Golden Delicious

by Christopher Boucher

  Just then you saw the flash of a warskirt between a row of toilets. You immediately closed your notebook, spun around, and started walking.

  “Hello?” said the tent.

  You brisked away from her and bolded across Pulaski Park and back toward Main Street.

  “Miss!” shouted the tent.

  You looked for a place to hide: JavaNet? The Haymarket?

  It was too late: Diane landed in front of you. Before she even had a chance to speak, though, you stuck your finger in her face. “Leave me alone,” you spat, and you stormed past her. “I don’t want anything to do with you.”

  Diane flew over you and landed inches from your face. “Just wait a second,” she said.

  “No,” you said. You changed direction and stormed the other way.

  “Stop right there,” boomed Diane. “I am a recognized Mother of—”

  “But you’re not my mother,” you said over your shoulder. “You’re not anyone to me—”

  “I’ve been looking for you for years,” Diane said, her voice breaking. “Will you at least listen to what I have to say?”

  You stopped and turned around.

  “Absolutely not,” said the Reader. “I have a good life here. A full life. I’m somebody. I have a boyfriend. A good job. I never had any of that in Appleseed. I didn’t even have thoughts of my own! All I was to was just words on a—”

  “ is dead,” said Diane. “Those sentences he imagined—”

  “Bookworms he called them,” said the Reader. “Fucking figments.”

  “—rotted out the whole town. And then one of them killed him.”

  “He killed himself, you mean,” the Reader said.

  All the air left Diane’s body.

  “Because you weren’t there to save him,” said the Reader.

  “OK,” Diane said.

  “Everyone abandoned him,” the Reader said.

  “All right—we could have”—her voice shook—“been there more. You’re right. OK?” Diane held out her hands. “But we can still save him. You—you can still save him.”

  “Me save him? You save him.”

  “I can’t on my own. You have to come back. Appleseed needs a Reader.”

  “I never had any sentences of my own,” you said. “Now I finally do and you want me to leave them all behind?”

  “For a few days—just to help us finish the story,” Diane said.

  You crossed your arms.

  “Please,” said Diane. “Please.”

  “And then what?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If I go back to Appleshit,” said the Reader. “What happens when I finish reading?” said the Reader. “Am I stuck in—”

  “No—of course not. The book will end.”

  The Reader crossed her arms. “And I can leave.”

  “Sure.”

  “And I can come back here?”

  “Of course,” my Mom said. “When you’re finished reading Appleseed, you can read anything you want.”

  “Even if I do go with you, there’s nothing I can do to help.”

  “Just try,” said the Mother.

  “Shit,” said the Reader. She looked around—at the festival behind her, and then at the slow traffic on Main Street. “If I’m going, I have to make a pitstop first.”

  “Absolutely not,” the Mother said. “There’s no time for that.”

  “Forget it, then—find yourself another reader,” said the Reader.

  The mother threw her hands. “Every second that passes—”

  “Trust me, OK?” the Reader said. “It’s important.”

  “Even with my son in the ground?”

  “Yes,” said the Reader. “Yes.”

  Diane stepped forward and put her arm around the Reader. “Grab on to my waist.”

  The Reader wrapped her arms around Diane.

  “Hold on tight,” Diane said. Then she pushed with her feet and lifted the Reader off the page. They rose over Northampton; the Reader hooted as she saw the words get smaller beneath her. When they reached skimming height, Diane shouted “Where’m I going?”

  The Reader pointed toward Route Nine. “Over the bridge and into Amherst.”

  “East?”

  The Reader nodded. “We’re looking for a place called Atkin’s.”

  They flew over green rolling hadleypages of farms and houses and then into stories of Amherst: pages covered with cows, silos, and wide-open spaces. The Reader pointed to the corner up ahead. “There it is,” she hollered. Diane saw a large farmstand, a half-filled parking lot, and rolling pages of green to the right. When she looked past the farmstand, she understood: the adjacent fields were covered with trees—apple trees, their branches shouting in green and red. The grove stretched back to the edge of the page, spilled off it, and continued on.

