Short Stories

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“The Apple Tree”

On days when petals tremble separate from fingertips and the sun glows pinpricks of light through leaves, the air is silent. With elevation, a stillness grows until bodies stand, unmoving, arms outstretched to welcome sinking clouds, and the quaking of life slows to an imperceptible shiver. In the Swiss Alps, this phenomenon happens in spring. For a few months a year, the air smells like open window and it feels like butterfly wings. In these mountains, a girl lives with her grandfather. They are alone with the dust glittering from the rays of light through the open door, and it is simple- to wake up with the slow-ripening dawn and rise, treading across the worn path of bare feet on hardwood floors to the pot of tea steeping on the stove, and watching, with the lazy fragility of departing night drifting in their eyes, the tendrils of steam escaping from the spout.

Gwen always pours. Her grandfather’s hands have worn too thin to carry weight and the veins along the backs are looking a little less like rivers and a lot more like cracking. But the more eroded his body becomes, the brighter his eyes shine, and it is in these early mornings, when Gwen rubs sleep from her eyes, that she sees his strongest. They capture thunder under a microscope, until its very fabric is twisted into a collection of sound waves reduced to pixelated image. But when his mouth opens, breathing sound to the thunder, it crackles with lightning. Blue, the kind that strikes only when it rains so that the droplets catch on friction and you can dance outside again.

She is grateful for his soft strength, especially when memories rise from immense depths and she sinks under their weight, because she knows that he is there to pull her back up again, just as she is there to remind him to eat and help him walk. For, with all the appearance of calm, they are brimming with the need to escape the house, Gwen to the hills and her grandfather to the garden. When no one is looking they glance at the third chair at the table and wish they had the chance to break it down into something else. Something that didn’t look like it could hold a person. Something that would serve an ulterior purpose than to remind them of loss. But, at the same time, parting with it would make the house one chair emptier and the spiders love to weave dream-catchers in between the rails on the back. Gwen spends all of her time on the hilltops now, glancing away from the birds that fly so carefree in the sky, wishing her mother were there to tell her about each one. This feeling would be followed by the self-loathsome thought that she was not giving her mother’s memory the peace it deserved, preferring to constantly pull her back into her head like prematurely derooting an apple tree before it has borne fruit. Gwen knows her mother deserves to grow her branches draped in red baubles, but she cannot let go. And so she prefers to sit and push any thought down until she cannot even feel the cold.

After breakfast, Gwen tends to the sheep. They dot the valley like cotton tufts on a sweater, ambling through wildflowers under Schnee’s watchful eye. The wind slips underneath his fur and back out the other side, creating ripples across his medium-sized body. Native to these mountains, Schnee is a Greater Swiss Mountain Dog and his fur is the shade of burnt toast, the kind you make by accident so the black appears splashed on, leaving behind patches of beige and brown.

He arrived at the cottage during a snowstorm, his fur completely frosted with it, looking like a white, wooly pom-pom. They had been sitting around the fire, reading while listening to the wind rattling the chimney, the snow falling down and sizzling as the heat of the fire melted it into raindrops. Gwen was watching this happen, counting how many seconds it took for the snow to fall into the fireplace before the snap of fire meeting water. Two seconds. Soon the chimney was too hot to allow any snow to enter it and Gwen turned her attention to her mother and grandfather. They were talking about a day in her mother’s childhood when it had snowed worse and they had not been able to open the door the ground was so covered in snow and ice. They had been worried that the sheep wouldn’t make it through the night, but they had laid down to protect their bellies and hooves, insulated by thick wool. Her mother smiled saying she was thankful she had been safe inside because she would not have been able to survive. Everyone agreed. It was in the silence after that joke that they could hear a quiet whimper from the window.

