February Made Me Shiver

So they came upon a field of empty trees, stark and witchlike against the country winter sky. The ground was dirty, muddy, the patches of frozen ( then thawed then frozen then thawed still tenaciously clinging to it's green) grass, now petrified in a permanent taxidermy of an orchard. The gnarled and burned branches lay broken haphazardly underneath the victims. He pulled over, and she got out to take pictures, but the farm dog tied up to the distant barn heard them and sounded the alarm. So they drove further down the empty road, and found a more inconspicuous spot for her to pretend to be a photographer. He stayed in the car.

 "What do you think they are?"

"I think they are monsters."
 "I think they are trees. Probably apple trees."
"I think you are wrong. They are monsters."
 "Well if they are not apple trees, they are too sad to be monsters."
 "Don't you think monsters are sad? I think monsters must be the saddest of all animals. They are all alone. There are very few of any one kind, they are all different and alone and have no one to relate to their own particular monstrosity."
 "But all these trees, they aren't alone. They are just dead together. They must have been alive together at some point too."
 "What if it's not just lots of monsters, but only one monster, buried under the ground, with lots of arms sticking up and out, all connected by tentacle roots, and they all look dead together because only one huge massive thing underneath our feet is dead?"
 "You are a weird funny girl"
 "It's not weird or funny. It's tragic and sad. You only think I'm funny cause you feel like somewhere deep in your chest I might be right. And that's why you put up with me."
"I put up with you because you are brilliant and beautiful."
"That isn't the point. The point is I am right. In some world, these are not trees, this is the brittle rotting skeleton of a creature we might only see in our dreams, something low and long and buried and slow like a glacier or like that giant fungus that is basically the whole state of Washington. That makes much more sense than individual lifeforms that grow up uniformly despite being separate creatures, then die every winter and come back every Spring and just magically give us stuff to eat."
"So that would make sap blood."
 "Yes, and apples would be..."
"...fingernails..."
 "...or warts...."
"something that falls off."
 "right, falls off a living creature, and then we eat it."
 "gross."

Suppose that each black and wizened broken trunk was broken open, that you drove your car straight into the field and mowed them down like kindling. Then as you get out of your Cadillac in the middle of the orchard, looking at the path of dead tree devastion behind you, your radiator starting to smoke, the ground around you starts to sparkle. Slight at first, then stronger, building momentum and light. Gathering like fireflies, only it's daytime though a dark daytime, and yet you can see them clearer and clearer. A thousand pricks of light, little diamonds rising out of the organic wreckage and war, floating hovering through their own pulsing a few feet above their former prisons.

 And every single one is a wish someone made before winter began, something that grew shimmering from a bit of dirt or bark or glass that got lodged one day in your chest, that was coated layer by layer over time with hopes you had for what might happen next year. Then the new year came and went, and February's winds stole all these pearls while we were sleeping, sucked them out of our mouths like cats sucking souls, blew them out of the houses and apartments and into the outlying forests and farms and jesus we're all hidden out there, our real selves and the prettiest part of ourselves, stuck cursed little summer souls in cold dark lifeless magic trees.

 So obviously, you have to knock them all down and free them.

 "But wait, what if our wishes need to hibernate and sleep through the winter like the trees, or they won't bloom when it gets warmers? What if I let them all out and then a frost kills them?"

 You're right, of course. But she doesn't like that conclusion, because it smacks of sentimentality, and spirituality, and purpose. And she'd rather have everything made of conflict.

 The little sparks from the crunching wreckage are now milling about, gusts of wind making them eddy and flow like Northern Lights. They haven't got anywhere to go, and so they blend and bleed with each other until it's a shimmering indistinct fog, diluting with the mud and asphalt of the road as it drifts up and over and into other fields.

Mirror Mirror

Mirror Mirror on the Wall, Who's the first person to take an apple down off a tree and eat it, so that the rest of the tribe could see it wasn't poisonous? And by tribe, I mean loose collection of individuals who had yet to formulate a hierarchy or belief system, except belief in finding things to eat that wouldn't kill them. So maybe there was one adventurous ancestor, let's call her the original foodie, who picked an apple fallen off its tree, lying on the ground small and wizen and brown and just at the point of rotting because everything in that world was either not ripe or rotting, a world without fridges or ice or salt or root cellars. Apples weren't as pretty back then, or as sweet. They were tart tiny almost inedible seed carriers, but our ancestors spent 90% of their daylight searching for things to eat and apples tasted way better than bark. We were like chipmunks, or squirrels. Humans, the largest squirrel. Burying things, hiding things from animals, stocking up for winter months. We needed so much fuel to run the massive computers growing in our heads, like computers that took up entire rooms of college campuses and sucked down enough electricity to power all of Minneapolis now. Minneapolis and degrees being an entire light year away, but anticipated all foreshadowed by food.

And our heroine, because the women would be the gatherers, roaming around close to home base/home cave/shelter, she found the apple, saw the bears eating it, and ate it too, and it was okay. She gestured and pointed, and everyone else started eating them too. She became an expert on finding things on the ground to eat. A leader among the tribe, because the most valuable skill was feeding people. They spread the news of eating the strange new thing to other more far away tribes over time - the banished son who couldn't find a mate traveling in the wilderness to other families buying his acceptance and life to strangers by offering them the fruit he came with, the kidnapped and bought daughter turning to the familiar foods of the home territory. The Woman was given a name, a certain grunt or moan or click that referred to her, the famous finder of food, and language was born. Eeeeeevvvvv. She gave directions to the other women, to find the trees and how to pick the good ones, and matriarchy was born. The image of her, a round fat apple woman well fed and all knowing, became a marker, and when they learned that apple trees could also grow out of trash heaps where cores had been thrown, that spot became a place to come back to Spring after Spring, Fall after Fall. Agriculture was born, staying put, cooking, villages, order and harvest and spoiled alcoholic juice.

The apple trees became a dark hidden place for young people to meet, or old people to cheat, to get tipsy on the fermented ground fruit. The heroine grew old and respected, her breasts sagging and her teeth almost gone, and one day found her mate fucking a younger girl in the orchard, in the branches and roots of her precious trees, at the very foot of the wrinkled gnarled original tree which had changed her life centuries ago and given her power, now old and ugly like her but growing the best and biggest and reddest fruit. If he left her, old and dying as she was now, she would be alone and ashamed, meatless and protectionless which is the original definition of heartbroken, when your heart actually breaks when you actually die.

Thus the Poison Apple was born and fed to pretty young things. A power born out of knowing the properties of what to eat and what not to eat, the original magic, and a hatred created from the disintegration of relevance. The Mother, who showed us the way up from the Garden, and The Witch, who knew how to kill without you being able to defend yourself. It was the Woman who created a world where food wasn't the most important thing, and opened the door to a time where she no longer was either.

The very ugliest and also best most complicated applesauce I've ever made:

one 1/2 bushel of apples. Whatever. Ida Roma. Matsu. Red Delicious.
peel, quarter
a section of ginger root about the size of the middle joint of your index finger, peeled and chopped
2 cups dark brown sugar
2 lemons worth of juice squeezed to death
several long and drunk throws of cinnamon
more salt than you really think necessary
1 package fruit pectin, thrown in at the last minute
1 package dried cranberries and 1 package dried apricots soaked in peach brandy for two hours
1 bottle cheap riesling
combine all in the largest largest stockpot your mom has in her kitchen
pour in enough water to cover the apples if there's any room left
simmer for three fucking hours

Bingo. Breakfast for days. 3 fucking quarts of it, honest. Breakfast for everyone for days. The whole stinking ungrateful tribe.