By Charlie M. Case
Winner of The Jennie Hackman Memorial Prize for Short Fiction (1st)
Some kind of sweet thing takes hold of you in the late summer.
It’s not much. You take it for nostalgia—standing in the pick-your-own orchard, your family and best friend flitting about selecting perfect apples, you inhale the fruit-air and, dizzied, consider years past. Other orchards. Former friends. The nearly-autumns you’ve endured; all kinds of youth leaving you. In the neat tree row you and yours bite into Pink Ladies and so ravenously embody the scavenger: fruit-blood drips slickly from your mouths.
You leave the field on the hayride tractor with the rest of them, rumbling back to the world. Still, you feel you’re stretching from that last apple tree—part of you was left there, or, there, something new crawled in. It’s leaving a trail. You’re being streaked across the air, your body a smeared photograph. Sweetripeness dogs you.
Maybe you’re getting sick.
In the parking lot, your group splits off—one half to the family car, the other to your friend Aronia’s. To the latter, it’s you who lugs the three apple-bags your group picked, and when you squeeze into the passenger seat you nestle two of them at your feet and hug the third. Fresh fruit-scent fills the little sedan as you puddle there, growing woozy, your younger siblings chattering in the back. Aronia’s going on about something—about school, moving back in on the weekend, the horror movie marathon you promised you’d join her for. You only half-hear it. You clutch close the sweetscent bag of apples, hug it hard, and let Aronia prattle on. She can talk for hours with no one listening. She knows you aren’t.
Sluggishly, your chin falls to rest on the topmost apples: McIntoshes, Galas. A Honeycrisp or two. You find that you’re hungry. You find that you’re too fatigued to pluck an apple from the bag and lift it to your mouth.
Aronia drones. Her voice, the car, the weight of the apples compounds. She drives and, outside, summer orchards smear.
In the last week before you move back in to college for the last time, the leaves begin to turn.
Early this year, everyone remarks. It’s not even September, and certainly not near fall—but the earth, it seems, disagrees. The weather cools. Smattered storms pull leaves from trees, soak the orchards to saturation. Pumpkin spice is available in stores.
So the world hurries along. And so do you: in the last week before you move back in to college for the last time, feeling so fully summersweet, you are tugged to responsibilities: to cleanings-up, organizings, to so many getting-togethers and goodbyes. Like you won’t be back in the winter—like the moment you graduate next spring, you’ll already be off on your own. Here, hands tug you from this to this to this.
“Amela,” you’re called—to the kitchen, to help Mom prepare dinner. Another round of family, of cheek-pinching you’ve long outgrown. Roast chicken, apple walnut salad, penne alfredo, apple pie—you shiver slicing the fruits, peeling them; you take too many to your mouth and are swatted for it—and napkins for each seat at the table, individually folded. You are the one who folds them. You do so feeling far-away, forgetting the movements of your hands as soon as you’ve made them.
There’s something wrong, you think distantly, at the dinner table, yet another going-away meal, your family jauntily clamoring together and maybe once prompting you to talk. Your head is heavy. Your body is warm. It’s like fever if it left fruit-aftertaste in your mouth. Like sickness if it were kind to you. There’s something wrong, you think, and do not say.
“Amela,” you’re called—to the yard, to chop wood with Dad. One of those final chores to complete before you go away, some tangible proof of your contribution. Not that the family needs a burning hearth for the winter—you’ve got gas heating—but it’s the principle of the thing. It’s warding against threats of power-outs, weeks-long winter storms; it’s what they’ll miss without your hands to do it.
Dad reminds you how every year: hold the axe in two places. Swing around and over your head. Slide your upper hand to the base of the handle as you bring the tool down, and bring it down: split the wood. You remember it not because he tells you again this year, though he does. You don’t hear him. You’re staring past the chopping block, across the acres of open field your family owns, over the fence, at the neighbor’s farm. At their dark strings of berry bushes and the pick-your-own gatherers swarming them. You remember it not because he tells you again, but because he’s told you before, and before, and before, and the memory and the muscle bring the axe down for you. And again. And again. You clear the woodpile and somehow you haven’t maimed yourself or anyone, only split so many uneven logs.
