Apple Grove

 —- and we step. I fall to my knees. This air is pure. Almost uncomfortable. I take big, deep breaths like I’ve been trained and I can hear Sask’n laugh softly somewhere above me. It’s night, with a full Moon throwing unmolested silver-golden light over everything. Just like the forecast said. 

The ground under my knees is warm and solid and.. organic. Dirt. Soil. An endless sea of little rippling greenery that stretches on and on. It seems impossible, as impossible as the sweet air and as impossible as the prize we’ve come to collect. Sask’n is already ahead of me slightly, moving with an ease that tells me they’ve made this trip countless times before, striding assuredly up to a particularly large tree. 

It’s like something out of a dream. A gorgeous thing that sprawls up into the sky with wide, welcoming branches cloaked by so many leaves, and perched across those countless reaching fingers— fruits. These are red. Perfect, shiny, healthy red so blissful and pristine that they catch the moonlight and seem to glimmer. Pick me, they say into the night, enjoy me. Almost in a trance I’m off my knees and scrambling to the trunk as Sask’n scurries upward, long dexterous fingers picking and plucking with the precision of a harvester tilling. 

Pick. Pick. Pick.

Even the sound that they make when plucked is delightful, a little magical crunch as they come away from each and every supporting branch. Our webpacks are sturdy, broad, and so we fill them until each step is a wobbly tribulation. I hold one in my hand. An apple. Turn it this way, then that.  It is a little miracle in every sense of the word. Small, elegant. A satisfying amount of weight for something so deceptively precious. I impress to Sask’n that, well, I have no clue what to do with it, and they thrum soft reverberations. It soothes my embarrassment just a bit. Then, they take a bite. Crunch.

My senses are elated when I do the same. So many impressions: cool ripeness, a slightly acidic skin that yields to fresh, moist flesh underneath. I shiver. Savoring every second. My first taste, and I know I will never have enough, that I will return over and over to this foreign place of sweet air and majestic trees. Always eager to recapture and surpass this first blessed bite. 

We have taken nearly two hundred apples. Even the rotten ones that litter cool, moist ground. Preparing— voices. All my worst fears of discovery and capture, the terror of paradox, all unfold in a moment. Have we been discovered?

We freeze. Automatic sensors unwrap the darkness around us until even the most advanced artificial eyes in this era would bypass us without so much as a blink. We wait. The voices are close. Sweet as this fantastical treasure we’ve secured, rich with laughter and words that speak to lives I can scarcely imagine. The tones are warm. Gentle. I feel myself whisper reverberation before it is stifled, silenced. In another heartbeat they are gone, passing away into the night just as we, with another step, pass into history.