Gwen got up and walked over to the frozen pane. When she rubbed the moisture from the glass, two bright eyes met hers in the darkness. At first, she thought it was a wolf and she was unsure if she should risk letting it in, but her mother didn’t hesitate, opening the front door. With a burst of wind and snow, the dog bounded in. Only a few weeks old, his mother must not have taught him the dangers of entering a stranger’s house yet. Schnee went straight to the fire, shaking white dust off of his pelage until he turned black. They would later joke that he had been burnt by flames. They fed him some leftover sausage and let him sleep in Gwen’s bed and that was that. When spring came, they built him a structure outside so he could watch over the sheep, but on really cold nights they left him a spot on the carpet by the fire where he and Gwen could sit together counting the seconds before fire hit rain and sizzled.

Gwen sits beside Schnee on the hilltop, pressing her side against his. Their eyes follow the current of breeze across the valley, its footsteps putting pressure on petals and blades of grass then springing forward. Snowbells, Globe Daisies, and Narcissus shiver in its wake, trembling away the memory of its touch. Most days, Gwen takes her notebook up the mountain, leaving her grandfather to tend to his garden out back, behind his cabin. Nothing makes him happier than to sink his weary hands into soil, where the moisture seeps into his cracks in a semblance of restoration. He grounds himself under the gnarled oak tree, pressing his back against its trunk and letting his fingers explore the distances between earth and roots.

Her mother used to take her to visit him. They would sit under that tree and Gwen remembers how her mother’s hair looked like feathers made of fire when the sun sank into her curls just so and she imagined she could feel the heat of it, from her seat on the cool soil. As they gardened, her mother would tell her stories. Gwen’s favorite was the one about the sparrowhawk. Her mother had a tattoo of one on her back and she told Gwen that one day, when she was young, she had fallen asleep in the garden, rocked by the breeze carrying sweet scents across the valley, ruffling the petals and her hair in great exhales. She dreamed that a great sparrowhawk swept her up onto its back and they flew across the world. When she awoke, she had the imprint of the bird on her back. Gwen loved those days, when time was irrelevant and they could sit there for hours, telling stories and imagining that one day the seeds they planted would become fields. Gwen liked to imagine that someday they would spread so far that the house would be swallowed and all that would be left would be grass and sky and mountain.

When they weren’t in the garden, they milked the sheep and gathered their wool, making butter, cheese, and yarn. With the berries they planted, they made dyes to color the yarn so they could knit. Her mother loved to knit hats, adorning them with crocheted leaves and petals. Gwen preferred making small creatures, inspired by fairytales. Her favorite was the Loch Ness Monster she kept on her windowsill. She had dyed it purple since it was her favorite color, made from blueberries and indigo flowers. The other animals she made she placed on a shelf by her bed, but she couldn’t bring herself to part with it. Besides, it deserved to be out in the world for once, instead of hiding in a lake. Gwen believed that Nessie was misunderstood. Maybe she didn’t hide because she was afraid of her reflection, but because she was afraid that the people who saw her would change the lake’s surface to show her a reflection tainted by prejudice. She couldn’t bear to lose sight of herself like that, so she preferred to make the lake her home.

Gwen and her mother would use the bread and butter to bake. Their favorite was lemon cake and they served it with wild strawberries cut in the shape of stars. Some days, when the sun shone through a veil of clouds so that it had the same consistency as beginning, she would go with her mother to a corner of the valley protected from the mountains. Year round, flowers would bloom beneath the trees and her mother taught her how to choose which ones to pick. They would fill wicker baskets with blossoms and take them home to turn into essential oils. Gwen loved how the house smelled on those days, like if she could close her eyes she would open them to find that the walls had melted into fruit trees and the floor was soft tufts of grass dusted with multi-colored florets.

Schnee pulls away from her side, tail wagging and nose pressed to the ground in search of something new which the wind carried to him in a whisper. She follows, if only to feel that there are still distances she does not know, like she knows that the drive here took two hours and that they found her mother five feet under snow. The rebellious tendrils of red curls which have escaped her bun follow him, dancing in front of her like beacons against the bright blue sky. As her shoes step further from the cottage, the weather begins to change. Her mother always loved winter, when the snow was waiting for the signal to fall. It usually waited for nightfall, when her mother stood on the front steps and looked up at the stars. She wouldn’t wear a jacket so she could feel the condensation raise goosebumps on her arms. It was the only way she could tell it was real.