“Amela,” you’re called—to your grandmother’s porch seat to rub her shoulders. To your little siblings’ basement fort to be their grand villain. To your elder sister’s room, to hold things in place as she pins them, her mannequin draped in gaudy fabrics. To the landing outside your older brother’s room upstairs, to signal when Mom is coming up; she knows he skimped on dish duty, so he’ll need to put out his joint and try not to look high. To your aunt in the living room, just here to visit for an hour or two: to indulge her blather about her coworkers at the mechanic and reach to wipe the oil from her fingers before she touches the couch.
They’re getting everything in before you leave. Directing your hands as they’re needed, tugging the fruits from them to better set you to the task. They leave you once you begin, no need to watch; always, you have been diligent. Even now, fruitfevered, you go until the work is complete.
The sweethaze—the fruitfever—is hard to think through. It makes the tasks go slow, or too fast; it glazes over the memories of completion and makes you check and recheck the work was done. It—it makes you want to curl up somewhere, dig a hole to take root in. You are a so-stickthin and trembling-young thing, you o-fruitsapling; who would put you to work? The reluctance, the straining, it fills you. Chopping salad, splitting wood, telling stories for your youngers, it fills you.
“Amela,” you’re called—to somewhere else, to someone’s help or for them to hand it off to you. And to the call you trot. As with sickness, with headache, with exhaustion-slog, you box up the fruit rot inside you and ignore it. And you go.
On a number of occasions, over the last week-before-the-last time, you attempt to get started with packing for school.
As with the years before, you have your list: school supplies, toiletries, clothing, bedding, miscellaneous. You have your suitcases and trunk: three carrying cases you can pack a full life in. You know exactly what you’ll bring and how to arrange it; you’ve played this game of Tetris before. It’s a work like breathing.
When the suitcases are unzipped and flipped open, placed like waiting mouths at the foot of your bed, you take a breath and scan the room, planning: what to tackle first? And then—
“Amela,” you’re called.
Another occasion. Try again—
“Amela,” you’re called.
Try again—
“Amela!”
Try again.
And—no one calls for you. The house is quiet, the tasks complete. You have time to spend on your own, getting ready to move in, just a few days away now. Knelt before the suitcases, you take a breath and scan the room.
And then you don’t move.
Until, two hours later, you’re called: “Amela,” to dinner.
Memory seems to grow brighter, as of late. Or—not brighter, really, but closer. Fluid; more easily called up. Between the flutterings of stillness in you—the soft creakings that seem to echo rest—there rises such vivid remembrances.
It is as though you’ve been caught in place, all your past collected and shoved into your present. As you work, helping with lunches and chores and looking after the others and running errands, you find yourself skipping: one moment you’re sitting with Mom and folding laundry, and when you next look up, you’re steadying a ladder for your uncle as he pulls leaves from the gutter. You’re caught up inside yourself, muscle memory moving you, other sorts occupying your so easily captured mind.
They call you back to the yard to rake those leaves. You take up the tool, start dragging the damp fall carpet, feel the earth lurch up and coax you, and when you were thirteen your family held a barbecue just around the time school let out. Mom and Dad invited a whole host of parents and family friends and folk they knew from town hall meetings, and it was a whole hullabaloo, and you were stuck with Dad by the grill as his little helper: fetcher and server and stander-there. A bunch of your peers at school were in attendance, but you didn’t know any of them, hadn’t tried very hard to make friends, so it wasn’t embarrassing when they came up and you served them hot dogs and hamburgers and bratwurst so much as it was terminally boring. One of them was Aronia, who you hadn’t known yet, but when she wandered over looking for food and cringed away from your offerings, when she sheepishly asked if there were any veggie burgers, Dad recognized her as the daughter of some local official and shoved you off to go dig around in the freezer. So you did, and when you came back, hands numbing, it was to Dad gossiping with Aronia about you. And when he finished her food, he made sure it was you who handed it off, careful teenage diplomacy, and Aronia smiled at you so gratefully and introduced herself and has been glued to your side, relying on you, ever since. Inside the house, you are scrubbing a water glass with a soapy sponge, and your fingers are been-there-a-while pruned.
