a long time in the past. There had even been a small teaching college in its heyday, but now it was boarded and silent.

The town served the needs of the ranchers that lived close with a grocery store and a gas station.

My Grandparents would be waiting at the end of the long, tree lined drive, in their pink farmhouse. Busy, mind you, not just sitting around. They were some of the most industrious people I was to ever know. The same was expected of you when you came to visit. I don’t remember ever going there to just sit and visit, unless it was on the yearly pilgrimage to see their Christmas tree. It was truly a thing of wonder to a small child.

They had those amazing candlestick lights that had bubbles that magically rose in their tiny tubes. It was always decorated perfectly, with all the tinsel hanging in exact order. You see, that was the kind of mother my father had…exacting.

Grandma was a tiny woman, but strong and always busy. She raised seven children and buried three of them.

Worked on the ranch like a man and grew a large garden to feed them all. My memory is of her always in a dress with an apron.

She grew that garden right up to the day she died. Her flowers were her pride and joy. It was said that a weed knew it didn’t have a chance, so it didn’t even bother coming up. She ran a tight ship. You could eat of the floor in her kitchen. She went so far as to starch and iron her sheets and tea towels. She was so busy, in fact, that I never remember a hug or word of encouragement. It wasn’t that she didn’t speak much, in fact, she had a loud and carrying voice. We children knew that, no matter where we were or what mischief we were doing that voice would carry to us and find us out.

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The orchard was my favorite place to hide. The trees had been there for many years, so they were large and productive. There was a tall row of lilacs separating the house yard from the orchard, so, if somehow you could manage to be quiet, you could eat the apples and play wonderful, pretend games, until someone caught you. Grandma always said the orchard was no place for children. She said we would break the limbs of her trees and trample the fruit that had fallen. She was right about all the damage we could and did do, but she was very wrong about it being no place for children.

Past the cellar, and down the hill, the creek separated the house from the corrals and the barns. The only way across on foot was a tree that had been laid bank to bank. It had been planed on one side to make it traversed more easily. It was still narrow, and good balance was required to make it across with out ending up in the stinging nettles and the creek.

The chicken coop was on the barn side of the creek and it was one of our jobs to gather the eggs. Some of my brothers and sisters liked that job. It held terror for me. Just going into that little dusty room and having to shut yourself in with all those chickens, who didn’t want you in there, took all the courage I could muster. But that wasn’t the end. You then had to stick your hand under the sitting hens and steal their eggs. They always sensed my fear and started to squawk and flap and fly around. Once one of them started, it soon spread to all of them and pure pandemonium would break out. To this day I can recall the feeling of hopelessness as those chickens flapped and squawked around my head.

After you finished your work in the garden, the orchard or the chicken coop, grandma always fed us. She would set the big table in the dining room and there was always lots to choose from. She would use the cloth tablecloth and the good dishes.

Grandpa, on hot summer days, would often bring the ice cream freezer to the back porch and make us a special treat. It was hard to be patient while the crank was turned ever so slowly. He was very particular about how it was handled. The ice had to be just the right size. The salt had to be added just so and the crank had to be turned so many times a minute. If you were the one who helped the best, you could have the pleasure of eating your ice cream off the beaters. I’m not sure why the ice cream tasted better off those beaters, than in a bowl, but I know it did.

Many years have passed since those Sunday trips to the 74

ranch. Someone else now owns it and the little pink farmhouse has been torn down and replaced. My grandparents have passed on and all that remains are the memories and a cookie jar. It’s shaped like an apple and it used to sit on the kitchen counter in my grandparents’ home. It sat by the back door and, if you were very good you could have a cookie as you were leaving. Never when arriving. You see, small children and cookies would make crumbs on a kitchen floor so clean you could eat from it.

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TREE Adam did not want the apple for the apple’s sake; he wanted it because it was forbidden.

MARK TWAIN

THE RETELLING

Celia Scully

In the beginning, there was the Word, the garden and the apple of our conceits.

Anon.

1.

Sturdy little apple tree adorned in ruby red, when you were cast from Eden, through no fault of your own, did you think to ask, like Job, “Why, Lord, me?”

No. In free fall, shock and fear, there was no time for such.

But I will tell you my story; let you be judge and jury: was justice done when all were punished for the curiosity of one?

But weren’t there two?

True. But hear me out.

2.

Life was simple until that couple came along— he— a bit of a dullard, naming all in sight, content to do as he was told; she—the lively, inquisitive one, bent on self-improvement and enjoying life to boot.

Why the Lord chose to test them, I cannot fathom. Did He, who knew all things, not know how badly it would end?

Why root a tree mid-garden, whose fruit a sacred-secret held, then say, “Don’t touch; don’t eat,” and point at me?

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I had to act, and quickly. My plan, so eloquent in its simplicity— no fruit/no problem—made me laugh out loud, which woke Big Snake who had been napping.

Grouchy and annoyed, he rattled his fearsome tail at me and swore to soon get even.

Foolishly, I paid no heed, for I was caught up in the glory of the story folks would later tell: how a humble little apple tree sacrificed its red-ripe bounty to save a naïve couple from its own cupidity.

Revenge came swift and sugar-coated as the woman fell for Big Snake’s fiction, tasted of my fruit, and waited for an adrenaline-rush of godly super-knowledge— then tossed the apple to her mate and said, “You try.”

How ironic that her name and mine should be forever linked in legend, myth and bible story: she, as original sinner; and me—the innocent one— as the bad apple.

I ask you, “Is that fair?”

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3.

Sturdy little apple tree, I’ve heard your story through and through but judge and jury cannot be.

For I, too, know God’s forte is not fairness.

But let me ask you this: when you were freed from Eden to live a life so rich in film and brand and ‘oft retelling, was not a favor done?

Good point, my friend, and one that had escaped me. There is no going back, nor would I, if I could.

My DNA is wired for bigger, greater things— in my crystal ball I see: Breaking News…Cosmic Apple Discovers New Eden in The Pleiades.

Stay tuned, for the fate of Paradise lies in the stars where myth and Space Age meet: will history record a doomed repeat or obviate the Second Coming?

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EVE-GRABS-THE-APPLE CMarie Fuhrman She twirls him in her left hand, a small red, merry work of art. It is not just superficial. She holds a bruised apple. She’s read about it in some book: a couple of these Indians up in Connecticut, (before this one), was dizzied by his heat. By him, she is not. “I do own Miss Universe. I do!” He pulls the words like the pin of a grenade and she, she just knows things.

“I do understand beauty and he’s not. He’s bruised, opened up to wet white ribs, riddled.” (If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband, she lifts the stickers from his bruised skin.) But now the apple has moved and he failed. He’ll have to admit that when bodies first touched the leaves of ache in the garden, he moved on her very heavily…”I moved on her like deliciousness.

I only know she is the color of something hired.” She wants to grab him by the pussy. The apple pulses. According to the white oval sticker, organized crime is rampant on reservations.

No other of the four thousand fifteen fruits she’s held think he might have more Indian blood than the tips of her fingers. He twists the stems of the reservations. Well. They have high cheek bones and somewhere, someone is sitting alone on a porch, Native American, but I don’t know if you would call her than by her teeth. She’s lucky, with her right hand she teaches various schools. Because she is a Native, she is more naked now than any apple has been since. Any two. “I am OK.” That she will tell you.

They don’t look like her children: Maybe this apple is McIntosh.

Maybe Red. She knows, it doesn’t matter. What he writes…It’s something bad she dreamt, something he gave to her after being an ass. She bets he’d make a great wife. We’re all like a red bird in her hand—she is setting red in us. *In the style of Dodie Bellamy’s “Cunt Up.” Sources used: Various quotes from D. Trump cunted with Natalie Diaz’s “I Watch Her Eat the Apple.”

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ARS POETICA Francis Judilla So like Nancy was saying somethin’ about Cthulhu and circles over by 6th and Vista— her new place had the bad vibes.

Me being I, I was all “Nah!” But she wasn’t having it.

So like Nancy brought the crew— Me and Nancy and Dave and Sarah, and we were all “Wassup spectre!” but nothing happened so we dug our graves.

Mine was pink by the stairs, Sarah and Nancy arguing for the kitchen. Then Sarah said “Yo, we really gonna do this?” And ol’ Dave got cold feet. “This ain’t for me,” and he left.

The bad vibes got badder. Then an apple tree: “Timber!” the apples screamed.

“Not again,” Nancy said.

O, what a massacre: the delicious no longer golden.

Nancy stepped out of the grave and dropped an iceberg.

What a gal!

Sarah whispered, “Where do we go from here?”

The spectre rearranged the alphabet soup: Isn’t that the point?

