Earned Apples
by Bosley Gravel
The Apple Lady was in a good mood tonight. She sat on the edge of the curb outside apartment number fifteen and smoked a long white cigarette. Wess smiled at her, sat down, and took off his left sneaker. He shook a pebble from his shoe.
“Is there a scoop tonight?” she asked.
“Maybe,” he said, and pulled the shoe over his heel. He began to tie the laces, but the fiber was rotten and it broke in his hand.
“How’s Ernie? Getting along with his wife?”
“I reckon,” Wess said, and rigged the lace on his shoe. He tossed the broken length to the cement and pulled a pack of generic cigarettes from his shirt pocket, produced a crumpled butt and lit it off the Apple Lady’s borrowed smoke.
They sat in silence for a moment. Jed, drinking from a bottle of blue mouthwash, wandered by, his cat, Mr. Brown, at his heels. Jed wished both them a good evening, and shambled on. His white hair stood straight up, reminding the Apple Lady of Albert Einstein, and Wess of his drunken uncle.
“Well,” she said, “Is there news, or is there news?”
“Ernie beat up Carol, she left him, and Sarah is in his apartment right now.”
“Well goodness,” the Apple Lady said and brushed an ash from her plump thigh, “What’s your mama say about that?”
“She doesn’t say anything about things she don’t know.”
“I see,” she said and tossed her cigarette butt away.
Jed was tapping on the door of apartment twenty-three.
“Honey, ” he said, “Honey, let me in.”
Wess and the Apple Lady watched Jed as he stumbled a little and half-heartedly knocked on the door. After a moment the door swung open, a thin lady, her raven colored hair in a sloppy bun, looked Jed straight in the eyes.
“Honey let’s him sleep in there when his mom won’t let him in,” Wess said.
“He still lives with his mother? He’s gotta be fifty.”
“Yeah,” Wess said.
Jed grumbled something to Honey.
“Be gone with your bad self! Peddle your foolish stories elsewhere, old man!”
Jed bugged his old eyes and spat to his left, Honey slammed the door.
“Bitch,” he said to his cat, “Snotty little bitch.”
The Apple Lady lit another cigarette. Wess followed suit.
“Is your mama getting along good with her boyfriend?”
“Yeah, ” Wess said, “She must be, she’s gone all the time.”
The Apple Lady belched, “Humph,” she said directly afterward.
Jed was wandering again, this time he knocked on apartment twenty-seven, and without waiting for a reply curled up in the door frame. The cat snuggled into the crook of his body and keeping its eyes opened lay its head down.
“You want to know something?” the Apple Lady said. ”I’m twenty-six years old, I have a good husband. I’m going to school, and some day I’m going to get out of here. The ghetto is no place for kids. That’s what I’m waiting for, to get out of here, so I can have me a little baby. How old are you, anyway? Fourteen? Fifteen?”
“Twelve, ” he said.
“Twelve? ” she said and laughed. “Your only twelve and you’ve already got the eyes.”
“The eyes?”
“You’ve got them, don’t worry. I got them, too.”
The door to apartment number nineteen opened. A tall man with a shaved head came out and quickly passed by them. He ignored the Apple Lady, but spoke to Wess, “What’s shaken little brother?”
Wess nodded in reply.
“Who’s that?” she asked.
“Mike, Ellen’s boyfriend.”
“Oh,” she said. ”Is he good to her?”
“More or less. He drinks a lot of beer.”
They were silent again.
“You going to go to college?” she asked.
Wess smiled showing a chipped tooth.
“Funny,” he said.
“Not really.”
“Don’t preach,” he said. ”Don’t you dare preach.”
“Sorry,” she said.
Wess lit another cigarette, off the butt of the previous one.
“I just bought some apples,” the Apple Lady said.
She stood up and opened the door to her place. A minute later she came back with two red apples. She gave them both to Wess.
“Thanks, ” he said and stubbed out his smoke. He polished the smallest of the two.
“The eyes, Wesley, you’ve got the eyes. You see everything. It’s a talent,” she said. ”It’s a blessing from God. The eyes will keep you from ever getting bored.”
He bit in to the apple, devouring a quarter of it in a single bite.
“Bored? From God? Funny.” he said, rolling his eyes a little.
“No, ” she said. ”It’s not funny. You’ve got to use it. Do you understand?”
“No,” Wess said without apology. ”I don’t know what your talking about,” he took another bite of the apple.
