There’s a light drizzle merging in clingy, bulbous raindrops. It seems to upset the spiders that I watch desperately trying to anchor their gossamer lines in the wind. They try so hard out there, little bent legs trembling under the pressure and full thorax whirling on the web.
I can see the apple tree from here; a perfect symbol of the gift of regeneration. Every year dour Mr. Honeycott swore to us that the winter had killed it off into the ugly lump of bitter black wood, and each year it was back in the spring like a phantom, a few persistent buds weeping themselves open like pink wounds.
The harsh winter of three years ago killed Mr. Honeycott off. He didn’t spring back like the trees and the bulbs; instead, he was lowered into the ground to become one with the apple tree that defied his expectations. I very much doubt that I will ever see his fingers worming their way up out of the ground like green tendrils. If they did, I would stamp them out. Each time I take a bite out of one of the tree’s fruits, like naughty Eve, I imagine his bemused, pock-marked old face, his leathery hands, his acrid, nicotine-soaked breath. As the apples burst in my mouth, I imagine him screaming his last.
Alice says I am sick because of the things I say. But Alice, my dear, I say to myself as I watch her run from the house, trip on a tree root, gather up her skirt, and struggle on…Alice, my love, it is you who is sick. You’ve developed a cough this fall, and you don’t yet know why. It is a hacking, insistent, lung corrupting cough. You are not well. The visits from the doctor are more frequent, but he doesn’t suggest a thing except bed rest and quiet.
Alice, my dear, you really should be resting. In peace.
I watch her run to collapse on the damp ground under the apple tree, spread out her skirt, and unfold her book. The damp cannot be good for someone so sick. As she reads some syrupy, glib stanzas, one of the spiders on the window in front of me descends on a firm line, then weaves shakily back up again. Alice looks up at the window, as if tickled, and waves just as the spider comes level with her eyes. I wave back, smiling, then I crush the spider with a fulsome crunch.
We grew up like sisters, but we are nothing alike. We ate our meals at the same table, slept in the same little bed. That seemed to be enough for our mother. I often wanted to ask her what it was like, looking after these children that have nothing in common with each other, like seeds from different pods, blown together on an ill wind.
Alice has always been gentle, sweet, and kind to animals. She rescues insects that are caught in the spider’s webs, and she kisses the dogs goodnight on their long, dirt encrusted snouts. Perhaps that is why she is sick now. All the dogs ever did to me is growl.
Alice has hair like roosting ravens and hazel-gold eyes. She has pale skin and a long neck, a slim waist, and shapely legs. She laughs when she should, she can cook, she can sew, she can clean. She would make an ideal wife for any man if she weren’t of late betrothed to the grave. Alice is my mother’s favorite daughter. Mr. Honeycott said she was my mother’s only daughter. Alice’s mother, then, would be horrified to learn that she sneaks off to meet her suitor in the dusk on dark evenings.
I follow Alice on these nights, on each illicit rendezvous. She picks her way through the heavy woods with her book in her left hand and her other hand nervously working to brush teasels from her dress and cobwebs from her hair. I pick through the trees behind her, not half so nimble but twice as quiet. Insidious. I practice the route during the day with my nostrils full of the wet, earthy scent of the woods, ensuring that I know where all the protruding roots are, where all the bushes ramble, and where the rain seeps into the ground to leave a boggy mush that might give me away if I fell. I know the path better than she does. I know a lot of things better than she does.
When she reaches the very edge of the riverbank, she stops and waits for him. We wait there together, barely breathing. I am concealed in the knotty bushes, and she is out in the open, as the true heroine should be, fresh and naïve. I enjoy our time together. Sometimes only a minute or so passes, sometimes much more, but he always arrives.
His name is Christopher, and he is around her age. I know all about him because I go to his mother’s house for cake when he is at the carpenter’s (where he is apprenticed). She’s such a sweet old lady, Christopher’s mother, very obliging. She can afford the sugar to put in those luxurious cakes, so I return home fat and satisfied. She proudly tells me everything about her son and I take care to leave well before he returns home, the sawdust clouding around him like a halo, falling from his boots and coating his hair.