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THE EVOLUTION OF EVES Janet Schlicht

They had to make me into a subversive. It was the only way. Or it wasn’t, but the holy men of the day cleaved to the idea that it was I who condemned us to a loss of innocence and grace.

And so my story becomes this: that after Adam and I had been living a blissful life in the garden of Eden for untold millennia, I was tempted into evil by the wily serpent and with one bite of the deep red apple, caused All Mankind to be cast out of the beauty and bounty that was Eden. This is a story that many children hear and learn before they are able to read, and so it is buried deep into their subconscious in a way that will inform their entire lives.

My story has been misrepresented. In truth, Adam and I had everything going for us back then. We held each other in deep trust, and we had more than enough food of every kind from the garden. There was a serpent, yes, but we paid him little mind. He wrapped himself around tree limbs, he slithered through tall grasses as snakes are wont to do. And we had apples, deeply luscious apples of which we freely ate.

But the holy men needed a story that would be good for telling and retelling. They needed a way to create a fear of God in the swarms of people. They had not so much as a thin papyrus with our story written on it, only the word of mouth from their ancestors and the ancestors before that. They needed to write it down. They needed an origin story. They sat in their dark caves wearing their black robes and thought deeply about it. And the image they kept tripping over as they attempted to write the story was me. My naked story was born in the dark gatherings of their imaginations. Eve, unclothed, nubile, cavorting through an impossible abundance. Their own thoughts created such irresistible desires that they could not concentrate on writing the story. What to do with a woman like me? What to do with women, who aroused always such unholy thoughts. The malign serpent, of course. The forbidden apple.

Weakness as a female failing. The story began to write itself, and what could I do about it, timeless as I was, living in a sort of magical reality.

Sealed in the scriptures, voiceless and powerless, I became a two-dimensional version of myself for some unknown period of time, a moment being the same as a millennium to 84

me. As generations of children learned of me in this way, there was no way to correct them. The men of the Church paid artists for their depictions of a woman shamed, a woman covering her body with her hands, a woman whose face was twisted by the ugliness of her deed. I had long despaired of regaining my own true form in any meaningful way. I should not have been surprised, then, when the big boys of the Church began to see an urgent need for a better version of me. The architecture of their story about women was resting on just a single support, and they realized that made for a lopsided structure. By this time they were living in opulence and had switched from penitential black robes to red outfits with lacy sleeves made just for them in Brussels. They donned odd hats and marched with scepters to signify their importance.

They came up with Mary, of course: virginal, beatific, perfect in every way, giving life without ever succumbing to lust. She was sainted from the very first, painted on puffy white clouds and being assumed into heaven. The tempting curves of her body they swathed in long robes, to try to extinguish the disquieting thrumming in their gorgeous red vestments. At first, I expected that I might detest her. She was, after all, often pictured with an apple in her hand or at her feet. My apple. My power. She got so much attention and she remains the object of so much veneration that I could hardly help being just a dab jealous. But we got to know each other. She is as aware as I am of the façades put in place by those in charge to try to obscure the fact that woman contains multitudes, and that each of us is holy in a way that the men who created us could never begin to comprehend.

Mary had been created, venerated, made into countless statues. And still the holy men were filled with a consuming desire. They denied it, of course, professed to love only the lord while under their black robes or their red robes, even in the presence of the flickering candles of the sanctified church, the pulse of their need would not be silenced. Over the ages, as I continued to gather dust in Genesis, men continued to behave badly while I shouldered the blame. They behaved badly even when they believed that Mary was watching them. Not all men, of course. But many, and in many ways both subtle and overt. Girls, young women are subjected to degradation and exploitation: the girl tricked into a life of sexual slavery; the girl surrounded by a group of upstanding young men who will 85

go on to become judges and senators; women of wartime who become spoils going to the victors; women who partners bruise them physically and emotionally. Their bodies and spirits used up, they become twisted, despicable creatures. They are spoiled goods.

The manipulation of my story by those who wrote the books lives on. That is not something that I can change. And of course there is no going back to Eden—too many memories for me, and besides, it’s surely not the same place it once was. I have made myself a life. I salvaged some apple seeds at the time I was banished, and the orchard I planted thrives. I’ve created a small business here in my mythological world, and I employ fifty sisters with picking and selling apples and making my signature cider. Adam visits from time to time; I’m not sure whether he comes to see me or eat my apple pie, but I’m comfortable with whichever is the case.

I keep an eye on the disordered lives of women in the larger world, as I believe witnessing has a power of its own. Does the long arc of justice bend, as they say, toward a better life for women? I like to think so, and I see much evidence of it, of strong and capable women who stand up one by one. The deep rootedness of misogyny begins to fray at the edges. Women begin to taste the metaphorical apple, devour its succulence, know it’s magic. They begin to return us to the dream, to the garden in which we are all aspects of the divine. Women are no longer dissolved into anonymity. We see their names, we see their faces, in the news and on social media. Every Eve joins the march with her sisters toward higher ground. There, she joins with people of both genders who call for the casting away of shame, where we are united as humankind in a true Eden, a place of blossoming and bounty.

May it be so.

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FORBIDDEN

Rebecca Evans On my second night in Weymouth in 1991, I arrived at The Sailors Return around six and scanned the room, waiting to meet the man of my dreams, Ray. I went to the loo, fixed my lips, re-lined my eyes, and repaired my mascara. My heavy sweater draped mid-thigh, covering leggings. My hair, tight with curls and tucked behind my ears, frizzed more than usual. I sat at the bar, nodded to the barmaid.

“Cider please,” I said.

“Half or full?” she wiped her hands on a tea towel tucked into the waist of her jeans.

“Half.”

I hadn’t tasted cider prior to my military assignment at RAF Upper Heyford. The method to process the brew has stood the test of time. The Vinetum Brittanicum, the Treatise of Cider, written in 1676, showcases how little has changed in 340 years.

Bottled fermentation, considered vogue, had launched in the 1630’s.

Man has carried liquid in a variety of vessels; skins, gourds, pottery, metal, glass.

Ten thousand years ago, we dug wells.

Three thousand years ago the Chinese brewed tea.

The Phoenicians from the Middle East invented bottles twenty-five hundred years ago.

Then there’s the apple.

Malus domestica.

Spitter apples, best-suited for brewing cider, earned their name due to bitterness and initial instinct to spew them, then coat your tongue with something sweet, like honey or, perhaps, tar.

Apples have been around since the launch of time. * Some believe Eve tempted Adam with an apple. Most Jews don’t read the text this way. Eve eats first. Adam consumes afterwards.

No temptation required. The idea of temptation surrounding a forbidden fruit was derived from Christianity, St Augustine in particular, and has become the basis for a great amount of misogyny.

Tempting.

Plucking.

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Biting.

Falling.

In the process, apples acquired a bad rap, blamed as the culprit, though the true forbidden fruit remains unnamed.

Sages offer assumptions on the fruit’s identity based on clues throughout the Torah: Wheat: represents knowledge, originally meant to grow on a tree.

Grapes: no other fruit brings as much misery as the grape, thanks to wine (I can attest). Noah planted grapes upon leaving the Ark, and in his drunkenness, things sour. One interpretation suggests that Ham, Noah’s son, had sexual relations with Noah’s wife, yes, Ham’s mother. Other commentary includes homosexual rape, castration, and curses for generations to follow. Grapes could easily result in destruction and should be consumed with caution, but consumed never-the-less as wine (or grape juice), holds significance in Jewish rituals, such as weddings and Seders.

Fig: the majority of rabbinic lies with this fruit, applying midah k’neged midah. Measure for measure. Since it is believed to cause Adam and Eve’s act of disobedience, the fig leaves cover Adam and Eve’s nakedness, hiding their shame. The righting of wrongs.

Etrog: this “tree was good to eat,” meaning even the wood tasted lovely, though I’ve not bitten into its bark. Etrog relates to the Aramaic word for desire, which could be akin to forbidden.

No one knows if the Torah’s prohibition of a forbidden fruit included all these trees or only one. Perhaps the tale is more allegorical, representing fruit as the essence within us that grows from understanding the difference between good and evil. What is known is the possibility of error, an accidental translation of apple. The Latin word malum, meaning evil, associated with malum, which is another Latin word borrowed from the Greek and translates apple. * I checked my watch, six thirty. Still no sign of Ray. A Brit sat beside me, striking a conversation.

“You American?”

“Why is that always the first question?” I asked. This was not the man I wanted to engage. Where the hell was Ray? “Sorry, Lass. What would you like me to say?”

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“How about, ‘what are you doing still alive?’”

He paused, looked at me, took a slow sip from his glass, raised it as if to toast me or maybe say “touché,” and promptly left. My impact on men in my day.

“I’ll take another,” I told the barmaid.