“It’s about sight, ” she said. ”It’s about seeing the world as it is, not as it pretends to be.”
He finished the apple, core and all, in two quick bites.
“What do you see about me?” she asked. ”You know everything that goes on around here.”
“It’s the ghetto,” he said with his mouth full. ”We can’t hide what we really are.”
The Apple Lady’s eye reflected a bit of light from the porch light.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing,” he said. ”I don’t mean nothing.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“Do you–”
“I’ve got to go,” Wess said and picked up his second apple and walked away.
The Apple Lady’s lips turned down.
“Humph,” she said, and went inside her apartment.
* * *
The next day was Saturday; Jed found his cat at three-thirty pm. Its head crushed, the murder weapon, a small carpenter’s hammer, was propped against the corpse. Jed, weeping, called the police department from the pay phone. They sent a police officer, a huge man with dark skin and blood shot eyes. After seeing Jed, drunk, crying, and holding a dead cat, the officer scratched a few words in his note book and left, everyone knew nothing would come of it.
Wess watched from the window of his apartment. The Apple Lady, whose real name was Carrie, sat out side her apartment watching Jed pace up and down in front of the complex confessing a true love for the dead cat.
Half an hour later, an old junkie catholic priest that owed Jed’s mom a favor came and said a small eulogy for the feline. Jed’s mother in her bathrobe, her blue hair in curlers, the priest, and Jed gathered in a small dirt patch, the common area of the complex.
Wess joined the Apple lady, and they watched the priest pray as large tears rolled down Jed’s dirty face. The mourners all hung their heads down looking at the shoe box that contained Mr. Brown.
“He was best friend,” he cried, “I still love him! I ain’t gonna put him in the trash can.”
“I already told ya, you ain’t gonna bring him back into my house!” Jed’s mother hollered back instantly.
“You bitch,” he said, his voice expressing unfathomable horror.
“No good jackass, just like your father!” she said, and smacked him with her cane.
“This is a funeral,” the priest said between gritted teeth.
Jed’s mother hobbled away towards her apartment. Jed kicked the priest in the shin, picked up his box, howled mournfully and ran towards the street.
“I wonder if he’ll be okay,” Wess said.
“I dunno,” the Apple Lady replied.
The priest shook his head and cursed, “Bunch of crazy lunatics,” he said to Wess and the Apple Lady. He walked away, looking back once, with a look of frustrated disgust on his face.
“That’s redundant,” the Apple Lady said.
“What’s that mean?” Wess said suddenly cheery.
“It means saying the same thing twice.”
“Oh, like, you got any apples lady? You got any apples lady?”
“Something like that,” she said. ”What do you know about the cat?”
“Nothing,” he said. ”Somebody was probably just bored.”
“Oh,” she said, and went inside, returned with two apples and gave them both to Wess.
* * *
The Apple Lady was in a good mood tonight. She sat on the edge of curb outside apartment number fifteen, she smoked a long white cigarette, Wess wandered by.
“What’s the scoop tonight?”
“Nothing.”
He was holding out, she could tell. It was just a matter of the right questions.
“How’s Jed?”
“Haven’t seen him,” he said. “But I heard they got his body downtown in the morgue.”
“No,” said the Apple Lady, “You’re kidding?”
“Nope, drank himself into a coma, or something, then dropped dead.”
The Apple Lady shuttered.
“Over the cat?”
“Maybe, how would I know?” he said.
“Humph,” she said.
“Humph,” he said back.
The Apple Lady picked at some maroon polish on her thumb nail; Wess practiced blowing large smoke rings, and watched proudly as they sailed into the breeze, contorted into meaningless wisps, and then faded to nothing.
“You got apples tonight?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said.
A siren went off somewhere down the street.
“The ghetto’s not so bad,” he said. “I think it’s a fine place for kids.”
“Grown ups, maybe,” she said. ”Kids, I don’t think so.”
“Humph,” went Wess. ”I find plenty to do.”
