Honeycrisp

In the apple orchard I pluck a honeycrisp from a tall branch, my ivory sweater revealing my wrist as I reach. Autumn runs straight up my sleeve and when I turn around she is staring. One look and the smoke of her irises spear me with their silver tips. I want her to undress me with sharp things. She crosses the distance between us, takes the apple from my hands, and bites into it, hard. Somehow I know neither of us is alone—no one goes to an apple orchard uncoupled. I tear the title page from a Patricia Highsmith novel and hand her a pen and “Jay?” a voice calls. From the way her shoulders turn inward, I know it’s her name.  

 “Jay! Where'd you go?” the woman’s voice curdles the billowing heat between my exposed neck and her dagger of a jawline. She writes numbers quickly, folds the paper in half, places it in my palm, her strong, thick fingers almost touching my own. Her dark hair slicked back, a single curl falling into her eyes, she looks at me with an earnest tilt of confidence, and I nod silently, holding the paper to my lips. I tuck the promise of her inside my bra as she walks away, answering to the encroaching voice, and look down at the golden apple, streaked with red like nails down the back, like drawing blood. I take a bite that overlaps with her teeth marks in the tender yellow. A first kiss.

My yearslong lover approaches, finds me with bite mark evidence of what will be our inevitable end. Lex puts her arm around me as we walk through the trees, but it’s like a once-warm coat gone ratty with age and overuse. I’m still cold.  

A gala apple, grown too heavy for its branch, falls and rots. Worms. Maggots. Lex picks a piece of lint from my sweater and talks about nothing. We are surviving off memories, the past an ethanol to keep us chugging along, but there hasn’t been a filling station for some time now. I hope the worms make a home out of the gala core’s decay. I hope I can find time alone to call the secret already burning like a moan against my chest. 

When I meet Jay at a redlit bar in a back booth a few days later, I tell her about our first kiss.

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