“Any food?” she asked and leaned on her elbow atop the bar.

“No. I’m good.”

I thought Ray could be it. THE one. My one. He wasn’t here. Something inside me knew he wouldn’t show, knew I’d never see him again and then I realized, of course, I’m too screwed up to keep a good man. Why would he bother? Or maybe he was married and had received a call from his wife, the one from his real life, the one back home, somewhere stateside, and he felt guilty about flirting with me and now couldn’t face me.

I had journeyed to Weymouth to get away from the base, from military life, from the war, though only for the weekend. I thought I had traveled for some semblance of solace.

Maybe I wanted to leave. For good. Only my unit would notice my absence, reporting me as AWOL. Since the war or conflict or what-ever-the-hell they wanted to label it—an impact of bombs and death and missiles and gases and p-tabs—had technically ended, I wouldn’t be counted as a deserter. That meant something.

I rubbed my wrist-scars, less noticeable over the years, as if they had permeated, became more of me. I traced them, routing up my arm. The longer one, a reminder from the time I had crashed through glass chasing my brother. The shorter slashes criss-crossing my forearm marked my feeble and frantic sawing with a razorblade.

My second failed attempt.

I began to cry.

If Ray didn’t show, what was the point? Someone fresh, newly into me, now dismissing me. Dismissal. A far too familiar emotion. * I spent eight years at Heyford, tossing my share of cider, and, if I’m honest, my feelings of abandonment had little to do with Ray or any other man. The internal conflict of continuous loss wears a person to their core. Those apples saved me from troubling mental territory, helped fog reality to at least push me through the night. That forbidden fruit washed my anguish, my 89

guilt of war-participation. Though whenever I swallow it down today, the spitting taste reminds me of those days when I longed to die, when I had little to live for, and like memory often does, it lures you back, with the drop of scent or the sting on the tip of your tongue, as if you are in real-time. As if you are exiting the Garden of Eden for all of time.

ORCHARD If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

CARL SAGAN

PULSE VEIN, BURST JUGULAR Heidi Kraay

pockets of skin cough between teeth tart slice mindful lips each hollowed candy orb a piece of history racing through orchards over grass barefoot watch for roots clawing up and all the ways we change it’s how a thing grows into sky into moon and on and on a thousand years bitty worms wrap round bruises salivate in this shell a bubble of meat like rare steak drip bloody oh yes the way we change from sugar crust, pie bites, caramel melting over to leaking out death on soil

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HER SIMPLE TOUCH OF MYTH Heidi Kraay

we let skin go rough aging with us wrinkles weight my gut rip into flesh the stringy bits fall down her face tracing taste buds hands get sappy inside, autumn everywhere raw feet land leaf droppings while fated moon glows desire out my throat tangy bites layer through teeth sticking lip to tongue this winter white day incongruous to eating apples finds our bellies all Sunday toes to ears flakes fall big like they’ll hold us forever in the measured way we ponder each fraction of a nibble grabbing smooth particles slow gnashing jaws

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LAST MEAL BEFORE CHANGE Heidi Kraay

white walls like an ice cave but warm here tacky floor like late night dive bar lope about making tunnels, sweet work a week I’d spend here a month if I knew time push body sack up with fingering legs my follicles taste the granules if I could conjure my next life here I would I’ll leave before then and find a tree inside this history of universe delicate star shapes wish for landscapes beyond gardens tremendous brown heads cocoon inside pockets like woody larvae acid toughness, poison blobs white blankets encase me not trapped, home cozy in delectable sheets avoid where stem starts to core a downward pointing stump duck under, stay a while longer zip on scuba gear, dive under surface a glimpse at dancing turtles cascading through time until holes meet reluctant caterpillar eats trail no more meat in my fruit 95

LOVE LETTER TO A CITY Amber Daley I didn’t expect to fall in love with you I’m an Idaho girl raised on farm-grown beets and sugar snap peas But one year after we were introduced my memories of you are just as sweet Oh golden, delicious, apple— Liza knew it well when she sang, “New York, New York”— to hold it on the tongue is to taste it twice Sweet even to the core your gaping Grand Central greets with promising skies before even stepping outside and the channels of hollowed earth beneath your metropolis hold delicious stories waiting to be told I long for the flavors I cannot photograph: The unsettling buzz of Chinatown with its fragrant, mysterious booths The steady rumble of the train beneath my feet The half breath of excitement caught in my chest upon glimpsing Manhattan’s skyline I think the street performers feel it, too A homeless musician’s desperate fervor cooks up sweat upon his brow His toothless grin and soiled garments betray skill But he is better than me, each day martyring himself before strangers because he will taste no other city’s fruit New York, New York I enjoy the quiet but thrilling zest of stepping into the crosswalk before the light turns green The cacophony of blaring taxi horns 96

doesn’t scare me nor does the dangerous gamble of walking alone through Central Park The delightful purr of the pedicab and the euphoric tang of paying far too much for a six block trek are moments that make my mouth water I miss your palatable theaters and piquant art scene With each bite of your succulent fruit affective juices spray into my eye I sit in the cavernous, quiet Majestic and plead with the masked man in tears, alongside Christine Daa’e And when Picasso’s “two” women stare in the mirror then back at me It’s like drifting through a haze tasting a world so unlike my nine to five See the cloud of thoughts rising above a sea of faces?

It’s like a spray of juice filling the air with reality after taking too large a bite The sway of swollen briefcases are metronomes keeping steady beat to pedestrians’ toes iPods are shoved in students’ ears so they can ignore the bitterness of impending deadlines And businessmen chew on their morning meetings trying to swallow the city’s aftertaste Though large, you are sweet and juicy Indeed, a chartreuse treasure you are to me I’m green with envy from a dozen states away wishing to be the cold-cheeked pink lady on the Circle Line, Red-skinned in a delicious Times Square winter or golden in the midst of a West Side sun The Hudson River never looked this beautiful in postcards So I didn’t think I’d enjoy your flavor However, the distance between earth and sky stirs me as my head swims 86 stories above 5th Avenue If the Big Apple is an acquired taste I’d be happy to sample it every day 97

Pointing in the air, the copper lady reminds me I must soon return home And so as quickly as my delicious dream began the fruit is consumed until the next time my tongue hums a memorable tune that goes a little something like this: “New York, New York I want to wake up in that city That never sleeps…”

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BETWEEN THE LANDS Eric Wallace

The great ocean was cruelly calm. Calm and black.

Black as the deepest shadows of a desert grave. And cunning, shooting sudden fierce shards of blinding light into the boat.

Out here on the Mediterranean, Jabari thought, light was not your friend. You baked, burned, poached like a sliver of rotting goat floating in palm grease.

The thin tent-cloth which had briefly shaded them had been stolen from its flimsy poles by a sneak thief of a night sirocco, leaving above only the chilly stars, then the ominous beauty of dawn, then the harsh climb of the ruthless sun.

Yesterday—was that yesterday or two days ago? Three?—it was waves. Waves taller than sand dunes. Waves angrier than raging camels, waves lurching, heaving, lifting the boat, slamming it down into the concrete-hard surface, the air filled with stinging spray and spume, snarling, salty upsurges, frigid waterfalls ripping and drenching. There were no life jackets.

Very safe crossing, easy. So it was said. A cruel joke.

Which was better? Storms from the sea or cremation from the sky? Jabari squinted in the hazy glare, his gritty eyelids resisting, looked at his fellow sufferers.

Those pressed around him came from Tunisia, Libya, Ethiopia, Chad, Niger, from refugee camps in Sudan. Drought, famine, religious persecution and war drove them like animals to the edge of the ocean, the lure of a future pulling at them from across the shimmering surface.

Here everyone was, cast upon the waters of this ancient sea, with places of safety surely not so far off, perhaps a rescue vessel even closer?

Rescue. Jabari bit his parched lips. There had been no rescue for his village from drought and disease, no rescue for his beloved wife, dead, his beautiful twin boys, dead. He had to move on.

People said flee north to Europe. Safety, work, a new life.

A confusion of so many colors. So many sad colors. You wear color for hope, for life, but the once-bright cheerfulness mocks you as you float in exhaustion, thirst. Red was especially sad. Jabari had buried Amara in her favorite red yelik, sewn and dyed by Amara herself.

A bewilderment of sounds, wailing, whimpering, 99

praying, moaning, a buzz of low tribal tongues, infants crying, beneath it all their puny engine’s lethargic rumble and the constant slush and swoosh of the ocean.

Jabari closed his eyes again. The sun blazed red through his eyelids.

The boat driver was a grim-faced Berber named Mehedi. As they’d squeezed aboard, he pointed a filthy finger at himself. Naqib Mehedi. He growled in Arabic, snarled a word or two in Amharic, barked short phrases in French. He spoke one English word, captain, with an ugly outthrust of his jaw and further jabs at his chest.