THE END
Earned Apples by Bosely Gravel is released under the Creative Commons
A bowerbird, or so I read years ago in National Geographic, or Smithsonian, or one of those other popular magazines with a bent towards science and nature, was a native bird species peculiar to Australia and the farther reaches of New Guinea, which had the curious habit of decorating its nest with all sorts of colorful bits of this and that – glass, shells, colored leaves, pieces of glass and plastic, berries – anything and everything which caught it’s eye and which it liked enough to pick up and take home, arranging it with all those other finds in pleasing patterns. This apparently makes sense to the bird doing the arranging, because they seem to be quite set on those patterns. They will, according to researchers, also restore bits that are deliberately disarranged back to the pattern which they chose. It also seems, according to the internet (which I turned to in confirming this tiny and almost useless bit of knowledge – hey, it’s on the internet, so it must be true!) it is the male birds who do this, so this is where this simile falls apart. I am, and have always been of the female persuasion and pretty happy overall with that designation, although in a truly just universe, I would have preferred looking a hell of a lot more like Audrey Hepburn, as well as having her mad dancing skilz.
But I do have somewhat of a similarity to the bowerbird (of whatever sex) because I collect stuff, random stuff that is attractive and catches my eye, and which I can arrange in attractive patterns. I do this when I write, or more specifically when I am reading and researching for what I am preparing to write. I never know what particular bit will engage my interest – and some items are very odd bits indeed. I keep coming back to them, and by this I know that they must be an element in the story. For “Adelsverein” I kept returning to the Goliad Massacre of 1836, to the kidnapping of children from the Hill Country by raiding Indians, to a throw-away comment in an old memoir – a then-senior citizen recalling that his youngest sister actually wasn’t of his blood, she was an tiny orphan found and rescued from the Verein camp on the Texas Gulf Coast, never able to recall her real name. I also kept circling back to the recorded memory of an elderly woman, recalling proudly that she was 90-something and didn’t need glasses to thread a needle – and also recalling that the husband she loved, and had been married to for only 13 years, being taken away by the Hanging Band during the Civil War and hung, for the crime of being a Unionist in a Confederate state – all this, in spite of her attempting to sneak his revolver to him. Reading about these tiny events was like getting a small electrical shock, or perhaps recognizing something that I had known in another lifetime. These combined with any number of other bits and pieces of frontier lore, with small and humble items seen in museums, with paintings and sketches of scenery, daguerreotypes and memoirs, even a 1850’s travelogue by a famously observant political writer who did a horseback journey through antebellum Texas and the south. Thrown into this mix are my own visits to various places in the Hill Country, my own first-hand observations of clear green rivers, their beds paved with round marble-white gravel, sessions with subject matter experts in frontier arcane, the memory of certain people and conversations — and then arrange it all in a somewhat-logical pattern. Just like a bowerbird, although my own bower is a famously complex excel spreadsheet of a dozen and more categories, organized by month and year. All those pretty, shiny bits are plugged into the place where they seem to me to belong.
In a year or two, there is a book come out of it, all; a ripping good adventure yarn with the added benefit of having the very best bits of it based on historical fact; not bad for a bowerbird.
Celia Hayes
Author - To Truckee’s Trail & The Adelsverein Trilogy
www.celiahayes.com
Ξ December 24th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Thunk |
Well, it’s a series of three book drafts–a marvelous supramundane space odyssey. And, long ago, I bought this domain to host the release of those books. But, publishing being what it has been for decades, the first book, a prequel of a series that precedes The Deepening books, never saw print. So the domain languished.
I’ve had offers to sell thedeepening.com–some nice and some ludicrous, ludicrous like the one this year by the folks who made that horrible D movie–but never felt like parting with it. So a couple of years ago I thought, okay, I’ll start an online glossy fiction magazine…which I did, with an ISSN and everything. What a GREAT BUNCH of stories by a GREAT BUNCH of authors we had…and no readers…except a few dedicated supporters and fiction writers wanting to scope out the ‘zine in order to get published in its pages.
When my eyesight as well as my bank account gave out, I tossed in the towel on the fiction magazine.
But it really bothered me that my very favorite entertainment, fiction reading, was losing ground, losing market share, in the entertainment world. It also bothered me that good books kept going unpublished. What to do? Well, it isn’t for lack of publishers or the ability to get books into hands of readers. It’s about getting readers’ (and non-readers’ attention.) So The Deepening, stage two, was conceived.
What was conceived? Something that was fun for me, not a lot of work (except for set-up, of course), and provided readers, authors, publisher–anyone, really–the means to promote a good fiction read–novel, short story, fiction magazine, hyperfiction… .
So, here we go. And if no authors come to promote their books, so be it. I read enough to fill its pages regularly, so you, our visitors, won’t have any reason not to check out the new articles here every week! Book mark it. It’s going to be exciting!
