autumn apples

summer memories

I eat apple cores. I always have, figure I always will�" mother used to tell me there’s cyanide in the seeds, maybe arsenic, that’d they kill me as soon as I touched them with my teeth; but, curious as I am, I soon learned that apple seeds are apple seeds and nothing more, unless you ate bushels and bushels of them. There were traces, little seeds of cyanide in the seeds of the apples, but, we all carry a little darkness inside us, right? Nothing to be scared of. But, she still gives me mistrustful looks when I finish my apple and turn it over so eat it from bottom to top, lastly pulling the stem from between my lips.

Autumn apples have always been my favorite; there’s an apple fair in the town next from mine every year, a place that I’ve always grown up wanting to live before I realized that I am far too alive for a small town as quiet as that one. Reality hit the day I read the sign as we drove in: 7774 people, a number halved and halved and halved again from my city, which is already too small, too familiar, too easy to not get lost in. The drive is nice, though; sometimes, as we pass the old highway, lined with barns and cows, huddled together like mother and child, I can see the apple orchards tucked back in the hills and wonder if I like apples for their taste, or their texture, or just the plain and simple ideas of trees and fall, childhoods spent eating the pies and crisps and cakes that my grandmother made from these, sitting at picnic tables, wondering if there was any more. 

Sometimes, I settle on the color; it’s the color that draws me in, streaks of green and red and yellow like sunsets and autumn trees and dried grass and the crunch it makes when you wander through it. They taste like that; the hills they came from, the soil they fell into, the hands that picked them�" the great wooden crates that splinter my fingers when I read them sideways, like woody books in a library with a title that didn’t quite fit in the width. As I nurse all my sharp little wounds, I am handed apples and they press on the little dots of palmed blood in a nice weight, another streak of red with the green and the yellow, and I consider not eating them because I am on them, in them, soaking in like the tree soaked water into its stem, the soil soaked itself into the tree, the sun into the leaves.