Mehedi sat in the stern on gas tanks padded with oily sheepskins. He gripped the tiller with a brooding, angry determination. He chewed khat, hawking small grassy balls and slimy brown streams. They didn’t always make it into the ocean. He never slept but dozed with one bloodshot eye half-open. He made it clear he had a curved Jambiya dagger tucked into the fat rope at his waist.

Far behind them now, lost in the blurred brightness, was Africa. Ahead, still unseen, was Europe, a cypher, a halfremembered promise. But also more worry. Before they’d left they’d heard rumors of boatloads of refugees turned away, of angry fighting on the beaches, of rejection and despair.

“Foolish rumors!” said the grinning overseers, herding people like sanga cattle. “Rumors,” the overseers scoffed, “are like the dirty foam at the shore, meaningless sea fluff filled with nothing but air! Forget the rumors! Europe wants you! Hurry, pay us and go!” The fatigued throngs chose to believe in welcoming arms.

Too many people. This little boat, this rubber dinghy, whatever it was, surely was built for no more than fifteen, yet the shouting overseers had crammed in more and more until it bulged beyond crowded, beyond teeming. Fifty? Sixty? Seventy?

Not counting the screaming babies.

And now, food and water had become an issue. The journey was taking forever. Overloaded and underpowered, the dinghy wasn’t fast. The storms had slowed them further. Jabari began to doubt that Mehedi could steer them on the shortest route with only the battered flip-open brass compass he consulted. Could he even find the promised lands?

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Shouldn’t the sun be behind us, are we going west, not north?

They had been told it would take perhaps three days.

But this was now the fifth or sixth. Had someone lied? Was this Berber taking them the wrong way? Were they already in hell?

Or was this heaven, a brutal parody of what anyone believed heaven to be?

On the seventh day, the growl of the engine changed to a stomach rumble, burped and gave way to silence.

Mehedi cursed, fussed, checked the fuel, raised the housing, tugged at wires, thumped at the carburetor, slapped his head. Hashim! Broken!

He rummaged in his camel saddlebag and pulled out a bulky telephone. Staring skywards, he tried to reach the satellite gods. They didn’t answer.

Hashim! Kaput! Mehedi’s voice held disbelief, scorn. Reluctantly, he gestured to the refugees, asking in Arabic if anyone knew what to do.

Jabari and the others knew nothing of engines. They knew nothing of satellite phones. They were farmers, goattenders, tentmakers, bakers, potters, weavers. No one spoke. No one stepped forward.

Mehedi sat on his makeshift bench and picked his nose.

The days scorched. At night a cold, white, scimitar moon mocked their anguish.

Water? Little left. Food? Becoming a thing of memory.

Jabari recalled a crumbling biscuit, a few shreds of jerky, a fig so wizened it could have been the shriveled heart of a long-dead pharaoh.

Gone were the blue-and-white relief agency packages, gone were the few boxes of Turkish fruit, gone were most of the jugs of water, tossed indifferently among them as they began to steal out of port.

One lucky man found a large scorpion aboard, smacked it with a trembling sandal. As others avidly envied, he ate it raw, pausing only to remove the stinger.

On his long trek to the coast, Jabari had stopped at an oasis. Green shade, soft, lush dates, cold, fresh water, surely from the fountains of paradise. His fevered mind curled like a wave. Might there be an oasis out here in the ocean? Was there any respite from these eternal salt waters and burning skies?

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Several times they saw fishing boats not many meters away. The fishermen always ignored their cries, turned their backs on those who raised their arms in supplication.

Long tankers and huge cruise ships slid silently along the far horizon. Out there were mirages, fata morganas, mindtwisted images, water spouts. Were those sea monsters swaying in the distant glare? If a monster dared to swim close, Jabari knew he would eat it.

The boat pitched, a chaos of smells, rotting brine, vomit, urine, feces, sweat, the stench of fear. They were seasick, dehydrated, spent, famished. Jabari licked his fissured lips.

It was a young Egyptian woman who raised the alarm. A high, incoherent jabbering. An accusatory, unsteady pointing.

Mehedi, hunched on his gas can throne, was furtively eating. As he recoiled, his tunic slipped, revealing a hoarded box on his lap. He fumbled for his dagger. A grin creased his dirty face. He felt in the box with his free hand. He pulled out a fat apple.

Jabari stared. This was no colocynth, the bitter, yellowgreen apple of the desert. This was a dazzling prize. Red, full and round.

Tafaha! Mehedi croaked. Pomme de Turc! He dangled the apple high by the stem, an executioner displaying a severed head.

Jabari felt delirious. He saw only the fruit. Red for danger. Red for the bulls the Spanish tormented. Red for— The dinghy rocked. The dagger blade glinted. The apple beckoned.

Jabari had tasted these fruits in Tripoli. Firm, sweet, of heaven itself. Heaven. He knew of the Christian miracle of the loaves and fishes, a few bites wondrously increased to feed a multitude. Might this one apple now fill all their bellies? He would slice it with that knife, share with everyone.

Miracles are dangerously close to hallucinations.

His muscles cramping, Jabari lunged. Mehedi swung the dagger. Blood spurted. Jabari collapsed.

Others rushed, shoved. Mehedi tumbled backwards, his mouth wide open, fell overboard, the apple flying from his hand.

Jabari sprawled face-first on the edge of the dinghy, mesmerized by the blue-black swells. He saw the apple float102

ing close, red as the insides of his eyelids, red as Amara’s burial robe, red as the blood oozing along the hot, stinking rubber.

A distant klaxon.

Jabari strained, tried to focus. Far off, a blur. A ship?

To rescue them? To force them back? Was it even there? Jabari wheezed, lowered his head, stared dreamily at the strangelylanguid waves.

The apple bobbed, round, red, gleaming in the relentless sun.

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BARREL The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.

ARTHUR MILLER

PLEASE REMEMBER WHEN I’M 90 Laureen Scheid

Please remember when I’m 90 Feed me Tim’s Jalapeno Potato Chips with an icy coke.

Applesauce from a pouch will be spit in your face.

Never play Neil Diamond. That man makes me cringe. Tupac is my jive.

I love movies about gangsters. The more F-bombs the better.

If I’m incontinent, keep in mind the wipes warmer you had when I was changing your diaper.

I do not celebrate Bath Day. We shower every day.

Pick a memory care facility with a dance floor.

Since you’re driving me, I like to listen to the radio. Not satellite playlists. I want to hear the local news and traffic reports and commercials about hypnosis.

I over pack at 40 and will surely continue to do so.

Put a Christmas tree in my room and keep it up all year round.

Make sure your father doesn’t get remarried after I die.

Raisins and prunes are not friends.

My desire to travel the world still burns. If mobility is an issue, Epcot is accommodating.

Dress me in my church clothes even though it’s not the Sabbath.

If we haven’t gone skydiving, now is a good time.

When you can’t find me, I’m looking for my grandchildren.

I want to ride a moped in Mānoa Valley again.

Remember me in my purple mu`umu`u at the Sapphire Room.

Hug Daddy.

Read Grandma’s journal.

Take care of your sister.

Hold me to sleep.

Mama Potato loves you. Always and forever.

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TIME AND AGAIN Sheila Robertson

(reflections in an old orchard near Normandy’s Beaches) Gray light swings astride shattered hulks of jagged cement as dawn extinguishes night’s crystalline stars Fog and memory sift in and out of crumbling artillery emplacements leftovers from some madman’s discarded war socketed above empty beaches Death bunkers along sea cliffs caressing battle’s rusting instruments Garish graffiti mocks pillboxes in Lies confronted by Truths Battles fought in the names of gods where ambition moulders beneath wayside crosses hung with tortured Christs witnesses to buried details History like a palimpsest scraped and written over forgotten and repeated emerges in Light To gather with Hope in sunny orchards where the tang of fermenting apples scents the warming air

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PASSAGES

Sheila Robertson Spring ruptures from bud-promise to blossom clouds infused with bee hum Summer’s time flashes past Its flight sketched in gold-leafed sun in dazzling sea in fiery acts of Living Fall releases leaves foreshadows regret We should have worked harder We should have paid attention We should have offered more Golden light no longer sparkles It wavers weakly falters like drones drunk on spoiling apples Until winter masses with certainty Cold Piercing Sharp Bees’ tattered wings skeletal leaves and life’s stings litter the darkening way

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DIAGNOSIS

Debra Southworth Man in the white coat, smug stethoscope around your neck, Snatched the handle and upturned my apple cart.

Shoved it under the 3:39 bus to Lost Palouse.