Christopher is of exact average height and very thin, like a sapling, despite all the work he does. He has watery blue eyes, pale blond hair that seems to get paler with each coating of sawdust, and a voice that verges on a whisper. He has nervous ways and almost dances when he walks. He is one of those people who is barely there, an apologetic excuse for flesh, just like Alice. I look into his old mother’s rheumy eyes and wonder how far I could bend that sapling before it would break.
I crouch behind the same scrubby bushes each time I follow my ersatz sister. I listen to her pleasantries, wafting like gently shifting breezes. I watch the owls gather in the trees and the tiny wheeling bats as they embrace. I try to find enough beetles to arrange in a circular pattern in front of me as the feeble quarter or half-moon becomes a stronger light, filtered out by the trees.
Sometimes Christopher brings her a gift, a ribbon to put in her hair, another sickening book of poetry, once even a locket. I felt my eyes light up as the sliver of crescent moon reflected her pale face onto the mirror of the locket. Now, that was a gift worth having. I wondered if it was made of real silver. There was a lock of his hair inside. Alice giggles when she is presented with the gifts and hides them away like a child. Then Alice and Christopher kiss, chaste and not awakened to the pleasures of the flesh.
When they part company, I pick my way back through the woods with her, parallel but never crossing paths. Alice is dreamy and short of breath with excitement and the cough normally seizes her about halfway home and I often doubt she will make the last few yards.
***
When Alice is dead, I will marry Christopher. I have run through the encounter in my head, going down to meet him on the riverbank in Alice’s place, pretending I do not know the route, awkward but sharp, like a caltrop, casually discarded in his path. I will return his locket, and I will hand him a letter, penned in Alice’s hand (or at least a passable imitation). With tears rolling down his cheeks, he will read Alice’s dying request that he should marry her half-sister. Trembling with shock and misery he will get down on bended knee as the night closes in and I will accept him graciously, taking one of his thin pallid hands and smiling into his indefinite eyes, thrilled by the calls of the owls as they solicit a mate.
Tonight, I will creep from the bed that I share with Alice. It will be a full moon, and too bright for her to meet him.
The moment I am waiting for will be heralded by an end to the violent coughing as it changes to the painful wheezing of her sleep. The gas-light from the corridor will seep into the room and mingle with the light from the moon and I will watch her sleep for some minutes to ensure that all is well. When I am satisfied, I will find the (now blunt) scissors that she keeps for sewing. With these, I will carefully amputate several locks of her lustrous, dark mane. Then I will search for the locket.
I imagine it may take me a while to find. Such precious things cannot be left out in the open. But time has taught me patience. I learned to wait with that hateful Mr. Honeycott, and nature rewarded me.
When I find the fine, gossamer chain and drag it from under her pillow to reveal the silver orb, bigger than one of her hazel eyes, I will no doubt be disappointed at her lack of ingenuity in hiding it.
Inside the locket, I will find the lopped locks of his golden hair. I will take the newly pruned swatch of Alice’s hair and intertwine the two braids and then I will leave, ensuring that I replace the scissors and close the door, leaving her sleeping as if she might never wake up.
Out over the uneven heaps of earth at the roots of the apple tree I will dance in an exquisite pleasure, sky clad, holding the silver orb up to the light of the omniscient moon, showing the spoils of my hunt to the bloodthirsty and noble Artemis.
Then I will dig the locket a shallow grave with my bare hands, aching in the cold.
I know exactly where to dig, exactly where Mr. Honeycott was buried three years ago. I have planned this for three long years. I will bury the locket on top of him, where he can see it. But wait…not before I remove the braids of hair, gold and black, sun and moon, day and night, male and female. Christopher and Alice, their very essences tied up together in a dance of forced passion.
Then I will find an apple.
In the late fall they taste of alcohol and feel like old wrinkled skin, like old, wrinkled Mr. Honeycott. They burst if you hold them too hard, so I will take the cold, rotting thing and push my fingers into its flesh, forcing the locks of hair inside like fibrous maggots, and when they are hidden in the heart of the fruit, I will eat the apple and the prisoners inside, never choking.
I will eat Christopher and Alice’s vows, their love, their souls.
