Comfort Me With Apples(8)

“She is yours, sweet girl,” Mr. Orpington said with moist, dark eyes. “Enjoy her.”

“Are you happy, Sophia?” asked Mrs. Orpington hopefully, still clutching her basket of eggs.

“Why does everyone keep asking me that?” Sophia replied. She laughed, because it seemed the right sort of thing to do, but they did not laugh back.

“It is important,” answered Mr. Orpington quietly.

Sophia frowned, and at the sight of her frown, Mrs. Orpington began to tremble.

“Are you?” Sophia said, and as she remembers it, she suspects she might not have sounded very nice about it, even though she felt nice toward the old dears. “Happy, I mean.”

“Of course,” the shopkeeper whispered hoarsely, his eyes fixed on the clucking bird she cradled in the angle of her elbow. “Of course we are.”

Sophia hurried away, clutching their pretty red hen and their emerald peas and their sugar-clotted dates and figs and their blue eggs and their clay jar of cream she could bring back or not any time it was convenient for her and their trembling and their words in her arms.

She should have answered politely, she knows better, and she curses her own manners. She will go back tomorrow and apologize. After all, she is happy. What is so hard about saying so, and to those who have never done her any harm? What if this makes them surly toward her husband when he comes to buy his coffee and his bacon? She could not bear that.

She is happy. Sophia is happy. Why could she not tell them?



* * *



She clears away the detritus of supper in silence. For a moment, she wishes Mr. Semengelof was there to play his piano and fill her head with something other than herself. But she remembers the actuality of Mr. Semengelof and retracts her wish as quickly as a cat’s claws.

Sophia flows into the rituals of the kitchen. She steps up and down from the stepstool her husband made her as she gives each object over to its proper home. Plates in the great cabinet. Glasses in the china case. Pans to soak in the sink. Bones in the silver pot on the stove to render into broth for tomorrow’s soup, liquid golden fat in a jar in the icebox for tomorrow’s frying. Nothing wasted. Nothing left out. Flatware in the drawer, knives washed and laid out to dry, ready to be slotted neatly back into the wooden knife block. Sophia slides the biggest blade into the biggest slot.

But it does not fit. It catches on something. The blade will not go. It makes a sound when it finds its obstruction. A scratching and a clunking. Sophia sets the long carving knife down on the counter and tips the knife block over, patting the bottom like a bottle of oil to get the dregs out. The obstruction tumbles into her hand.

It is a bone.

Brown and dry and old and small. It has not known meat or juice for years. It must be a bit of chicken bone. I overlooked it stuck to the knife and shoved it in, she chides herself. Lazy. Slovenly. But her heart beats fast and her stomach floods itself with acid and she knows, she knows she had nothing to do with this. He carves the roast, not her. It’s too big for her little hands, he always laughs, babying the blade with an oilcloth before putting it away himself.

There are marks on the bone, the same marks that slashed up the back of the hairbrush, black scaldings, black letters in a language set in direct opposition to the friendly kinds of letters that spell out Orpington’s Organic Co-Op over the place where the evening roast flies joyfully to your arms.

And it is not a chicken bone. Sophia wants it to be. More than anything, in this blue-washed moment with the stars craning their necks toward her in particular, more than anything she wants it to be a chicken bone. To smell of sage and rosemary and butter. But it doesn’t, because it can’t. It smells only of time and loneliness and wild, hot, endless sands.

Sophia cannot help knowing what she knows. She is standing in her beautiful open floor-plan kitchen in her perfect sprawling house holding the tip of a human finger.





CORTLAND



14.??Smoking of any substance and drinking of spirits by female Residents are not permitted due to possible damages incurred to the Property.

15.??If approached by the Association’s Representatives, Residents will behave with decorum and deference, providing any documents, evidence, testimony, or information requested, and executing with promptness any and all solicited action(s).





CAMEO



The moon melts in through the big bay windows of 1 Cedar Drive like cold butter over hot bread. Nightingales and whip-poor-wills and kingfishers tune up their throats as a gentle mist lifts from the street into the summer night.

Sophia wakes. She fell asleep on the couch, too afraid to go up to that massive bed where the shadows looked like long fingers reaching for her in the moonlight. She looks down across the landscape of her drowsy body and sees that a tiny grey field mouse has curled up in the arch of her naked foot. Its round ears twitch with dreams of clover and owls.

Sophia stares. She does not leap away. It has the right to sleep in what shelter it can find, poor thing.

“Go on,” she whispers, and moves her toes ever so little.

The field mouse opens its black eyes. It does not leap either. It watches her. It leans warmly, possessively against her foot. It opens its mouth.

A shadow falls across Sophia’s belly in the shape of a curved knife. She looks up unbreathing and she is not alone, not even so alone as a woman with a mouse. A heron stands outside her window, a waterbird as tall as a man, its fish-shredding beak pointed at her heart, the blue of its feathers glowing like wet ink in the first drops of sunlight. It taps the glass with its beak. Harder, harder, until it is not a tapping but a stabbing. A spiderweb of broken glass pops open. The heron opens its mouth. A long hiss rises up from its gullet.