Grannies rolling under the bed, Braeburns behind the couch, Pink Ladies into the gutter.

Just out of reach, can’t pick them up.

Further away they roll out of control.

Under the taco truck, Into the laundromat, Roll behind the empty mall, stinking Mr .Jonagold.

Hey, white coat man, you missed one!

One Gala in my hand, now in my mouth. The taste is sweet.

Sweet juice of hopeful chutney.

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I HAVE ALWAYS LOVED POISON Neal Dougherty Apple seeds contain arsenic, the go-to for homemakers to get rid of rodents and fools.

Not enough arsenic to kill or even sicken a rat.

The doctor’s old maxim is a callback to homeopathy. The symptoms the arsenic causes in well bodies, can be cured by the same, in my body.

But the bitter, black seeds lack potency.

Maybe there is a slight kick in the juxtaposition of the crunch into the fruit’s flesh with the taut snap when I pierce the skin; a rush from biting in through the pulp and pulling back the peel that I catch with my teeth that could treat what I’ve got, for a moment.

And in a moment, the skin will be all peeled away.

The exposed flesh will ripen and streaks of yellow and brown will show like they’d been waiting there all along.

A ripe, naked apple smells boozy.

Another bite would burn slightly down the back of my throat.

But not enough to set me ablaze.

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JEAN COCTEAU’S APPLES Grove Koger

Les pommes des Hespérides: Notes pour un film / The Apples of the Hesperides: Notes for a Film

By Jean Cocteau; ed. by Bosquet Équarrisseur; trans. by Anthony Coleman Éditions Villefranche 47,50 € / $52.95 Shortly before his death in 1963 at the age of 74, Jean Cocteau began working on a new project, a film based on the Greek myth of the Golden Apples of the Hesperides. Thanks to Cocteau’s adopted son, Edouard Dermit, we have known for some time that Cocteau made rough drafts of several scenes for the film, as well as a number of pen-and-ink sketches, but, until now, that has been virtually all we knew. The project was fated to remain unfinished, and, with the passage of time, interest in Cocteau’s multitudinous artistic productions has faded.

Students still watch Orphée in film school, but does anyone else, anywhere?

Therefore, it’s all the more surprising, if highly welcome, to have this final testament from the man who spent his life meeting Serge Diaghilev’s famous challenge, “Astonish me!”

Fragmentary as it is, it exhibits Cocteau’s lifelong fascination with myth, the wellsprings of art, and the inadequacy of ordinary human perception. As to the first, he once remarked that “I do nothing but follow the rhythm of fables,” and regarding the last, “To see within, turn your eyes to the horizon.” Even if, it seems, you have no eyes with which to see.

According to the Greeks, the Hesperides were the “daughters of the evening,” maidens who guarded the golden apples that grew on a tree in the far west and that gave the sunset its colors. For his eleventh labor, Héraclès was required to steal them.

In Cocteau’s ironic version, this myth is subsumed into the story of a petty thief also named Héraclès. It seems that he has seen a painting in a Marseilles gallery that depicts the apples and that, he knows, a wealthy businessman will pay a high price for. He steals it, but in making his getaway by car, he runs over a young boy in the street. The boy dies and Héraclès is arrested a few days later in a bar.

Cocteau apparently completed only a few rudimentary 112

scenes of Les pommes, and there’s no indication of how he would have dramatized Héraclès’ years of imprisonment. What we do get, after the scenes involving the theft and its immediate aftermath, is a glimpse of Héraclès’ latter days. Having been released from prison two decades later, blind and apparently destitute, he lives in a dingy apartment that holds little more than a narrow bed and a wooden table and chair. Its single window faces directly into an alleyway. We realize that the child (identified in Cocteau’s stage directions as Erichthonius) we see delivering a flagon of wine to his door is the very boy he ran over so many years before, unaged and unchanged aside from a horrible gash running down his face. Next, Héraclès’ addresses a woman— “élégante,” Cocteau describes her—cleaning his room as Athena.

Consulting a guide to Greek mythology, we learn that the goddess Athena retrieved the precious fruit and returned them to the Hesperides … and that Erichthonius was her adopted son. Has the goddess already fulfilled her obligation? Is she waiting to discover the painting’s whereabouts? Or has she something else in mind entirely? We never learn.

Blind though he is, Héraclès nevertheless is able to sense the warmth of the setting sun that reaches him through his window, and, in what we can guess would have been one of the final scenes of the film, holds up his hands to catch its warmth. What he doesn’t realize, of course, can’t realize, presumably, is that his window doesn’t face west. The heat he senses (and the light producing it) is a fortuitous reflection off a window across the alley—in Shakespeare’s phrase, a “pale fire.”

(The great novelist Vladimir Nabokov would later borrow the phrase for his 1962 novel.) Or—has he grasped the essence of the situation after all?

Other, more mundane questions also come to mind.

Cocteau’s films are so mesmerizing that, as we watch them, we don’t question their surface logic. But reading is a different experience. We can assume that Cocteau would have accounted in some way for the fate of the painting, but how can the apparently impoverished Héraclès afford an apartment, however bare? Pay for wine?

I’m not familiar with Éditions Villefranche, whose name appears to be signaling a connection with Cocteau’s favorite retreat, the little fishing town of Villefranche-sur-Mer on the Côte d’Azur. Nor do I know of Bosquet Équarrisseur, although the scholarly apparatus he provides for Les pommes is ample. The 113

book’s text is made up of crisp photographic reproductions of Cocteau’s sprawling handwriting matched on facing pages with an English translation by another unfamiliar individual, Anthony Coleman.

What might the stolen painting have looked like? We get an idea from one of the sketches Équarrisseur includes. It shows a footed dish piled with oculi—eyeballs—whose pupils are unnervingly dilated. And who might have played the thief? Cocteau seems to have realized that he would not live long enough to make the decision. His protagonist may have been blind, but he himself saw clearly. In Les pommes’ last entry, he wrote, nearly illegibly, “Dans trois jours, je vais être fusillé par les soldats de Dieu.” As one of Équarrisseur’s notes explains, Cocteau was remembering what he had been told some forty years before, on December 9, 1923, by his young lover Raymond Radiguet, who had contracted tuberculosis: “In three days, I am going to be shot by the soldiers of God.” Sure enough, Radiguet died three days later.

Author’s Note Aside from the quotation regarding sight, the conceit that Cocteau was working on a final film, and the existence of the book under review, everything in “Jean Cocteau’s Apples” is authentic, including the details of the myth and the anecdote about Raymond Radiguet. Likewise, there is nothing about the film that is not in accord with Cocteau’s well-known preoccupations.

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YOU GOT TOOK Alex Fascilla June 10 Dear Blanche, I was forced to kill the sunflowers hanging over my fence by sort of wringing their necks. They struggled some with seeds going everywhere so I had some fare when it was all over.

Shirley’ll be sore at me but I’m tired of hollering at her about ‘em when she’s out stretching her hides. They didn’t struggle, it only looked like it because twisting their heads off is harder than it looks and if there was a sill-o-ett of the whole ordeal you’d think I was strangling off a skeleton man; the seeds his hundreds o’ teeth.

I pray carrying isn’t bringing heaps of heartache your way, Blanche. This baby is gonna be the best thing for you and once things get stable again, I wanna help you bring it up. I don’t know about child rearing but I’d wager having breasts helps with the bonding and such. I’ve seen breasts a man can sling over him that you can fill with nourishment and that’s probably what I’ll do if it comes down to it; supposing that makes it think I’m the rightful father.

They’re cracking down on the rations again. Harold down the street looks like one them sunflowers I killed.

Sunday Regards, Rod _____________________________________________ July 22 Rodney!

Oh for hell’s sake Rodney what did I warn you about getting on Shirley’s bum side. I’ve seen her wrath bloom so big the heavens took pause. And you know they live off those seeds! Expect a response in kind.

I’ll decide if a baby’ll be best for me but I appreciate the sentiment all the same.

Speaking of, I got a dispatch from the Birth Ministry that it’s twins. I’ll give you a second to chew that cud before I tell you the most surprising thing…

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There’s a boy and girl in there. Can you believe it, Rodney?

All your nonsense about rearing might be needed, supposing you’ll care for the boy and I’ll rear the girl. That’s what I’m supposing once all the rations and upheavals blow over.

They say twins shouldn’t be possible anymore but lo, two miracles. I thought Gail for the girl and Fuller for the other.

Rodney, don’t go falling to pieces on me—keep in line. Arg! One of the ferals swiped a powder bun off the table and ran off. The thing’s middle looks like a snake that swallowed up a cannonball. I’m eating for three; danged feral.

Regards x 2, Blanche _____________________________________________ August 31 My Blanche, I’ll wring that feral’s neck.