You refocus. Look at the clock on the oven for the time. The apples in the fruit bowl (and there are still so many; your family is enormous in the first place and even then went overboard at the orchard) catch your attention. Unlike the premature leaves which—you look out the window to make sure—you’ve finished raking, the apples haven’t yet begun to turn.
But they might be right on the cusp of it, you think. There’s something concentrated, almost too-much in their smell.
That week, another extended family dinner is held three days before you’re set to leave, on what promises to be the last warm night of the season: a final summerbrightness fall hasn’t yet chased away. Your family loves to get together. They’ll do so for any reason, and at least four or five times this month the reason has been that you’re soon going away. Just you, this year. Your older sister graduated last spring, and your older brother elected not to continue his education. With everyone home in the summers, it gets so crowded—you wonder if yours alone will be a presence enough to miss, when you leave.
The work you do, surely, they’ll want for. But you?
Mom and Dad drag the table out of the shed and set it up outside on the grass. You scuttle about behind them, setting up folding chairs, dragging a few outside from the kitchen when there’s not enough. You cart out platters and bug nets, plates and utensils, get snapped at because the tablecloth wasn’t down yet, think the answer to that question is no, skip, and you’re sitting down at a full table surrounded by conversation and there is sweet potato in your mouth. No one is looking at you.
You reorient. You taste the dregs of summer.
It’s prime time for older family members to badger you about your schedule, you think—what you have on your plate this semester, what your plans are after graduation, if you have job offers lined up yet. But they don’t. At your going-away dinner (the third this month), no one prompts you to speak. Your family doesn’t ignore you, of course; if you hop into a conversation or make a comment, they’ll fold you in just fine.
But they don’t look at you.
After a few more bites, you push your food onto one of the little kid’s plates and put your fork down and stop eating. And you sit there, listening to the chatter, for the rest of the meal.
Beyond your aunt’s shoulders, the neighbor’s thin-row berry bushes are distant and nearly picked over. A breeze blows in from that direction. On it rides the scent of all the forgotten berries, those dropped and trampled, so many fragrant deaths. The air has that too-ripeness to it. Left sitting out too long, split open and smushed, that sweet flesh is being retaken. The smell, the knowledge of it, wends its way into you.
You inhale it and lean back in your seat. And you don’t move.
Until, an hour later, dinner comes to an end and you’re called, “Amela,” to help with the cleanup.
For no reason, you delay standing. Just by a few seconds. A moment that no one notices or cares to, before you break the inertia, put yourself to work. And when you do—
When you do, your ankles meet resistance. Pulling out your chair, you stand, break the hold, and look down and find that it was roots. Thin, new roots that had briefly kept you there. Grown down, trying to anchor, as roots do.
You delay a little longer, standing in the yard, staring down at them. You think of fruitfever. Of the breeze and those berry bushes, of unturned apples and the sweetripeness in you that clouds and warms and cradles and begs: rest, rest. You-o-fruitsapling. Who would put you to work?
“Amela!” you’re called. To work.
Your free evening hours, meant for school prep, pass and pass.
Maybe you let them? You sort of do—it’s half a willing cessation and half the thing-in-you, the root-inertia, that which wants you to settle and stay. That sosweet temptation. You’re tangled up in it, so confusing a sensation: stillness, relief.
I need to pack, you think, and think, and lay on your side on the carpet and stare at the patient suitcase-maws. But you’re good at playing Tetris—you could get yourself together in an hour flat, have before. You have time. You don’t have to do it right now.
I need to pack, you think, and think.
And you don’t move.
And you start to grow.
The second-littlest gets sick in the night.
Light sleeper that you are, you start awake at his uncomfortable whimpers—find yourself still lying on the carpet, surrounded by vines—and when the vomiting starts, you shoot up and break roots and quick-step down the hall.
He shares a room with the littlest, who is also awake, sitting up and covering his ears and looking green. A sympathetic vomiter, you know from unfortunate experience. A quick check with the thermometer finds the littlest healthy, so you avoid another mess by shooing him off to go crawl in Mom and Dad’s bed, and set to cleaning up the sick.
