This is the apple in your hand.
Some would say it is so red that it looks black, but that’s not quite
right. It’s the color of wine and offal, of liver soaked in Pinot Noir.
Bruise-dark and blood-bright.
The skin shows little russeting, if any. But it is home to a peppering
of lenticels—the little white dots you sometimes see on appleskin. These
lenticels feel somehow deeper than the skin itself. As if you are staring
into a thing that is nothing as much as it is something: an object of depth,
of breadth, like a hole in the universe. In this way the lenticels are like
the stars of a moonless evening.
The skin is smooth and cold, always cold. It is a round apple, not
oblong, not tall, but also not squat. The Platonic ideal of an apple shape,
perhaps: roughly symmetrical, broad in the shoulders, narrow toward
the calyx. The apple is heavy, too. Dense-feeling. Heavy enough to crack
a window. Or break a nose.
Even before you bite it, a scent rises to meet you. It’s the smell of
roses—not unusual, because apples are related to the rose. Same family,
in fact: Rosaceae.
What is unusual is the moment, a moment so fast you will disregard
it, when the smell makes you feel something in the space between your
heart and your stomach: a feeling of giddiness and loss in equal measure.
In that feeling is the dying of summer, the rise of fall, the coming of winter, and threaded throughout, a season of funerals and flowers left on a grave. But again, that moment is so fast, you cannot hold on to it. It is
gone, like a dream upon waking.
Of course, what matters most is the eating.
In the first bite, the skin pops under your teeth—the same pop you’d
feel biting into a tightly skinned sausage. The flesh has a hard texture,
and if you were to cut a slice you’d find it would not bend, but rather, it would break like a chip of slate snapping in half. That snap is a satisfying
sensation: a tiny tectonic reverberation felt all the way to the elbow.
In the chew, the apple is crisp, resistant to its destruction, with a
crunch so pleasurable it lights up some long-hidden atavistic artifact in
your brain, a part that eons ago took great joy from crushing small bones
between your teeth. The flesh is juicy; it floods the mouth, refusing to be
dammed by teeth or lips, inevitably dripping from your chin. But for all
its juiciness, too, the tannins are high—and the apple feels like it’s wicking the moisture out of your mouth, as if it’s taking something from you
even as you take from it.
The taste itself is a near-perfect balance of tartness and sweetness—
that sour, tongue-scrubbing feel of a pineapple, but one that has first
been run through a trench of warm honey. The skin, on the other hand,
is quite bitter, but there’s something to that, too. The way it competes
with the tart and the sweet. The way the most popular perfumes are
ones that contain unpleasant, foul odors secreted away: aromatics of rot,
bile, rancid fat, bestial musk, an ancient, compelling foulness from the
faraway time when crunching those little bones made us so very happy.
And so very powerful.
The bitterness of the skin is a necessary acrimony: a reminder that
nothing good can last, that things die, that the light we make leaves us all
eventually. That the light leaves the world. A hole in the universe. So we
must shine as brightly as we can, while we can.
It speaks to you, this bitterness, this foulness.
It speaks to some part of you that likes it.
Because part of you does like it.
Doesn’t it?
Okay, this isn’t really an apple review, ha ha I tricked you because it’s Halloween, you sickos. Rather, a note that Black River Orchard is two bucks for your digital book reader of choice. Which is to say, you can find it at Bookshop.org, Kobo, Amazon, B&N, Apple, and so forth.
And The Book of Accidents is still five bucks.
I expect this is a today only thing, so hop to it. If you dare.
HAPPY APPLEWEEN, NERDS