  Diane dropped into the grove and set the Reader down onto the page. “Didn’t I tell you?” the Reader said.

  Diane spit. “Get what you need and let’s go.”

  The Reader approached a tree, grabbed an apple, and pulled it off the branch. “These are apple trees,” she said.

  “I know they are,” Diane said.

  “And it’s pick-your-own!” the Reader said. She took a bite of the apple and then held it out to Diane. “Don’t you want one?”

  “Not right now I don’t,” said Diane. She took the bitten-into apple and put it in a drawer in her skirt. “ needs us. Now point me to the closest bookwormhole.”

  The Reader nodded toward Route 116. “Belchertown—a few miles that way,” she said.

  Diane lifted them up. High over the page, the Reader looked down and shouted, “You have to admit—that grove is a beautiful sight, isn’t it?”

  But Diane didn’t answer her; she tightened her grip on the Reader and skimmed forward, faster and faster, as fast as any Mother ever had.

  GRENADIER

  The Reader and the Mother volted through the bookwormhole. As they did, light flooded the town, painting the buildings and the fields, swarming the Amphitheatre and the hospital and drenching Appleseed Mountain.

  Diane didn’t stop; she carried the Reader high up over the buildings and trees and then banked left and bulleted forward. “Welcome home!” Diane shouted.

  The Reader tried to get her bearings. Were they on Guerry Street? No—that was Jonquil, just past the Green, not far from Colton’s deadgroves.

  Something was happening on the ground below. Up and down the street, people were stepping out of their houses. Fifty feet away to their right, a woman wearing a bathrobe stood in the middle of the road, stretching out her arms. When she looked up at you, you saw that she had a hole in her face. “Halleluiah!” she shouted at you.

  “Thanks be to the Core!” shouted someone down the road.

  “Mothers did it! They did it!”

  The bookwormholes, you saw now, were everywhere: in the people, in the trees, punching through the lawns and roads every ten or twenty feet. “What happened here?” you shouted.

  “You did,” Diane said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Not a street or page, it seemed, had been spared. Whole houses were burned to the page; some streets were completely gone. The center of town was leveled. Zooming over the high school, you could see the Small Pear up ahead—all of the windows had been smashed; Gilbert’s was covered with plywood; so was the Beagle. You looked to your right. “Look at the Hu Ke Lau!” you hollered. It was just a charred corpse of a restaurant. And many of the pages on the North Side were nearly empty—burned out, and rotted completely through in some places.

  “Where are the Mothers?” you shouted.

  “Most of them were KIA, some of them maybe captured,” Diane shouted. “The rest are in hiding.”

  The mood on the street below, though, was jubilant: people were clapping or hooting, shaking hands, high-fiving, and hugging. Passing over Coventry, a long-haired man shouted up at them. “Beautiful!” He took off his shirt and slammed it to the p
age. “It’s fucking beautiful!”

  Diane turned onto Converse Street. Soon you could see the edge of the worryfields. Even there, though, people were happy: you saw two worriers dancing, another just lying on her back and staring up at the bright sky.

  As you approached the fields, you saw a big lump in the far corner of the page. “What’s that?” one of your thoughts said, pointing. Something was moving next to the lump. Was it a machine? No, it was a man in a gray jumpsuit, hunched over the page. He was digging. “Is that Ralph?” you shouted. But you knew it was.

  Diane dipped, grazed the surface, and lowered you onto the white soil. Ralph didn’t even look up. Dirt flew over his shoulder.

  “Ralph,” Diane lyled.

  You were in awe—you’d never seen anyone work so hard. Ralph didn’t even have a shovel—he was scooping the pagesoil with his bare hands.

  “Ralph!” Diane shouted again.

  Ralph looked up, surprised. “Wha,” he said.

  “I need you to stop digging—”

  He shook his head. “The page is tough,” he said, “but I’m making progress—”

  “I need you to stop that right now and go find someone for me.”

  Ralph’s straightened up. “Who?” he said.