The blankets are stripped and replaced. A mouth is cleaned up, a near-miss with a second puking is had, a mouth is cleaned up again. When it stops, you sit with your second-littlest sibling and let him cry into your shoulder. You curl an arm around him, rock gently. Shoo away the little green shoots that mimic you, curling from your fingers toward his skin. The hollow of a tree, you think, unprompted, is so safe a place for small creatures.
He falls asleep after you ply him with fever reducer and gulps of water, lay him back down, and place a damp cloth on his forehead. After, you stay there a while. You smooth back his hair, look long across the room at the digital clock reading 02:30, feel the feverheat of his skin indistinguishable from yours. Something has been wrong with you, you think, looking down at the babybranches growing out of your skin, reaching for your sibling, mimic-of-comfort. Something sweating, dizzied, fruitfevered, has been wrong with you. And you have walked on through it.
No one has woken in the night to tend to you—but then, who would have noticed? No one looks too closely. You’ve ensured they won’t look too closely; you’ve done your best to push through. It isn’t too long until you leave for school. You’d be remiss to shirk your duties now. They just take a little longer to do dizzied, is all.
The six-hour drive to campus will be great fun so fevered, you muse, tucking hair behind the second-littlest’s ear, and feel the tickle sensation of your own hair tucked, ten years old the last time you were so sick you couldn’t move and Mom sat on the edge of your bed and hummed and held you, smoothed your sweaty hair away, soothed your whimperings. Your room was painted a soft purple then, and you were still the youngest, Mom just showing with baby four out of an eventual six. It was around that time that she’d started teaching you to do laundry, and to cook basic meals, and you loved to spend that time with her, to see the fruits of your labor and to be guided by her steady hands, be shown, be helped, be useful. Your older siblings gladly handed chores off to you. You took them up with such an excitement to prove your worth, and Mom and Dad had been so impressed, had given you more to do, had asked you very seriously if you could take on some more responsibility since Mom was pregnant and having trouble, and you liked being useful. You liked helping her. Liked the way she smiled when she watched your fumbling little hands, because back then she still looked at you. Your second-littlest sibling, baby five, hiccups in his sleep.
You reorient.
Across the room, the digital clock reads 03:45. You take your hand away, stand up. Brush little torn vines off of the bedspread.
Leave, and go back to your unpacked room.
Aronia moves into your shared dorm room one day before you do. That morning, she drives to your house and begs you over to hers to help pack.
This is an annual routine. Every year since you were freshmen, Aronia has left it to the last minute. Every year, she begs your “help,” and then sits down and watches you do it for her. Every year you both make the six-hour drive to school separately, and she always goes before you.
So it goes. To the call you trot.
Her room when you arrive is a whirlwind mess: clothing litters the floor, household necessities pile the bed, total junk is tossed everywhere and in between. Over it all is a thick weed-covered-by-perfume smell that the open windows try, valiantly, to waft out. Aronia paces the room as you blink and squint, disoriented, and she fills the corners with her usual blather: a preamble as she pretends to sort things out on her own, your presence motivation. You know she won’t.
You let the farce go on, though, and in through the window crawls another smell: fall decay. Things sweetly rotting. It pierces the haze and fills you, and you slump into Aronia’s beanbag in the corner. And you don’t take over packing. Instead, you watch.
She doesn’t at first notice your passivity. She keeps pacing, putting things in haphazard piles, talking over her checklist and the classes she’ll be taking and the clubs she’s part of and can’t wait (or doesn’t want) to get back to. She seems not to notice the gapingly empty suitcases. From your position in the corner, you stare at their caverns, Tetris-placing within those of her things that you can see. You could have this room cleaned up and put away in less than two hours. It’s why you’re here.
But you don’t move.
Eventually, Aronia runs out of things to pick up and move two feet over, and out of stories to tell or thoughts to share. She stalls, looking around, and distantly you see the weight of the task register in her: the packing up, the work of it, the leaving. She staggers. She’s not good at transitions and you know it. It’s why you helped her that first year, when she asked. It’s why she has given up responsibility and leaned on you every year since.
Aronia sits down on the floor in the middle of the mess. She curls her fists into the hem of her shirt, and turns to you, and calls: “Amela,” in so plaintive a voice. “Help?”