Hot dang, twinnies! I need more about Fuller and Gail.

Boy, do I. On the other fence Beth-Anne’s ivy vines were growing over and dammit, Blanche, I couldn’t see my fence so I took to them with an ax seeing as that’s all I had. Well, one thing led to another and shoot, I’ve got a slash in my leg looking like a split stalk o’ rhubarb. Doc said I wasn’t fit to raise any kids on account of my recent behavior so I hauled off and let’s just say doc needs a doc now.

The Ministry of Crime tells me my plea won’t hold water. Oh and now Shirley. She was steamed about the sunflowers and she and Hare set fire to my front hedge. The whole time I’m watching it burn while laid up on my easy chair, I’m thinking about your news of the twins.

I figure it’s been a week since I had a bite of nourishment. I ate the last of them seeds and haven’t had a scrap since. Oh, and that hedge fire Shirley sparked caught up to the house and a quarter of the dang thing is exposed to open air now. No one knocks, now they holler “Rodney” from the yard and I have no trouble hearing ‘em. It’s getting colder up this way.

Harold from down the street finally passed, he was 116

shriveled up like a plum left near a hedge fire.

Warmest Regards, Rod PS Blanche, I’m in an out-reach to all rural folk. It’s a pilot program or pilot’s program as they call it with the Ministry of Language. Said they’d teach me better reading and writing and such. They said it doesn’t mean I’ll learn to fly. I asked. _____________________________________________ Oct, I don’t know Dearest Rodney, Oh my dear lord Rodney what did I tell you about hauling off and making trouble. I can’t stand to think Officials are sniffing around.

Stop and consider, Rodney, dammit! Think of Fuller and Gail.

Rod, before, they told me they’d make concessions on account of my special pregnancy, remember? Word around is the Birth Ministry got ‘took up’ by the Ministry of War and there is no money left for special treatment. Now how does that work, huh? And how about that Language Ministry, filling your mouth with words instead of food?

I’m alone and can barely move, as laid up as you with your split rhubarb. Oh and the other day, a man came to the house. Said he was from the Rations Unit and took all the buns I was storing and run off. Neighbor told me, “ain’t no Rations Unit, you got took.”

Last trip to the Repository of Medicine, the line was snaking out the door and down the road like a rattler and there I was, on the end, two kids rattling around in me, shaking like it was my warning.

Like a rattler, Rod. They told us all to go home, no more medicine. I walked four klicks. (A nice family put me in a wheeled barrow until my back ached too much and I asked to walk again.)

I’m real worried over here, Rodney. We need a plan on how we get these kids reared once they drop out me. Can you come to me? I think I love you, Rodney.

Hurry up, Blanche _____________________________________________

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December 7 My dearest Blanche and those she carries, I grew weary of the Pearson man hooting and hollering in my front yard and I arose--on account my leg felt better-and buried a pebble in his eye s’far he’ll think twice before he takes up bellowing elsewhere. Nobody saw me do it Blanche, and later, when the Official came to question me on striking that doctor, I was contrite and cordial and invited him into the house for the last of my coffee. He asked why it was part-burned. The house, not the coffee. Although perhaps that, too.

Blanche, I know I must quit hauling off but I’m going wild over here, thinking about Fuller and Gail and sustenance and I tell you: it’s eating me up. It came to me: there is no love that isn’t triangular. You and those Twins. Me and You and Barnes, rest his soul. You and Your Belly and Me. One always left outside looking in because two is the strongest love.

I hope you note my words are getting better. Next correspondence I want you telling me about Fuller and Gail.

Please, Blanche. I’ll happily ruminate.

I love you, Fuller, and Gail.

Aggressive Regards, Rodney _____________________________________________ February 10 Rod, This will be my last letter to you. You blasted fool.

The kids were delivered. Stillbirths.

Fell out me like two shriveled grapes from a dying vine.

I couldn’t get nourishment I and I couldn’t get medicine and you never came for me.

You never came for me.

I wish for our paths never to cross again, Rodney. You doomed us.

Blanche PS - I’ve requested the Postmaster prohibit delivery of your letters. _____________________________________________ 118

March 21 My Dearest Blanche, I pray this finds you. Know I have wept intermittently since your last transmission; flung into a despair from which I will not soon recover. Behold, however, that my deepened foray into language has opened my eyes to the tremendous beauty of this world. I am finding small ways to recover from your news and atone—as I will explain--for my bouts of impulsivity.

(And note, I evolve! My savagery of late has adopted a baroque quality: blunt force substituted for furtive poisonings.)

Oh dear Blanche! You did not disclose that you had surreptitiously enclosed two seeds in your last dispatch. I discovered them in the bottom of the envelope sometime later, very nearly throwing them out! I performed the requisite research on their species and now recognize what you have done. Trust they were planted on either side of the birdbath and have since sent up small shoots of life.

A Fuji, and a Gala. How apropos.

I yearn, Blanche, oh how I yearn to find sustenance in the richness of language. But as you cleverly observed, these words--despite their greater heft--do not fill my belly. Thus, know that as you, I pray, read this, I am laid over the seedlings and will remain here until long after my soul has departed.

Nourishing our Fuller. Nursing our Gail.

Forever Yours, Rodney

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LAST CHAPTER

Marguerite Lawrence In a facility at the base of Boise’s foothills, her friend is dying. Cancer has wrapped itself around his organs and is having its way with him. She has camped out with Craig’s family and friends in his room for weeks now. They talk pain management, and how the morphine, fentanyl, Tramadol affect his eating, sleeping, half-sleeping, breathing. They also tell stories, mostly from college that usually start with, “I remember a time in Craig’s green panel wagon…” * When she’s alone with him, sometimes they have conversations about how she’s supposed to do this without him.

He’s been a protector, confidant, friend for 53 years. He tells her, “One of us has to go first.” She cries and whispers close to his ear, “Well then, I guess it’s my turn to be here for you.” * There was a time when she was fresh out of college and he was almost 30 – a wedding in northern California and a wild weekend with college friends, and a posse of guys from Whittier. She lost her backpack but was fairly certain she left it in a surfer guy’s red VW Bug the night before. Craig drove her through a couple motel parking lots looking for a car matching her hazy recollection. Eventually, they found the VW, located the guy, got the pack. As she slumped in the passenger seat of Craig’s Cadillac, embarrassed and hungover, he pulled an apple out of his jacket and handed it across the seat. “I think you need food,” he said. * He’s being washed, dressed, helped in ways a proud man must truly find deplorable. Sometimes the caretakers refer to him with names like My man, Hun, or Craiger. It cracks her up, but at the same time, she cringes. Craig has always been quiet, dignified, independent, and alone but not lonely, and so she’s thinking he hates all the monikers.

There’s only one nickname, given to him in the ‘70s, when he pitched for the Rural Raiders intramural softball team.

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest was in the theaters and because of Craig’s imposing stature and quiet stoicism on the mound and off, his teammates deemed him Chief in reference to the story’s character by that name. The title stuck, and all these years later, 120

as he lays in his bed, his teammates and friends still come in and say, “How ya doing, Chief?” * When his meds take hold, he sometimes asks where he is, wonders how he’ll get his Jeep over the boulders in Moab, or points his finger at galaxies and garnets above his head. One day he sees Bob, our friend who died 11 years ago. Chief says Bob is in the room with him. She looks where he’s looking and only sees a hospital wall and a watercolor. She asks him what Bob is doing. Chief says, “Bob’s smiling.” * Dogs come to visit – Virgil, Tuklo, Gus, Emma, Louie, and Theo. His brother lowers Chief’s hospice bed so he can lay his hand on the dogs’ heads. They give him comfort and at this point in his life, it’s all about that. * A few days ago, the lady next door, Jeanne, was moaning, calling, “Help help.” The man in the room with her kept asking, “What can I bring you? Do you want water? Can I put your head down? Up?” Jeanne kept bawling, loud like an injured animal.

In Chief’s room, she stood by his bed that day and talked about nothing – the weather, a backyard project, her car – and everything she pattered on about, she said loud to try to drown out Jeanne. But she could tell Chief was waning weary of her nonsense. He turned his pale face to the window, so she stopped yammering, opened the window so he could feel spring, sat in a chair, and worked a Sudoku.

The next day Jeanne was gone, and the day after that Frank from across the hall was gone, and Sue’s and Juan’s rooms were cleaned and remade, the same week. The facility operates and looks the same – halls, cafeteria, sunroom, offices. But the people, compromised and vulnerable who are brought to these sterile rooms in ambulances, their names printed in washable marker on doors, after a while go away. * When she was 26 her best friend committed suicide. A few days after the death, Chief sat with her at her house, a beer in his hand, a dog at his side.