  The Reader watched Ralph’s truck drive off; then she turned to Diane. “Walk around the page,” the Reader told her. “Start collecting words.”

  “What for?”

  “As many as you can find.”

  “They’re all dead,” said Diane.

  “That’s OK,” the Reader said.

  Diane went to work on this page and the next, gathering as many words as she could. When her arms were full, she stacked the words next to her son’s grave. Soon, she saw Ralph’s truck drive into the worryfields—he hadn’t been gone long. The passenger’s-side door opened and the Memory of Johnny Appleseed stepped out.

  “Oh my Core!” shouted the Memory, hobbling toward you. He held out his ethereal arms. “You came back!”

  “Took some convincing,” Diane said.

  “Did you hear what happened to ?” the Memory of Johnny Appleseed asked her.

  “Of course she heard,” Diane said.

  “I brought something for you,” the Reader told the Memory. She gestured to Diane, who opened the drawer in her skirt.

  Ralph studied a pile of words next to the lump. “What are these?” he said.

  Diane fished into her skirt, found the bitten-into apple, and held it out to the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

  The Memory’s face bloomed. “What—where did you—” He pointed at the Reader. “Where did you get this?” He took the apple with both hands and held it like an egg.

  “Holy shit,” said Ralph. “Is that what I think it is?”

  The Reader turned to him. “Let the Memory deal with the story of Appleseed,” she said. “I need you to help Diane pick up as many words as you can find.”

  Ralph looked confused. “Why?” he said. “They’re all—”

  “She knows that, honey,” said Diane. “Just do what she says.” She led Ralph to an adjacent field to look for sentences. He soon caught on and understood what they were looking for. When he couldn’t find the exact right words, though, he decided to improvise. He selected three words from the page—“junction,” “author,” and “veneer”—and dragged them over to Diane. “Do me a favor and cut these, will you?” he said.

  The Mother flipped on her skirtsaw and it whirred to life. “Where?” she said. Ralph pointed, and Diane pulled the blade through the words and gave Ralph the wordparts he needed: the “au,” the “ction” and the “eer.”

  Then Diane went back to what she was doing: dislodging a top layer of words—“nuisance,” “selfish,” “brat”—and digging deep. Finally, she found the words that she was looking for—that she’d been trying to find for years: “I was just so scared.” And, “I was angry.” And, “And sad. I didn’t know what to do with it all.”

  And then, “You were wonderful the way you were. You didn’t need to be anything, or do anything, or be anyone.”

  Ralph and Diane carried their words across the fields and lay them on the ground by the Reader. The Memory of Johnny Appleseed stood by, watching them arrange the words. They didn’t all fit together—some letters were rotted beyond recognition; other phrases were irrelevant or heavy with sorrow—but they did their best to order them so they made new sense. “Put that one there, how about,” said Diane at one point. After watching the Reader work for a few minutes, Ralph knelt next to her and sunk his hands into the page.

  “What’s she doing?” the Memory of Johnny Appleseed asked Diane.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Diane said. “She’s revising.”

  HONEYCRISP

  I. YELLOW TRANSPARENT II

  That spring, the Auctioneer reappeared in Appleseed. Her arrival was completely unannounced—one day she was spotted walking over the margin, her arms full of meaningless words and throwaways. She didn’t even go home to Converse Street—instead, she walked directly to the empty Amphitheatre. Then she stepped up onto the bare cement stage, held up an item at random—a jar of hearsay—and began to shout.

  “Ourfirstitem​ladiesan​dgentsishear​sayfinea​ppleseedhear​sayyoure​notgoing​tofindanyrum​orsbetter​thantheseru​morsrigh​therethishea​rsayisholyi​tholdsthe​bonesof​truthandmemor​yletsstartthe​bidding​athalfaconcept.”

  Soon, a numb passerby humbled to the edge of the Amphitheatre. Lulled by the Auctioneer’s call, he blurted out a meaning-bid without even really thinking about it. Just then, a wandering thayer appeared in the opposite corner of the Amphitheatre and shouted out a higher amount. The numb countered; the thayer did, too.

