Silver Apples Of The Moon

It was the same in nearly every county. The sun rose and filled the green rolling landscape with golden mist, instead of the silvery night kind, and cars rumbled down the path for an hour as they made their way into the city, and there was noise and bustle until rush hour ended, then I was all alone as my brothers played games.

My brothers only got away with playing the games because mother was too busy reading fortunes in the tiny parlour at the front of the house to tell them no. She told them off for tracking mud into the house after a particularly rainy or misty morning in the paddock, but the tealeaves always demanded her attention again, so my brothers and I were left to our devices for most of the daylight hours.

“I’m not playing,” I told them as they trudged through the tall grass to the paddock in their wellingtons. Only Joseph heard me, and he wiped his jam-sticky mouth on the back of his hand before he told me, “Suit yourself.”

They collected their colourful rocks and placed them at various places in the grass. They’d been painted many times, and varnished. I’d done it myself, so I knew that the paint wouldn’t come off and they wouldn’t have a small dot of colour to look at when they came back. Something to guide them out of the game when it ended. I’d only made six. One for each of them. I didn’t want to make a seventh.

“Want to manage it, Laurie?” Theodore, my oldest brother, asked. He always asked, as though, one day, I might change my mind. He was the one that usually woke me up, if Marcus didn’t get to it first. He was first dressed in the morning, at the stove, burning bacon until Elliot took over.

I shook my head. “What I want is for you to haul your asses inside and get started on lunch. I’m hungry.” Sometimes I was an asshole in the morning. Or in the afternoon. Most of the time, I didn’t care.

“You just ate,” Joseph said. He was halfway across the field, in front of the big apple blossom tree that was all leaves and no blossoms right now. If you squinted you saw the wilting petals that had fallen into the grass, but they were like slush, a dirty version of something that was once white and sparkling.

I tried not to whine, but my voice even grated on my nerves. “I’m hungry anyway.”

The sky flashed. Lightning drew a deep white crag through it. Rain fell, lightly at first, then it flung itself down. In a minute it would be a total downpour. Water was already swelling over the ground.

“God, Laurie,” Elliot said, loping through the grass to me. He held up his raincoat, which was yellow and patched with purple squares. He panted; he was not graceful at all on solid ground, and the dirt had become mud and he was sinking into it. Each footstep he took was several seconds of squelching and tugging. “Take this. Put it on. Pull up the hood. Come on.”

“You should go inside,” Marcus said. Henry has a hand over his brow and nodded, but he was already thinking about the game, I could tell. They were all thinking about the game. It was like trying to hold their attention while somebody whispered in their ear over their shoulder. It was nearly impossible. This close to starting it, they could probably already smell the warm loam and moss of the woods, the rot of the logs. Whatever place it was that hung over us today. Wherever they were going to find their silver apples.

“How long will you be gone?” I asked. They would all come back at different times; that was the point. But I would stay out here until at least two of my brothers reappeared from the game.

“Good lord,” Theodore said. “Not long, Laurie. In time to make you lunch.”

I hoped Elliot would be back first. He was the fastest cooker, the one guaranteed to have us fed and out of the kitchen and into the back room where we wouldn’t disturb mother and her clent in the parlour before we’d all shed our wellies and coats and gloves.

The trees were slicked with rain. The water was up to my ankles, but it would have to rise much higher to actually wet my feet. My brothers all took their positions at their rocks.

This was part of what terrified me. I’d yelled at them once for it. “What if something- a bird or something, just comes along and picks up your rock? Where will you be? How will you find your way back?”

“Calm down,” Marcus had said, while Elliot shoved a jammie dodger in my face. It was enough to keep me from talking while Theodore patted my shoulder, then seemed to think better.

“Because,” Theodore said. “If you was stood up there, you’d just have to have good aim. We can see the rooftop of the house from the woods. We just have to fall nearest enough to it. I could show you some time, Laurie. If you came up with me.”

I had shaken my head. They would never get me up there. They could race to find an orchard-full of silver apples before I ever went up there.

Today they were back just after lunchtime. It was dangerously close to tea time, when mother had her most important and- this was important – wealthiest clients. We could absolutely not be caught in the house at teatime. It meant either condemning ourselves to an hour of total silence, without access to the washroom or the kitchen, or being banished to the outdoors again. It was best to get lunch before her clients arrived. At least then, when one of us or all of us had a bursting bladder (that was usually Joseph or Henry) we would have full stomachs.

Kieran, who is usually quite soft-spoken, though he does have outbursts at the strangest times, once protested that this was not fair. He’d nearly pissed his pants the day before, in front of me. And Theodore walloped him on the back of the head to make sure he didn’t. Mother pointed out that we were free to go outside, for as long as we liked, so long as we were back before she was inspired to call the police. She’s funny like that.

Henry won today. He came strolling from between the trees, picked up his rock (Easter egg purple) and came toward me. In the hand not holding the rock, there was a silver apple. It looked like a cheap piece of plastic, like a Christmas ornament from a dollar store.

“They all get like that here,” Marcus had said the first time I looked at it. I’d thrown it against the side of the house to see if it would shatter like a real apple, but it bounced off like a fake one.

Henry handed me the apple. I handed him his jacket. The rain hadn’t stopped, but it was letting up some. We were both soaked now. “Do you think you’ll join us tomorrow, Laurie?”

“I won’t.”

“What’s this?” Elliot came over, and this time he did slip in the mud. When he came up, his hand was a mess of mud and leaves. He wiped it on Henry’s coat. “You’d like it up there, Laurie. Come on.”