By the time Gwen is only a small spot on the horizon, the snow is falling slowly. It whispers around her ears as she shivers from the cool shock of each snowflake landing on her face and arms. Her hair glitters with them, reflecting sunlight back into the atmosphere where clouds lie heavy with iced condensation. She turns her face away from the stinging sensation, preferring to look down at the flowers being trampled by the soles of her shoes. She leaves behind pressed flowers. Her mother kept a book of them, lightly ironed between the pages where she had scrawled snippets of poetry beneath their names, wrapping ink around flattened petals. Gwen used to slide her thumbs across the bursts of color on parchment, eyes closed so that the world was dark. She liked to imagine that her thumbs could tell her their colors based on the way the film felt under her skin. When they were rough, she saw red, like the way her mother’s hands felt after washing dishes, the tips of her fingers pruned up and tightened by the friction of sponge on pans. Soft, she saw orange like the feel of her mother’s hair when she saw monsters in the shadows and hid her hands in her mother’s curls. She would pick out the knots until she was surrounded by softness, like the down under a bird’s wings, and she could sleep. Yellow petals felt like pollen or dryness and the dust particles crawling across the living room when the sun is at its strongest. Green was warmth, like eyes when they first open and fall onto loved faces. Blue is still and cool, like water, like snow falling against her face. Purple is loss like the sky as the last rays of sun slip beneath the mountains.

When Schnee finally pauses, Gwen notices the bells, seeming to come from all corners of the Alps at once so that it feels like they are being pulled from within her. Their noise rattles her bones and it seems that each chime reflects a sound of memory. As the snow falls harder, the songs of birds are quieted and the mountains grow motionless, the flowers no longer undulating in the breeze, but the sound from inside continues. She begins to run forwards, trying to find silence, but she is only hit by echo and spinning vibrations that fracture her surroundings into pieces of the past. Some are heavier than others, made of a darker substance like tinted glass. She can’t see inside them like she can the others, only hear their bells clang with voices, soothing if not for the immense volume and power they speak with. She is lost in it, running blindly in search of closure from the sheer audacity of something so unwelcome taking root within her very core. It is bittersweet like chewing on apple seeds, cracking the skin with her teeth and waiting for the flavor to curdle her tongue; she can almost feel an apple tree growing inside her, stretching its branches through her veins, so she runs faster, preventing her feet from sinking into the ground. The sky is blurry and it smells and looks like rain and puddles and sinking. By now, she is the size of a speck of dust, and running further into disappearing. Another few seconds and the mountains swallow her whole.

The trees begin to thin as soon as she stops thinking about her surroundings and focuses only on the bells. Funny how it works that way, that when she stops thinking about something it becomes more important, like how she didn’t tell her mother goodbye and the church bells chimed like mockery or maybe just as a way to fill the silence because stillness would only make the tears fall faster. Church bells. They ring above her head as she steps into the clearing, echoing the rattle of apple seeds sprouting in her stomach, glancing off rib cage into the semblance of heartbeat. The sound is coming from a church, nestled between two hills, the clouds parted around the steeple in such a way that the sun hits the roof directly, melting the snow in small circles on the copper tiles. It is made of worn stone, beautiful and timeless.

Slowly, her feet carry her to the front steps, and before she knows it the door is open. Schnee doesn’t follow, preferring to stay behind and watch, untouched by the cold that swirls now in great waves, picking leaves up on energy and dropping them like rain on the ground. The soles of her sneakers slap against the stone floor as she walks into the depths of the structure. When she looks around, she is astounded to find that the walls are made of crumbling bricks, merging and dispersing in ways that leave gaping holes in the sides. Under her eyes, the walls shake as the bells continue to toll. Wind whistles under the wooden beams and snow seeps into the cracks. Gwen isn’t cold. The next thing she notices is the water; it covers the floor and soaks through her sneakers. She follows the spirals to the center of the room where they all part in four directions back to the corners of the walls. An apple tree rises up out of the tidepool, its branches stretched to the ceiling holding up the roof. It is covered in bright red apples and Gwen reaches to pick one before realizing that each one is rattling with the sound of bells. She looks closer and the polish reflects back a face of her mother. She blinks and realizes that the nose is not the same shape and this face has more freckles than she remembers. Gwen looks at her reflection as the walls continue to break down around her.

She imagines how, if she cut the apple, its seeds could be planted into more trees. This one apple tree is only a transition, a doorway into both the present and future, but not a reality. She cannot build a life for herself on its branches, only use it as a source of shelter and food. This does not mean she cannot visit the tree when she needs it. No, it only means that she has to create a situation where her surroundings have more than one facet. Most of all, she needs to remember that her reflection is the only thing she cannot bury because, beneath the piles of bricks torn down by self-loathing, it will still grow into a tree. But if that tree is the only one left to hold up her roof, how long until the beams bend inwards and the tree is crushed too, leaving nothing but dust behind?

But this can’t be because, although the foundation is covered in water, it has no cracks. Deep inside the earth, it has planted stone roots that cannot be shaken easily. With resolve, Gwen closes her eyes and imagines dawn. How the tea steeps on the stove and it is simple, to watch the vapor rise and fog up the window, her grandfather asking her how she slept with his voice of quiet thunder. Maybe they will both go garden tomorrow, or she will go get the milk from the sheep and bake a lemon cake. The third chair will stay at the table and the dreamcatchers etched between its rails will reflect back the stories she knows so well. Out back, the apple trees will grow from the seeds she planted and she can watch them from her window without yanking them out of the ground. The next summer there will be apples for pie and she can spread the crumbs out on the windowsill for the birds. Her mother would have liked that.

Gwen is ashamed. Her mother had taught her that prisms of light made rainbows in the darkest of places. The world is never black and white. She does not have to honor her mother’s memory with self-loathing, but with love. Love for herself and for the world she is a part of everyday. Love for the smallest things like the sound of snow in the fireplace or the colors evoked by the textures of pressed petals. With light in her core, Gwen floats up to the dome on the roof.

The next day, she would only remember how it felt to reach the top. How the world spun a little differently with elevation, and the sunlight no longer hit roof tiles but seemed to glance off of each snowflake until the sky was no longer gray but paled into the same blue as her eyes. The valley unfolded at her fingertips, sewn into panels of a shawl that she could wrap around herself and, as she stood in a dome with windows all around to let the snow in, she shivered with cold. When she got back down, the tree had vanished and the holes had patched themselves up, turning back into limestone.

It is silent. Schnee is waiting at the door and they walk out together, making their way across the hills back to her grandfather and the sheep grazing amongst the flowers. Her grandfather waits for her on the front porch when she gets home, not worried as much as curious. His hands are creased with fresh soil and the smell of it pulls Gwen back into the present. He pulls her towards him, enveloping her in a welcoming embrace. Warmth spreads through her, melting away the snow, leaving only the electricity of blue storm clouds in her palms. Her fingers crackle with it, itching to create something new and beautiful. He leads her inside, telling her about the conversation he had had with the raccoon living by the woodpile that afternoon, how the air smells like snow, and does she remember how her mother would look up at the sky without a jacket and she got goosebumps, and maybe they should make a fire tonight, and does she want lavender tea? He nods to himself that yes, tea is always wanted, busying himself with the hot water, asking Gwen about her day. She tells him all of it, knowing that he has already seen it all in her eyes, but also wanting his voice to add sound to the thunder so her story catches on lightning and becomes something tangible, a flash lighting the night sky.

There they stand, grandfather and granddaughter, holding one another in a form of a dance made of words and the smell of soil and snow and lavender. Schnee sits by the fireplace, looking at them both with the kind of secret smile only dogs can make, knowing that there will be no sad glances tonight only the warmth of memory like spring showers nourishing apple trees. Gwen looks out of the window at the setting sun and there, painting the horizon with great wings into a canvas of streaking red, orange, yellow, pink, and purple hues, is a sparrowhawk, circling the peaks tinged with gold, catching fire, and melting into stars.

-Youna Fradin (16)