She looked at her feet. “What a tragedy,” she said.

“Well, I don’t know,” he said. “One person’s tragedy is another person’s answer.”

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Later that night, she wrote about this in her journal because she wanted to remember. She knew, even back then, that Chief was a man of few words and when he spoke, it was from a place of both wisdom and logic. * Chief loves Sunday dinners. She likes cooking for him, and her family and mutual friends. He’s especially fond of prime rib with all the fixings. She made him that dinner before he was too sick to come to the table. He also loves ice cream and Crème Brule, both of which many good friends bring to him in his final weeks. * March 31st. She is pretty sure this is the last Sunday Chief will have on earth. His breathing is now a death rattle and his eyes no longer focus on anyone or anything. He’s in between here and elsewhere, being birthed into a new world, and morphine is his midwife.

“Remember the time,” she says, softly holding his hand, “you drove a bunch of us in your van to a canal south of town?”

She must have been 14, she guesses, and August, because the corn was up.

Chief had tied one end of a rope to the back of the van; the other end was knotted to the drilled-out hole in the front of a home-made skim board. The group took turns two-at-a-time, lying belly-down on the board in the water. When they yelled “Ready,” he’d hit the gas and pull them till the board was jumping and bobbing in the water, and the kids were careening into each other, and shouting, “Faster, Faster.”

When she closes her eyes, she sees Chief that day sitting behind the wheel of the wagon, his mustachioed-face and toothy grin filling the side-view mirror. As her sister and she splashed along, holding tight to the board, his eyes darted from the dirt canal bank in front of him, to the side-mirror, constantly watching out for the screaming weenies he was towing. He was laughing and they were too young to be scared. * Minutes before sunset, as she shares vigil with Chief’s brother and sister, the sky turns purple. Across the street from the facility, a Cooper’s hawk flies to a tall elm. A kestrel flies out of the same tree, and takes umbrage against the hawk, diving and screeching for all it’s worth. The Cooper is unimpressed, unmoved, and stays still on a high branch. Eventually the small122

er bird gives up and flits off, and moments later, the Cooper’s hawk also flies away. When this happens, she looks back to Chief and says, “What a show,” but her words drift.

Chief’s chest has fallen, and his ragged breathing has stopped. The echo of his last exhalation wafts through the open window and joins the night air. * When she leaves the facility for the last time – stars are out, and the March wind is down. She drops her backpack on the front seat floor, wipes her eyes, and as she starts her car, a mild whoosh brushes her face. She turns to the passenger seat, and filmy, like from the other side of a rain-soaked window, his hands on his knees, is Chief. “Oh,” she says. “Thank God. Can you help me get home, Chief? I don’t think I can go it alone.” He nods and she puts the car in gear.

As they navigate the dark streets she tells him how relieved she is he’s out of pain, how blessed she is to have known him, asks him to watch over her husband and kids from wherever he’s headed now, because they love him too. She tells him if she could have chosen a big brother in this life, it would have been him.

When she pulls into her garage and turns to thank him for this one last rescue, characteristic of the Chief, her dependable, quiet friend, who always leaves parties without goodbyes or fanfares, is gone.

She sighs, picks up her backpack overfilled and thick with snacks, books, Sudokus, crosswords – the weight of which has proven too much for the bag – the strap breaks. The pack falls back to the floor with a thud, and a bruised but beautiful, Honey Crisp rolls out.

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MEET THE WRITERS Alexandra Ellen Appel’s work appears in numerous literary journals. Current work will be featured in the Light of Peace (Fall 2020) and Cirque: Literary Journal of the Pacific Northeast (Fall 2020). In 2015 two poems were included in the WITA Anthology, Animal. Dr. Appel is pleased to be included in this year’s WITA Anthology.

John Barrie is a writer from Boise, Idaho, whose micro-fiction has appeared in CWI’s Stonecrop Literary Magazine and Boise Weekly’s annual Fiction 101 contest. When not writing or working, John spends his time as a husband, father, Boise State student, Dungeon Master, and fierce advocate of spicy food–his Carolina Reaper chili is his proudest non-writing accomplishment. A wise woman once told him, “If you can’t afford to tip, you can’t afford to go out to eat,” and he hopes that now more than ever people will live by that message.

Kyle Boggs is an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at Boise State University. He is a former (and still sometimes) environmental journalist turned academic who believes in the power of community writing, a strong cup of coffee, and a long run in the foothills. He can be seen on adventures big and small with his partner, a messy-haired toddler, and two wild dogs.

Dené Breakfield grew up in West Virginia. In 1985 she moved to Boise, where she earned a BA and MA in English from Boise State University. Her work has appeared in cold-drill, Nebo, Writers in the Attic (Fuel), Boise Weekly’s Fiction 101, Plays magazine, BSU’s Women Making History project, and elsewhere. christy claymore has published three poems within the past year, and is pleased to have the third included in this fine publication. Formerly an adjunct professor, she is now working 125

on two novels (one in collaboration with a friend), a documentary (again, in collaboration with friends), her poetry, and also freelances as an editor and researcher. She loves running the beautiful trails that surround Boise, and her two wild boys are the very fiber of her heart.

Amber Daley is a Boise-based professional writer fueled by slow food and slow travel—both themes that influence her (mostly private) practice composing poetry and prose. Despite being a fifth-generation Idahoan, Amber is an incurable wanderlust and enjoys spontaneous road trips, outdoor markets, and long walks down the cheese aisle.

Neal F. Dougherty applies his passion for writing to his work as an attorney defending members of our Treasure Valley Community from deportation and separation from their families. He is currently using his B.A. in Creative Writing, from the University of California at Riverside, to make trolls uncomfortable on social media. He volunteers his time with the Idaho Harm Reduction Project, and, he is a member of the board of Allies Linked for the Prevention of H.I.V. and AIDS – Idaho, a nonprofit which provides STD testing and treatment, harm reduction services, and which operates a food bank in downtown Boise.

Rebecca Evans’ poems and essays have appeared in The Rumpus, Entropy Literary Magazine, War, Literature & the Arts, 34th Parallel, and Collateral Journal, among others. With an MFA in creative nonfiction, Evans is now working on an MFA in poetry at Sierra Nevada University. She is currently editing a collection of essays titled Body Language, and just completed her memoir, Navigation. She has served on the editorial staff of the Sierra Nevada Review and lives in Idaho with her three sons.

Alex Fascilla spent 12 years in corporate America before quitting to create art. He’s a writer, photographer, and refinishes and reimagines discarded furniture. His time away from the daily grind has reawakened his passion for writing and–after stumbling on an old copy of The Artist’s Way–he stokes that passion by writing daily. He was born and lives in Boise.

Sandy Friedly has a BA in English with an emphasis in writing and an MFA in creative writing, both from Boise State University. After freelancing for many years, she worked as editor for 126

Student Affairs Marketing at Boise State, writing everything from radio spots to taglines to feature articles. Her work has appeared in the Boise Weekly, Boise Journal, Sail, Northwest Travel, Northwest Parks & Wildlife, and elsewhere. Covid binge watching includes Breaking Bad, The Handmaid’s Tale, Schitt’s Creek, Mad Men, and others.

CMarie Fuhrman is the author of Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems (Floodgate 2020) and co-editor of Native Voices (Tupelo 2019). She has published poetry and nonfiction in multiple journals including Emergence Magazine, Yellow Medicine Review, Cutthroat a Journal of the Arts, Whitefish Review, Broadsided Press, Taos International Journal of Poetry and Art, as well as several anthologies. CMarie is a graduate of the University of Idaho’s MFA program, a regular columnist for the Inlander, and an editorial team member for Broadsided Press and non-fiction editor for High Desert Journal. CMarie resides in the mountains of West Central Idaho.

Cheryl Hindrichs is an associate professor of literature at Boise State University where her teaching and scholarship has focused on modernism, World War One, illness, and landscape.

Reading, alone and with others, is her greatest pleasure. Learning to see, being a dedicated reader of Woolf, into the life of the mind and body, and into the world when we are not there is her life’s work.

Francis Judilla is a poet, writer, musician, and composer. He holds an Interdisciplinary Studies degree with a triple emphasis in music, creative writing, and philosophy from Boise State University. He is currently working on his first novel.

JoAnn Koozer: Writing has always been a natural way to express and record my life and surroundings. Poetry offers me fantastic forms and techniques for doing so. To find ones unique writing voice has been a journey and a joy.

Grove Koger is the author of When the Going Was Good: A Guide to the 99 Best Narratives of Travel, Exploration, and Adventure and Assistant Editor of Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Journal. He made his first sale—to The Idaho Observer—in 1965, and since then he’s published nonfiction in a wide range of periodicals, including Boise Magazine, Boise Journal, Idaho Magazine and The Limberlost 127

Review. His fiction has appeared in Cirque, Danse Macabre, Prometheus Dreaming and Punt Volat, and he blogs at worldenoughblog.wordpress.com.