Henry pulled my hat down so the rain didn’t drip into my eyes. “Stop badgering Laurie.”

Theodore arrived next. Then Kieran. And Joseph was the last. I held up Henry’s silver apple to show them that he’d won, and Theodore glanced at his watch before ushering us back to the house. We had twenty minutes to divest ourselves of our jackets and boots, use the bathroom, and grab the makings for sandwiches. Mother had already taken the scones out and they were cooling on the stove. Their smell made us linger in the kitchen until mother swatted at us with a dishtowel. Then we took refuge in the back room for an hour, curling in our grandmothers’ quilts while the rain tapped on the windows. It made just enough noise that Theodore could lean over and whisper, “Where’d you put the apple?”

“The kitchen,” I said. I wasn’t particularly concerned about whether or not it got thrown away. Neither were my brothers. It was the game to them, the race. The woods above our house. I was scared for the day they realized they wanted to play the game elsewhere, and one by one, would leave. “How is it much better in the air than on the ground?” I whispered, cupping my elbows with my palms and leaning my chin on the swell of his arm.

“How is it much better on the ground than up there?” he asked.

I shook my head because I couldn’t answer.

The next day we had a visitor. Visitors are few and far between, and mother doesn’t take to them appearing out of nowhere like this one had. Theodore and Marcus spoke to him on the doorstep rather than let him inside. We were more afraid of disturbing mother than of appearing ill-mannered.

But the stranger didn’t look unhappy to be on the doorstep. He looked unhappy for some other reason, a reason that creased his face and made him look as old as Theodore, though he couldn’t have been older the Kieran. He was wearing a yellow waistcoat, and he clearly wasn’t prepared for the perpetually rainy weather. His oxfords were probably once black, but you couldn’t tell because they were encased in bricks of mud.

“I just noticed you’ve got one of those forests,” the young man said. “I don’t mean to cause any trouble, but I would be chuffed if you’d let me have a go at it.”

He had a pleasant accent, the kind that mother’s clients from London, from the well-off part of London, possessed. I wondered what could have brought him here, to the beautiful country and the soulless forest above it, when Theodore said, “It wouldn’t be any trouble. As long as we don’t disturb our mother.”

“You’ll have to come in the back door too,” Marcus said.

“If that’s alright,” the stranger said. “I’d love to.”

I liked the way he talked. With genuine politeness. Not like he’d been raised with manners, like my brothers sometimes acted, but like he’d grown into them. Had realized that the world would be a nicer place if more people had them, and elected to take them up all of his own.

When we came in the back door, Henry let out a scream like a cat in heat. Joseph was holding an ice cold bottle of water against his naked back. He pulled back as Henry twisted his spine and declared, “Rotten bastard!”

Then they all spotted the young man and forgot themselves and shoved aside brocade cushions and quilts and considered turning up the heat, though they ultimately decided against it, since mother would probably feel it in the diner. Theodore introduced us. “That’s Joseph, Kieran. That’s our sister Laurel.”

It was the late hours of the morning, but we’d done laundry (it was hanging, not drying, outside) so we hadn’t even gotten on our wellies yet. The stranger looked at the silver apple from the day before that I’d left on top of the piano (no one played the piano, because it was so out of tune that middle C sounded like Henry’s scream). He did not have a calculating look, but more a curious one. He sat on the uncomfortable couch as though he’d been fused to it. “Is that from the forest?”

“Yes,” Theodore said, and tapped the silver apple. “Looks better up there, I have to say. Have you seen one before?”

The young man shrugged. He has perfect posture, so perfect there wasn’t a wrinkle in his yellow waistcoat. “I’ve seen silver apples and gold apples. I saw a few cornucopias of fruit. In some places its plums. Or a salmon.”

“A Salmon,” Elliot hooted, as though the stranger had told him he’d once found a gnome in the forest.

“Just apples here,” Marcus said. Then, “You’ll have to wear Henry’s second boots. I reckon they’ll fit you.”

The idea that the stranger would be up there, playing with my brothers, searching for a silver apple, filled me with inexplicable horror. I watched him don the wellies and wondered if he would be the one to come back first, or if he wouldn’t know where to look, how to navigate the forest. I thought of the fact that we only had six rocks.

“How will you find your way back?” I asked, as we trudged toward the paddock.

“I’ll just have to be careful and keep an eye on the roof,” he said.

“It’s got a weathervane shaped like a sheepdog,” I told him. “Just in case you can’t remember what it looks like.”

“That sounds brilliant. Thanks.” He paused and seemed to consider another question. “Are you coming up too? Or is it just your brothers?”

“Just my brothers,” I said, trying not to sound pitiful. But I did. And he heard it.

“You don’t like the game?” he asked. “Loads of girls in the city play it. You look like you’d love it. Your brother’s aren’t all right with their little sister going up there?”

I was about to tell him that it had nothing to do with my brothers, but that wasn’t quite the truth. Because they loved the forest and the game and everything it had to offer. They loved the silver apples, even when they became nothing more than plastic Christmas tree ornaments on the way back down. They loved the game so much that sometimes their eyes glassed over as though they weren’t behind them anymore.

“I just don’t need to play it,” I said.

The stranger pulled his right wellington out of the mud. It came away with a great sucking sound and so much mud it was a wonder he hadn’t just pulled his foot from the boot. He sighed, not condescending or pitying, just understanding. He reminded me a little of Theodore, then he said, “You know, I think you’d be great at this game. Maybe you’d like to play in the city?”

I thought of the silver apple on top of the piano. “Depends. I want a bigger prize than apples.”

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay