The Apple Tree That Kept One Apple
moral · 5-minute read · 3 min read
"That one's mine," says the old apple tree, and she curls her topmost branch tighter around the reddest apple on her crown.
She has watched children come all summer, reaching up with sticky fingers, and she has let them take the low fruit, the small fruit, the fruit with a worm hole already started. But this apple, the one that caught the whole August sun and turned the color of a barn door, this one she has decided is hers alone.
A boy comes first. He stretches on his toes, and the tree draws her branch up out of reach, higher than his fingers can climb. The boy shrugs and eats a windfall apple from the grass instead.
A woman comes with a basket, humming, and reaches for the red apple with a practiced hand. The tree sways her branch sideways, slow as a held breath, and the woman does not even notice, she is already reaching for another.
A girl comes last, near the end of September, when the light turns thin and gold. She looks up a long time at the red apple, shading her eyes. "That's a beautiful one," she says, to no one, to the tree, to the sky. Then she picks a smaller apple from a lower branch and walks home swinging her basket.
The tree lifts the apple to the last of the light and holds it there. She has kept her best thing safe. No hand has closed around it. No mouth has bitten into what she grew with her whole long effort, all that spring rain and June sun poured into one round shape.
October comes empty. No children come to the orchard anymore, they are back in school, and the woman's basket season is done, and the tree stands alone with her one apple, her secret, her prize, still hanging.
She notices the change before she understands it. The apple's skin, once tight and shining, starts to pucker at the shoulder, like a held smile going tired. A brown spot opens on its cheek, no bigger than a fingerprint, then wider. Wasps find it first, then flies, drawn to the sweetness turning into something else, something the tree does not have a word for yet.
By the time the first frost silvers the grass, the apple hangs black and wrinkled at its stem, sunk in on itself, wet and sour where it once was firm. It falls one gray morning with a sound the tree has never made before, a soft, defeated thud, and lies in the wet leaves, and no bird will touch it, and no child ever will.
The tree stands bare all winter.
In spring, when the blossoms open, she opens every one of them wide, and holds nothing back.
What you hoard ripens rotten.