Maggie Koger lives near the river in Boise where children swing in the park as grown-ups unwind. Trees shelter squirrels and the muse lurks along the greenbelt urging her to stay focused.

Here today, yesterday or tomorrow—the bunny, mink, heron, and others—all waiting to be featured in a next poem. And how wonderful it is to have the Cabin to shepherd our efforts.

Playwright, writer and theater maker Heidi Kraay examines the connection between brain and body, seeking empathy with fractured characters. Her work has been presented in Boise, regionally, in NYC and internationally, most recently through Playwrights’ Round Table, Trinity Street Players and Georgia’s One Minute Play Festival. Recent poetry publications include Z Publishing, Timshel Magazine and Willow Creek Journal. Heidi holds an MFA from California Institute of Integral Studies and is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America. heidikraay.com Marguerite Lawrence Some stories, I find, are conjured from dreams, conversations (heard and overheard), places I visit, and current events. Last Chapter is none of those things. It is a story of friendship – 53 years of knowing a person. Craig was always there for me, showed up at my door when I needed him most. He died last year, and I wrote this memoir to help me cope with the pain of losing him to cancer. I want to believe he’d appreciate the effort.

Carol Lindsay is a retired educator from Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho.

She balances writing with skiing, hiking, biking, and time in the water. Her happy place is spending time with her two grown daughters and wandering the west with her husband in their camper van.

Liza Long is an Assistant Professor of English at the College of Western Idaho. She is the author of The Price of Silence: A Mom’s Perspective on Mental Illness (Plume), a 2014 Books for a Better Life award winner. She blogs (occasionally and erratically) on topics that interest her at The Anarchist Soccer Mom. Susan McMillan has lived in Boise since 1994 and enjoys exploring the West with her husband and dog. By profession, Sue 128

is an attorney, which for many years was all consuming, allowing little time for writing other than occasional scribbling. Recently retired, she’s enjoying the freedom of more time to write and read and the challenge of fewer excuses for procrastination.

Julia McCoy is a middle school English teacher in Meridian. Julia is a long-time member of the Writer’s Write group in Boise.

She recently completed a chapter on a 17th century monk for a book on Spanish Benedictines, to be published next year. She was published in the Writers in the Attic once previously, and occasionally wins flash horror competitions for movie tickets and hotel stays.

Kim Monnier finds creativity and energy in the transformations in the world. He is on the editorial staff of The Whistle Pig, a literary publication of the Mountain Home Arts Council.

Christina Monson (pen name Christina Stark) enjoys writing horror and sci-fi with a female twist. When she’s not writing or buried in a book, you can find her having fun with her husband and son, watching a superhero movie, or longing for a spooky autumn day. Connect with her on Instagram @ChristinaStarkAuthor.

Hi, I’m Eileen Oldag, and I began writing on the Texas Gulf Coast. In Shreveport, LA, I was a founding member of Upper Gladstone Writers’ Workspace, and here in Boise writing circles continue to be important to me. These days, it’s the preciseness and malleability of memory that infuses much of the poetry I write.

In the barren landscapes that define southwestern Idaho, Sheila Robertson seeks beauty and stories off the beaten path. With pen and camera she is happiest in the deep winding canyons of the Owyhee or camped out under the stars in its remotest weathered desert. Sheila came to Boise nearly forty years ago, where her husband’s rich family history goes back to before the turn of the last century. Fragments of their stories engender her own. With the inspiration of her husband and two children, she has published articles, stories and poetry that reflect Idaho’s landscape for 35 years.

Ruth Saxey-Reese (Ruth Salter) earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine and teaches writing 129

at Boise State University, Northwest Nazarene University, and The Cabin. Her award-winning poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in Chiron Review, Calyx, Nerve Cowboy, Rattle, The Desert Chronicle, Hawaii Pacific Review, and America Magazine. Before she could write words, she made patterns of wavy lines and called them letters to God. Writing is how she comprehends the visible world as well as the unseen within and around her.

Laureen Leiko Scheid is thankful to raise her two precious daughters with her handsome husband in beautiful Boise. She was born and raised in Honolulu with her seven siblings. Laureen enjoys exploring Idaho, skiing at Bogus, and dancing with Owhyee Hula ‘Ohana. Laureen is honored to be a part of this year’s anthology.

Janet Schlicht is a Boise grandma who enjoys seeing the world through the eyes of the young. She likes playing with words, digging in dirt, listening to leaves rustle, fiddling with fabrics and being with friends. She is grateful for the help and support she has received from friends and teachers as she has tried to work out how best to put words on a page.

Celia Scully is a poet and writer who moved from Reno, Nevada, to Boise, Idaho, in 2017. Her articles have appeared in newspapers, travel, women’s and specialty publications. She has co-authored two books and taught community college adult education classes in non-fiction writing for publication.

She holds a BA in English literature from Trinity College (now Trinity Washington University in Washington, D.C.) and a MA in journalism from the University of Nevada, Reno.

Debra Southworth wrote her first poem at age 13, well past bedtime, hunkered under the covers with a flashlight. Now a grandma, she has committed to a more intentional sharing of her work in 2020.

Marsha Spiers: I have written since I could put pen to paper.

It’s how I clear my mind of clutter. At 72, there are a lot of stories. This one’s dedicated to my grandchildren and how life used to be.

Judith McConnell Steele and her husband, Richard, moved to Boise in 1978. He was an Idaho native. She wasn’t, but soon found the environment nurturing for a budding writer. Judith is 130

a published poet, writer, and writing teacher, the author of two books of newspaper columns and a novel, The Angel of Esperanca.

She is naturally attracted to fire, but is not an arsonist.

For Anita Tanner reading and writing is akin to breathing.

Raised on a small dairy farm in Wyoming she learned a love of animals, the land and nature. She’s the mother of six and grandmother of seventeen and numerous grand-dogs and great grand-dogs. A few cats.

Eric E. Wallace has published three short story collections (Undertow, Hoar Frost and Stonerise) and two literary novels (Emperor’s Reach and The Improviser). This the seventh Writers in the Attic anthology to include one or more of Eric’s stories. His website is ericewallace.wordpress.com.

Rebecca Louise Weeks was born in Boise, Idaho. She has lived in Oregon, Maine, and the San Juan Islands. Her writing is deeply informed by her experiences as a mother, caretaker, and from a changing sense of “place.” She mostly writes poetry, autobiographical fiction, and memoir. She is also an arts educator and yoga teacher. She has taken several classes at The Cabin and was published in WITA’s Song.

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THE CABIN is a Boise, Idaho literary arts organization. We’ve been creating human connections through words since 1996.

You can read, write, and learn with us at:

READINGS & CONVERSATIONS an annual lecture series that brings internationally-acclaimed, provocative, and inspiring writers to Boise.

WRITERS IN THE SCHOOLS (WITS) a program that places professional writers in classrooms with 3rd-12th grade students.

SUMMER WRITING CAMPS literary adventures for young writers.

ADULT WRITING WORKSHOPS creative small-group classes led by published authors.

GHOSTS & PROJECTORS a reading series that pairs emerging, innovative, and experimental writers with writers from our community.

WRITERS IN THE ATTIC (WITA) an annual publication contest and event for local writers.

LITERARY ACTIVITIES such as book club meetings, readings by local authors, and other events that create conversation and community around literature.

The Cabin’s administrative offices are housed in a restored log cabin, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, on the banks of the Boise River in downtown Boise.

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APPLE

writers in the attic

Apple is the shining symbol of health, and the moniker of a famous daughter. Long rumored as the forbidden fruit that transferred the knowledge of good and evil, this mischievous object bonked Newton on the head and defined the laws of gravity. Loosely Latin for domestic evil, this is the poisonous vessel of Snow White’s deep sleep, and the rotten core of a schoolyard bully—but also the sole object on earth holding the doctor at bay day after day. Along with Steve Jobs and his turtlenecks, our theme is the logo of California’s progressive tech mammoth, and the same golden objects Hera gave Zeus as a wedding gift, where they reside in a garden at the northern-most edge of the world. You are the apple of my eye, my favorite kind of pie…

The Cabin is a Boise, Idaho literary arts organization. We forge community through the voices of all readers, writers, and learners. Writing Camps nurture the imagination and awaken the senses through creative adventures in the art of writing.

Cover artwork: Joris Hoefnagel or Hans Eworth Queen Elizabeth I & the Three Goddesses, 1569

LOG CABIN BOOKS LITERATURE / POETRY