Behind her grandmother’s house, there is an old, dead apple orchard. It’s a stretch of gnarled trees with shriveled leaves; bruised, brown fruit bobbing on yellow grass. Sometimes, Lucy asks a boy to meet in its middle, under the big, rotting Gravenstein tree. ‘At midnight,’ she whispers, because everything shimmers in moonlight, because it’s the only spot in town where the sky will show its stars.
Lucy doesn’t mention that the dead trees have strong feelings. That if they don’t like someone, the thorns will come out. Most boys leave with scratches. Emmet winds up with four fat cuts on his calf.
‘Girl’s an animal,’ he brags to the juniors and the seniors and some of the sophs. Whatever, Lucy thinks. She knows that he knows only some branches got close enough to touch him.
Michael gets past the trees but upsets the birds. Two crows land at his feet. They hiss in his face.
‘Can birds do that?’ he says. ‘Can they hiss?’
Lucy shrugs. ‘Around here, the snakes chirp.’
The boy bolts once the birds start nipping at his ankles. ‘Girl’s pretty,’ he tells his friends. ‘But weird, so weird. She thinks she can talk to animals.’
‘I mean, sure, who can’t?’ Lucy points out. It’s not like they listen.
But Julian. Julian, Julian.
Julian exits the thicket unscathed. He waves the crows away by laying down a soft, white blanket. ‘You’re right,’ he says, scanning the sky. ‘You can see the stars. Look, there’s Orion.’
And when he points out Eridanus and Dorado and all her other favorite constellations, Lucy notices that this boy, too, is lit up in pieces. Long legs. Thin waist. Broad shoulders. Blue eyes twinkling behind a cloud of white-blonde hair. So, she gives in and kisses him and when their lips part, she knows they generated enough heat because she felt it, but also because a seedling has appeared under the old, rotting Gravenstein tree.
‘Boy’s the one,’ Lucy whispers to the seedling as it grows and grows. Lucy doesn’t notice, not really, that she’s the only one returning with water. She half-notices that the stem is turning red. She ignores that the little green bulb has burst to reveal squishy, yellow, slivers instead of full, pink petals.
But then there’s Julian walking around town, holding hands with Daisy, something Lucy can’t ignore.
‘Sorry,’ he explains.
‘Yeah, sorry,’ Lucy replies. ‘Just tell me how you fooled the orchard.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ she concedes, because nothing, really, is all she has; a hollow stem connected to a few white wisps, primed to scatter in the wind, except, of course, in the old, dead apple orchard, there isn’t any. So, Lucy gives in again and yanks the dying dandelion from the ground.
She sits beneath the big, rotting Gravenstein tree and blows the little white wisps toward the stars, which, yes, are visible; bright-white and shimmery, but so, so far away. She wishes all the apples weren’t rotten; that dead trees didn’t hand out splinters, that roots would take hold in coarse, gray dirt, that something good could grow, even here.
Jeanine Skowronski has published work in Lunate Fiction, Meet Cute Press and Dwelling Literary. She was a finalist in NYC Midnight’s 2019 Short Story Challenge. Find Jeanine on Twitter at @JeanineSko.
Photo by Kym MacKinnon on Unsplash.
