Lucienne Cummings
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The Apple Tree Man inhabits the oldest tree in the orchard. The Apple Tree Man scowls and waves his arms at scrumpers. The Apple Tree Man demands a yearly cider tribute from the farmer, or the next harvest will fail.
I’m the last apple in the fruit bowl, the shrivelled green one that everyone avoids because there are better, brighter apples that don’t risk tasting bitter half the time. I’m the girl not picked for any sports teams; the student no one wants to study with; the one secretary who’s never invited to the Green Man for a cider. That’s why I eat every apple I ever buy, especially that last one, pips and all.
Take a candle and go alone to a looking glass; eat an apple before it, and the face of your future conjugal companion will be seen in the glass, as if peeping over your shoulder.
I’ve shrivelled into my routine, rotting a little more each time I get out of bed, dress in the same outfit, pass meaningless pleasantries with Over-Friendly Mike on Reception, repeat banal small-talk with my other colleagues. I make the same mixed-leaf salad, clean the same plate, and go to bed by ten pm, every day. Even my breath smells like the forgotten apple core inside an ancient school desk.
But today is different. Today, I see it – a tiny green shoot, growing out of my belly button. I move to cut the shoot off, but when my scissors touch it, my soul shivers, so I pad the shoot with gauze, and put a large jumper over my usual shirt. No one in the office notices. Not even Over-Friendly Mike on Reception. On the bus home I develop a frantic itch to feel earth around my feet, which I scratch by plunging them into my window box as soon as I get home.
I pare this pippin round and round again, My shepherd’s name to flourish on the plain, I fling th’unbroken paring o’er my head. Upon the grass a perfect L is read.
‘Nice hair!’ says my boss the following morning, her eyes wide. I cringe under my newly mossy fringe. ‘It… er… suits you?’ I don’t tell her how I’d tried to cut it three times before breakfast, or that it grew back thicker and mossier each time.
The space around me at the office grows as my colleagues whisper in corners, pointing at my green fingernails and my shoes full of soil, laughing because I’ve grown so much taller overnight that my trousers look like crops. I forgo my usual cuppa at 11am, and drink a bucket of water instead. I’m still parched.
On the golden apple, the goddess Eris wrote, ‘For the Fairest’, and threw it into the wedding party. Then she stood back, and watched the other goddesses fight over the precious fruit.
By the next morning, the forest of sadness in my head has thinned out a little, but my elbows, hips, and knees rustle like piles of dry leaves. The shoot from my stomach has wound itself around my torso and neck, developing tiny branches that tickle my stomach and my left ear. I call in sick, barking into my phone with a scratchy throat. A shower helps, but I still feel like I’m floating above the ground, disconnected. My shoot turns towards the sunlight streaming through the bathroom window. I can’t stay indoors any longer.
A mile away, in the limbo patch beyond the Victorian train station, I find a wooden gate in the fence, next to a chalkboard reading, ‘Community Orchard’. Through a knothole I spy red valerian, tortoiseshell butterflies, dog roses, and waggling honey bees. The unmown grass is dotted with sinewy tree trunks. I slide the rusted latch up, and slip inside, already half-drunk on the melon-pear perfume of the apples.
The Apple Tree Woman grows the apples that make the cider. The Apple Tree Woman invites the bees and the butterflies in, and shelters the songbirds in her hair. Without the Apple Tree Woman, the Apple Tree Man would be nothing.
I sway in the warm breeze, shedding petals across the grass. My feet have been rooted in this patch of ground long enough for that first chartreuse shoot, and many others, to grow and harden towards the sky. Crab spiders and ladybirds feast on the acid stickiness of aphids in my canopy, while a solitary bee tickles me beneath my bark, where once there was a knee, or hip, or elbow – I can’t remember which. My branches will be heavy with fruit again soon, ready for the lovers who choose to shelter in my shade, for the children collecting windfalls, or for that one lonely woman who always takes the last green apple, and eats it, pips and all.
Lucienne Cummings writes fiction and comedy in north-east England. Her work has been published in National Flash Fiction Day’s Anthology and FlashFlood journal, Mslexia’s Best Women’s Short Fiction Anthology, Trash Cat Lit, Neither Fish Nor Foul, and Funny Pearls, and has been shortlisted by Fractured Lit, Mslexia, and The Propelling Pencil. Her comedy writing has been broadcast on TV and radio by the BBC.
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