This is what you’re here for. To make, to chop, to hold, to listen, to help.
Aronia’s face does something confused when you don’t immediately rise, but you don’t wait long enough for her to catch your eye. If she looked right at you, you think you’d fall to rot.
You stand and move to start playing Tetris. As you lift yourself up off the beanbag, from your skin, thin roots snap.
On the last day of the last week before the last time you leave for college, the apples turn.
It is, of course, too soon for it. They are barely a week picked—but everything has been moving too fast, lately. Seasons, fruits, the last-week, the thing-in-you as it spreads and grows. So it goes. So it all goes, and you are afraid to stop, lest it run away from you.
You still have not packed your bags.
This is a task no one will call you to. All are too busy tugging you elsewhere to think of it, and anyway, who would assume you’d need a push? You’ve always done this alone. You have never needed help, and so no one offers it.
You sink, still, to the floor of your room.
On Monday your last year of college begins. You’ve never thought beyond it. Only that, at some point, it will end. That it has to end. School, yes, but also all else. At some point you have to stop. At some point your life has to begin. You’ve never thought when—never had the stomach to—only managed to focus on the first step, the stop. Eventually you have to stop. Eventually the world will let you. Next spring the world might let you. Or—or, sometime that summer. That nearly-fall. So must you pack to get there.
But you don’t move.
It crawls in you, spreading and filling, thin filigree made thick for the mass of it, sweetsickness like so many roots—like you’ve been seeded and sprouted in—like your skin is the seed as it starts to crack. Every inch of you wants to still and grow down and blossom. Berry harvest has passed—an early fall hastening it!—but the thing-in-you is so warmed by the body, the bloodpumping, the toowarm fevered mess you’ve been made into. It’s so simple, thoughtless. It observes all that energy you lose when you trot to the calls, and sagely advises: rest. And when you do not—when they don’t let you, or you won’t say no—it begs you: rest. So temptingly. You-o-fruitsapling. Saddled with so much, and no one will look at you.
You don’t move. You’re not sure yet if you’re giving in.
You chose the work, didn’t you? You wanted it?
The morning sun rises. Your knees ache, pressed into wood; your back smarts, curled grotesquely forward. I need to pack, you think, and keep thinking, and when you were eighteen and packing for college for the first ever time you folded shirts into piles into suitcases and thought to yourself soon. And so much was held taut in that soon: some kind of endurance, some longing, the idea of an end in sight. You planned, all vagueness, all-hope, to study and graduate and get a job and head off on your own, rent a house and raise chickens, to go home only for holidays. You looked at it all like an inevitability, the way a young adult’s life goes; that leaving home behind wasn’t anything more special than the close of a book chapter, that it was only natural change, that you didn’t think soon with all that weight behind it for any particular reason.
The room is bright. It’s afternoon; you’ve skipped again.
Reorient. You look down, and your neck creaks with the movement.
All over, you’re sprouting. Roots, little vines, would-be-branches, none quite thick enough yet to bud leaves. Still small but accelerating, encouraged by your sowarm fruitfever, by your stillness, and the haze beckons you back into it, brings all your memory into the now for you to flip through, a little slideshow-convincing: all the labor and longing you’ve done. In its simplicity it makes you look at it directly. In its simplicity, it curls and conjures up so profound, so sweet a guilt.
You want to stop. You want someone to help you.
Rest, the thing-in-you advises.
And why wait? Everything is already going so fast. In through your open window wafts the berryrot, up through the floorboards the overripe apples in the kitchen; fruit rots and rises, and you inhale it, inhale all the turnings, the time leaping towards you both from back and front. Soon can be now, the thing-in-you offers, and it can, can’t it? You can stop. You don’t have to answer any calls. You don’t have to pack or move, you don’t have to work—you-o-fruitsapling, who would make you? It’s okay to rest. It’s okay to stay your hand. All needs not be shouldered by one alone.
You, thintwig, are not meant to move any longer. You can’t.
Roots burrow down, find purchase in wooden slats, reach and reach for soil. Vines grow up and out, and branches, and leaves which bud, and fruits, eventually, but not yet; it’s too late in the season.
You don’t move. You grow.
“Amela,” you’re called, so sweetly, to rest.