Comfort Me With Apples(7)
As the song like pure starlight fills the room, Sophia slowly draws up her knees to her chest, wraps her arms around her whole self, and begins to rock back and forth. The three older women idly open their hostess gifts, unaffected and unconcerned. They exclaim silently over them, showing them off as the music teacher’s slender dark back bends over his work.
A knob of fresh cheese Sophia made herself, a squirming mass of tiny pink bloodworm larvae, and a sopping wet red lump of fresh, glistening meat: a heart, still bright with oxygenation, just this side of beating.
Mrs. Fische plucks up a helping of larvae and drops it into her mouth, sucking her fingers with relish. Mrs. Minke sinks her sharp teeth into the cheese. Mrs. Lyon licks greedily at the severed aorta of the heart.
Sophia smiles at them. Seeing their pleasure pushes the music and the strange man and the scream far down into the root system of her mind. The tension pops like a moonflower opening. Ease slides down her limbs.
She is happy, after all.
Sophia’s smile unfurls as pure and perfect as the first smile ever managed. They like her gifts. They like her. She is appreciated. She is loved. It is such a wonderful thing in this world, to have friends.
SNOWSWEET
10.??Holiday displays and other celebrations are prohibited. Every day in Arcadia is pleasurable and special. Holidays are therefore superfluous.
11.??It is forbidden in the strictest terms to give the passcode for the exterior Arcadia Gardens gate to anyone not a signatory to or in current violation of this Agreement. Transgression will result in immediate eviction.
12.??Suffering of any kind is and shall be considered contraband.
13.??No children shall be tolerated on or around the Property. This Agreement covers two (2) Residents only, from signing until termination by the Association. Any conception, whether brought to term or otherwise, shall void this contract in its entirety.
KEEPSAKE
The sun wriggles down between the green foothills that ring Arcadia Gardens like a wedding band. Time passes without pressing its claim. Oranges ripen on the tree, passion fruit on the vine, the wool on the backs of hand-raised, heirloom-breed communal sheep lengthens by the barest fraction of a centimeter, and Sophia sits down, alone at a laden table. She watches the golden juice glisten on the breast of a roast chicken and roll down the rich mound of meat to pool on the clean china plate beneath.
Her husband does not come home that night. Sophia accepts this as she accepts the presence of gravity. As she accepts everything else. His work often takes him far afield and into the next day. A freelancer knows not the meaning of the words day shift or night shift! Perhaps Mrs. Lyon or Mrs. Minke know how to dislike their lives and scold their husbands. Sophia has never had the knack.
Once it is full dark outside, she lights the candles and eats her share alone. She swings her legs back and forth under the chair like a small girl. She will leave the larger portion for him, of course. It takes so little to fill her up. Sophia admires her table setting, its symmetry and balance. Roast chicken stuffed with pears and citron, buttered peas with mint and thyme, fresh bread rich and yellow with extra eggs, salted cucumbers, and a fig-and-date trifle lavished in pink pomegranate cream. Sophia savors each bite mindfully, aware of its source and its aim, grateful for its weight in her belly, its benefit to her body.
She has not thought of Mr. Semengelof for hours, since before she began dressing the roast. Honest work banishes bad memories with such efficiency!
Sometimes, on these nights she spends alone, Sophia looks at her bountiful table and can almost see that something should be there that isn’t. Not her husband or her friends, but others, others she cannot quite name or even imagine, shadows, phantoms of a future unlike the present, somethings to fill these eight chairs round the dining set. That has always seemed strange to her. Eight chairs, when it’s always been just the two of them.
Sophia shakes her head. What has gotten into her today? She will ask Mrs. Lyon’s little ones to supper on the weekend, and they will need the chairs then. Goodness! How many times has she hosted their neighbors? That’s all the chairs have ever been or ever will be for. What else? Who else?
How quickly the blue-green of twilight brings wildness to the mind.
To tame herself, she recalls Mr. Orpington’s shop that afternoon. The sign above the door, painstakingly lettered in gold: Orpington’s Organic Co-Op: Your Needs Are Our Wants. And just outside the door, in the same pretty penmanship, that long, lovely poster announcing the summer show:
Tomorrow at the Arcadia Gardens Municipal Amphitheater:
An Evening of Earthly Delights!
A Pantomime: Memories of Bliss to Come
To Be Followed by Ice Cream and Dancing
Presented by Your Gracious Hosts
Mrs. Palfrey, Mrs. Moray, and Mrs. Wolfe!
She remembers with pleasure selecting the peas from the barrel like emeralds, sliding the silver scoop down into the infinite depths of little green gems and up again. Smelling the heavy red pomegranates with all those garnet crystal seeds inside. The basket of brown and blue eggs offered to her by young Mrs. Orpington, her eyes shining with strange tears, her beautiful black curls tumbling down her back, bashful and proud to have so much to give her favorite customer. The russet hen that scampered across the shop floor and leapt up toward Sophia with a crow of joy, the very bird that rested now on the good china plate before her. How she caught the bird and it snuggled into her arms, looking up at her with expectant adoration.