Ξ December 23rd, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Events |
EVENT: January 6, 2009 Author Nan Hawthorne To Begin Let’s Read Historical Novels Discussion Group
The Accessible World News Wire
Author Nan Hawthorne To Begin Let’s Read Historical Novels Discussion Group Tuesday, January 6, 2009
As the world anticipates change in the New Year 2009, Pat Price, the Accessible World, http://www.accessibleworld.org , founder and events coordinator, recently announced the organization would begin a new series of special online events that will expand significantly the scope of its current online programming. The new initiative will feature events that will provide an abundance of information on a variety of topics that will interest, inform, challenge, and entertain a broader cross section of the population than it currently serves. These special programs will reach out beyond the disability field into the ‘real world’ in which we all live.
On Tuesday, January 6, 2009, author Nan Hawthorne will have center stage in the Accessible World Auditorium as the new historical novels discussion group is launched.
Commenting on the scope of the group, Hawthorne states, “Every yesterday has a story, and that story is what we call history. Historical novelists love to take history and recreate it with vivid characters, vibrant settings, and tantalizing connections to the great people and events of the past. Whether a novel takes place in the court of Solomon, in a village on the icy shore of Viking Greenland, in a dark and foreboding castle in Italy, on a battlefield about to erupt into Napoleonic gun fire, or in a modest cabin on an American frontier, the reader joins the writer in coming to understand just how different life was and people were not.”
Plan now to attend Let’s Read Historical Novels, a monthly excursion into the historical novelist’s imagination with author Nan Hawthorne as your guide. We will start with Hawthorne’s own first novel, An Involuntary King: A Tale of Anglo Saxon England. Begun as stories a friend and she wrote as teenagers in the 1960s, An Involuntary King is the story of the king of an imaginary kingdom that would nevertheless be recognizable to any denizen of England before the Norman Invasion. Hawthorne took a teenager’s romantic story and reworked it to make it true to the era, which she loves. The young king is thrust unexpectedly into his exalted role and must struggle not only to keep his crown but also to deserve it. Threat and treachery besets his every turn while other men come to love and serve his beloved queen. Can the royal pair overcome all the obstacles through their own strengths and their steadfast allies and come together in the end? An Involuntary King contains adventure, romance, battle, intrigue and humor and an overall cast of characters so vividly drawn you will never forget them.
The book is available in print through Shield-wall Books, http://www.shield-wall.com , and in a digital version through Lulu.com, http://www.Lulu.com , and for members at BookShare.org, http://www.BookShare.org . Signed print copies also available. It is 648 pages long and has some strong language, violence and adult situations.
Contact: Nan Hawthorne, P O Box 12454,
Mill Creek WA 98011 USA
Tel: 425-487-1140
Email: hawthorne@nanhawthorne.com
Web: www.nanhawthorne.com
Here’s the info you need to join others online from your home, office, or wherever you and your computer, an Internet connection, a sound card speakers and a microphone happen to be at the time of the event. Everyone worldwide is welcome. NO PASSWORD IS REQUIRED AND the entire event is FREE!
Date: Tuesday, January 6, 2009.
Time: 5:00 p.m. PST, 6:00 p.m. MST, 7:00 p.m. CST,
8:00 p.m. EST and elsewhere in the world Wednesday 1:00 GMT.
Where: The Accessible World Auditorium at:
http://conference321.com/masteradmin/room.asp?id=rs5affc3cfa191
Or, alternatively, select the Accessible World Auditorium at http://www.accessibleworld.org.
If you are a first-time user of the Talking Communities online conferencing software, there is a small, safe software program that you need to download and then run. A link to the software is available on every entry screen to the Accessible World rooms.
Media Contacts:
Robert Acosta, Chair, Planning Committee
818-998-0044
Email: boacosta@pacbell.net
Web: http://www.helpinghands4theblind.com
Pat Price, Founder and Events Coordinator
The Accessible World Symposiums
Vision Worldwide, Inc.
317-254-1185
Email: pat@patprice.org
Web: http://www.accessibleworld.org
The Accessible World, http://www.accessibleworld.org ,a division of Vision Worldwide, Inc. a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, seeks to educate the general public, the disabled community and the professionals who serve them by providing highly relevant information about new products, services, and training opportunities designed specifically to eliminate geographic and access barriers that adversely affect them.
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Happy Reading!
Nan Hawthorne, Historical Novelist
Author of "An Involuntary King" - high adventure and romance in the early Middle Ages.
www.nanhawthorne.com
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