Look, look, the dusk is growing! My branches lofty are taking root . . . Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome?
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
Crow feathers chase my feet. I’m not lost. A red leaf blows towards my face. Right before it plasters my eyes, it alters—gargoyled. I peel the leaf away in panicked heart-blast. Now it seems mundane. Damn thing! I throw it down, a gage for the night. Break me if you can. The feathers and now a leaf monster. Am I unwell? Maybe the apples welled forth uncouth bubbles, the froth of forsaken jesters. Feathers clump and undulate along the path, balling underfoot, their arachniform spines evoking Old Juliana and wind witches wheeling in the sun. The year and I reverberate together. I’ve had apples, apples, only apples to eat these three days—my stomach everaches, neverfilling. Yet, without the apples—
Pestilent thoughts. Crow feathers scratch my soles, cutting them. The hesitant tickle of green blades. My family sewed Crescent Orchards long ago, reaping under skies of Persian turquoise. We reaped until the day our harvest disappeared—all of the apples gone, gone from the crates, gone from the thousands of trees still waiting to be plucked. Confounded, I wandered the plundered cathedral as limbs creaked, drunk and snarling in the wind, biting my ears. I stumbled acres from the house, numb from disbelief, finding dumbstruck apples and stowing them in my sack, praying I could find apples enough to counter the stark and unearthly ruin. I cried by the stream that feeds the orchard’s fern-drunk heart, the oldest chamber.
Then I fell asleep. I woke in a world of mist and drop-bubbled spiders. Oh, how the melty have fallen! I rose—a rinthereout solivagant—and began walking. Time passed. Years tear, you know, and summers twist into winters, forming seasons of rapture. Ripening, nature ruptures in flames, ripping the doorway to death open. Dreadful bandage. And the wound? Shadows grow, skittering crab-wise and widdershins. An incarnadine ball bounces low through the trees. It’s not safe, they say, to be lost at such a time. I’ve got to keep moving. Beyond the falls, Thor’s Well roars. Abandoned tracks, a trestle bridge—my steps echo cold upon the cold rails. Cold, the clang, the grey lady waiting. March, General, as the column bier rolls to the specific.
I’m not lost.
Clouds hide behind clouds. The feathered jumble dogs my loping stride, an unasked dancer. If I stomp upon wishbones, will they attack? A silly fear. Die, tangled tango! I leap, crushing the puzzle. Crow feathers crumple, bleeding darkness—no, they’re mischievous locks from my own head. What have I done? The coils shudder. Weaving a home for weary songbirds, I become a tree, a throb-torn stone. Dark vines unfurl from my head.
The stars are gone—vanished.
No, no, not stars, apples.
How did it happen?
Did they sprout legs in the night
and stride away under the moon?
Last year’s harvest fills my mind. I see again the gleaming crates—ribcages enclosing a million hearts. Lichen-happy and moss-draped, the giants by the stream are the only trees who left a few goblin apples behind. Apples enclosing gravid stars. All this grave matter formed from starfish, they say, and starfish from dust, and dust from nothing. A pulsing seed—the Pacific chews the land. All-swallowing, unpacified.
From a distance the ocean exudes a desert sheen. Only closer do we suspect the sharks, the gulper eels, the butter-lusting churn within. Stomach, be quiet, stop hurting. I curl upon the ground, my coat bothering me. In dreams it walks, arms raised, into the welling tide. I wake to the scream of dawn-haunted gulls.
My coat is gone.
Three apples left. Tree branches stretch through filaments of fog, stirring. Cream in the coffee, tea with cardamom and rosewater. Eggs hard-boiled with pepper and garlic salt. Hummus. Crumpets and lavash and sangak and marmalade. Olives. Pumpkin seeds. Marzipan. Omelets with tomatoes, goat feta, pesto, and onions. Bacon. Cup after cup of salmon chowder. Pistachios. Burgers. Yorkshire pudding.
An hour plus a stomach is no apples. The bees bow and struggle to soar, bearing summer’s curtain. Nightjars puff and paddle upon the ground, dreaming of a raptor past, of goatsucker myths, of stone-turned teats. Spirits rustle, pressing outwards from sky-dreary pools. Apples grimace in the dark, glowering. A glower taken—
Taken by sprites with bony fingers.
Taken by the Taker taken. Winter comes—
lost sows bellow in the hills.
Now nears the hour of Old Juliana. Marvelous, she wakes to twirl in the harvest dark, to dance upon the foetid marshland before sinking into the earth for another year. If you listen, you can hear her snoring under the heath, underneath trampled streamers as echoes rush wild past bewildered ears. Our neighbor saw her dance once, and he plummeted quick into an old well out of fright. He broke his ankle and boasted about it for months, yelling ankle updates across the fence.
The orchard is a boat on the globe-snuggling sea.
Can one lose the sea? Even a thing so large? Humgruffin time tricks on, troll-playing. For hours or millennia I seek the roar. Why do I keep recognizing the boulders, the trees? Barn-sized, a hen scatters patchwork seeds. Dust-spirals disintegrate, gyrating. Sunbeams dapple the ground. Here prowls the Old Apple Tree, here crawls Juliana, dead and mossy. A mere skeleton now, I trip upon serpentine roots. Spider queens dangle above my dark mouth, as red as pomegranates.
Weep and gather. Sleep again.
Amee Nassrene Broumand is an Iranian-American writer from the Pacific Northwest. Nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in Barren Magazine, Empty Mirror, The Ginger Collect, Rust + Moth, Sundog Lit, & elsewhere. She served as the March 2018 Guest Editor of Burning House Press. Find her on Twitter @AmeeBroumand.