  News of the auction rilled through town—it wasn’t long before a crowd had assembled. Someone lent a table; a Cone delivered a pulpit. Appleseedians brought meaningless items to the stage and the Auctioneer held them up, sang of their potential, and made them meaningful. That auction ran for ten hours straight. Looking out at the jam-packed house, the Auctioneer could see off-duty Cones, former Mothers, Muir Drop Forgers. She wondered if Uncle Joump was out there. And how about her father? Or her brother—where was her brother?

  II: A GRAFTING

  Two pages over, the Memory of Johnny Appleseed drove his shovel into the fibers. When the hole he’d dug was deep enough, he pulled a single seed from the Reader’s apple and dropped it into the soil.

  As the Memory was covering up the seed, Ralph drifted over to check on him. When he saw what the Memory was doing, he told him to wait right there—that he’d be right back. Ralph ran out to his truck for an emotional wrench and a bucket and carried them to the happiness hydrant on the corner of Apple Hill and Converse. When he turned the bolt on the hydrant, happiness flooded the street. Ralph filled the bucket and left the faucet running; then he carried the bucket of happiness out to the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. The Memory took it from him and carefully poured the happiness on the apple seed.

  Within paragraphs, the first saplings of happiness-fueled stories began to peek through the pages. The stories were restorative: soon, the holes in the pages and people started closing. In the center of town, the windows grew back at Small Pear and the Bagel Beagle opened for business. Someone turned on the lights at the Big Why, and a truck arrived with a new batch of questions. Cordial Carl did some deep breathing and fired up his grill.

  Heartened by the sounds of the auction, people started pulling off of the highway and into Appleseed; soon they were arriving in droves. And all of them needed food and housing. With two new apple orchards up and running, Ralph reopened Belmont and Woodside and shifted to part-time at Muir Drop; then he quit altogether.

  III. JUPITER

  In the new stories, wasn’t so alone. He was still bald and overweight, but he had a good strong heart, a zell imagination, a tough soul. His house was still alive and everyone inside it safe and sound. He didn’t always see I to I with his mother, a nurse at Appl
eseed Hospital, but they got along OK—sometimes they’d go to Appleseed Library together and then talk about what they were reading. He was closer with his father, Ralph, who he worked with at the apartment buildings. had a pet sentence, a few good friends, and even a girlfriend or two. In high school he worked at a community theater and started writing stories in his spare time. He stopped eating so many chips, and learned when to stay quiet and when to speak. When he was eighteen, he graduated from Appleseed High and went on to college.

  At the end of the story, the Reader finished reading. Not great, you decided, but not bad, either.

  MOTHER (AMERICAN)

  The Reader straightened up and wiped her brow.

  “Well?” Diane asked her.

  The Reader looked down at the silent page and shook her head. “I don’t know. I thought—if we put these together—he’d come back, but—”

  They all stared at the lump.

  “Maybe he was dead too long,” the Memory of Johnny Appleseed said.

  “My poor boy,” said Ralph.

  “Ormaybewe​justhavent​foundtherigh​twordsyet,” said the Auctioneer.

  Diane leaned down to the page. She made a few more sentences—the simplest, truest ones she could:

  “You are good.”

  “You are loved.”

  “I have always loved you. I always will.” She planted them and pushed page over them.

  Suddenly, I was pulled through the words without warning: back through letters and pages, back to the body of —I found my fat stomach, my still feet, my cold brain, my dead thoughts, my closed eyes.

  I heard my family’s words. “My poor boy.” and “You were wonderful the way you were.” And, “I have always loved you. I always will.”

  The words were breath in my lungs; I heard the story directly above me. I blinked. Where was the surface—the light and the air? Was I still ? Was I at all?

  MCINTOSH

  Standing over the pagegrave, ’s parents hear a sound—a flicker in the margin woods. They turn to see words, sprinting through the trees, across the worryfields, at breakneck speed: “I am sorry!” becomes “I am running and running!” and then “I am saving you!”