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
Nancy Fulda proprietress of AnthologyBuilder.com thinks you might be. Executed as a straight forward website on the surface, AnthologyBuilder is in reality, an innovative concept that takes advantage of state of the art of print on demand technology, Web 2.0 user interfaces, and a huge pool of author talent. Seemingly, Nancy has found a way to keep popular reprints available, paper consumption to a minimum and get authors paid for their work.
The Deepening, in conjunction with roving reporter Bosley Gravel, was graciously granted a few minutes of Nancy’s time to get the details of this fascinating project.
BG: What can you tell us about the genesis of AnthologyBuilder and its goals, mission statement?
NF: AnthologyBuilder started as wishful thinking and a whimsical blog post *. I was frustrated because my friends were publishing in so many different magazines that I’d go broke trying to subscribe to them all, and joked that I wanted a build-your-own-anthology web site that let me pick and choose my own stories.
There was an overwhelmingly positive response to that post. Several people even contacted me and proposed business partnerships to get the site up and running. Most of the proposals fell through in the end, but by then I’d fallen in love with the project and decided to make it happen on my own.
The site opened for its first round of beta testing last December and currently hosts 674 stories and 313 cover images. I’m amazed at how supportive the creative community has been of the concept. At this point, we can’t afford to pay our artists and authors the kind of compensation they truly deserve, and yet they’ve chosen to entrust us with these fantastic stories and images anyway. For me, it’s a reaffirmation that we’ve got a truly innovative project here; something people are willing to go out on a limb for because they like the idea of it and believe it will work.
One of the driving concepts behind AnthologyBuilder is the idea of the customer as an editor. In the past, fiction readers have been at the mercy of the market; they could only buy the stories that happened to be in print at the time, and assembling a collection of their favorite stories often required the purchase of over a dozen anthologies and magazines.
I hope that AnthologyBuilder will change all that. As our library grows, I expect AnthologyBuilder to become a place where customers can come to assemble the anthology they’ve always wanted to buy but have never been able to find on the shelves at their local bookstore. A cat-lover could create an anthology of kitty mysteries, for example, and a retired doctor could assemble a collection of futuristic medical thrillers.
BG: Approximately how many hours a day goes into AnthologyBuilder?
NF: Heh. It depends on the day. In the beginning, I spent about three months working on the project full time, and it still sucks entire weeks out of my life on occasion. The rest of the time, I’d say I spend about 2-3 hours per day updating the web site, processing submissions, and doing quality checks on customer orders.
BG: What about staffing?
NF: Mostly, AnthologyBuilder is all me. I’ve got my husband handling negotiations with our printing companies, and I’ll be pulling in some extra editorial help in the not-too-distant future. But for now, the company is far too young to support a full-time staff.
BG: Have any big names (prize winning, etc) contributed to AnthologyBuilder?
NF: The list is actually quite long. We’ve got stories by best-selling author Eric Flint; Campbell Award winner and SFWA Secretary Mary Robinette Kowal; Campbell Award winner Jay Lake; British Fantasy, Bram Stoker, and Pushcart award nominee Eugie Foster; and about a dozen winners of the Writers of the Future contest. We also have cover art by Hugo-award-winning artist Frank Wu.
Other names visitors to the site might recognize include Dave Freer, Cat Rambo, Tobias Buckell, Jim C. Hines, Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Irene Radford, James Maxey, and Lawrence Schimel.
Oh yes, and our selection of public domain stories includes one written by President Abraham Lincoln.
BG: AnthologyBuilder appears to running custom software. Was it commissioned?
We tried to commission a web developer, but couldn’t find anyone willing to take on the project, so I ended up doing it myself. That was kind of fun, actually. It involved learning PHP, figuring out how to run a web server, interfacing with an online API, and juggling several random tasks that I never would have guessed come hand in hand with running a company.
BG: What is your hosting situation?
NF: We run off of a Linux server and use a fairly standard web hosting package with (theoretically) unlimited bandwidth.
BG: Currently there is no sponsored advertising on the site. Could you tell us a bit about your philosophy on third-party ads?
NF: I make a point of keeping advertising to a minimum on the site. I want visitors to feel comfortable and have fun putting together anthologies. They can’t do that with random advertisements flashing at them from five different directions. When I do run ads on the site, I make sure they’re low-key and relevant to the site’s content.
BG: What sort of things might be in AnthologyBuilder’s future?
NF: The first item of business is to finish the last few bug checks, move out of beta testing, and make our first big marketing push. We’ve been running very low-key so far, making sales primarily by word-of-mouth through the blogosphere, and I’m curious to see what kind of traffic the site might generate once we start actively looking for customers.
After that, the next planned expansion is the introduction of an Open Market where authors can upload their own stories and set their own prices–sort of like the e-Bay of the written word. This would be a secondary site, running separately from the more carefully moderated main site, and would be a bit of an experiment.
BG: Any plans to expand to podcast style stories?
No. Our site is centered around the concept of printed books. Podcasting doesn’t really fit into the scheme.
BG: Will AnthologyBuilder ever offer a paperless version?
NF: I doubt it. For one thing, the contract with our authors clearly specifies reprint rights and limits electronic display to a short preview only. Moving to a paperless version would require getting each author’s approval of the change.
Secondly, I don’t feel it would add much to the site. There are already plenty of places where you can get electronic stories. The whole point of AnthologyBuilder is that you can hold the stories in your hand and stash them on your bookshelf.
BG: Any plans to expand to the world of ‘first rights’?
Only in the sense that authors could choose to put unpublished stories in the Open Market. I’d advise authors against doing that, though. Sell the story somewhere else first. You can always put it on AnthologyBuilder later.
BG: How about on staff copy editors?
NF: Yup. That’s a definite possibility.
BG: Have there been any legal problems?
Well, I have nightmares about all the ways someone could potentially abuse the site, but so far no one has tried.
BG: Tell us about the physical characteristics of the actual book:
NF: The books we print are 6 x 9 inch Trade Paperbacks. That means they’re about the size of a hardcover novel, but with a glossy paper binding. They look about like this, except with a title and cover art of your own choice.
One of the coolest things about AnthologyBuilder, in my opinion, is that you can choose your own cover art for each book, and we’ve got a truly astounding selection. From Carolyn Yoachim’s photographic genius to the fantastical renditions of Dean Spencer and Jonathan Rollins, there’s something here for everyone.
So far, our customers seem very pleased with the books and the quality of the stories. I intend to keep it that way.
BG: What are your favorite anthologies?
NF: Looking over my bookshelf, I’d say three of my favorites are Tales of Knights and Roses, When My Job’s Done, and the Villa Diodati Sampler.
BG: How many books printed this far?
NF: Sorry, that one’s confidential 
Clearly, with dozens of pre-edited anthologies, and hundreds of top notch stories to chose from when you build your own, there is something for everyone at AnthologyBuilder.com. Go build your own personalized anthology today! And don’t forget your gift cards for all your friends and family.
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Nancy Fulda’s fiction has appeared in venues including Jim Baen’s Universe, Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest, and Norilana Books’ Warrior, Wisewoman anthology. She is a Phobos Award recipient, a two-time WOTF Finalist, and an assistant editor at Jim Baen’s Universe.
Nancy keeps a blog at http://nancyfulda.livejournal.com. She lives in Germany with her husband, their two children, and no cats.
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Bosley Gravel lives in a constant state of breaking the fourth wall, he is currently working on slipstream detective novella featuring evil incarnate. He writes in various genres and interested in all things fictitious.
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