Christopher Boucher

Golden Delicious

For Lisa

ENFIELD, CONNECTICUT

APPLESEED, MASSACHUSETTS

VOX

ROYAL JUBILEE

That afternoon I took the Reader to see the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. We left right after school on my customized Bicycle Built for Two, the Reader on the backseat and me on the front. We pedaled through the paragraphs of downtown and across Highway Five to the deadgroves near the west margin, where I figured we’d find the Memory planting stories in the soil.

That was the year that my Mom left us — sharpened the blades in her skirt, winged up her blouse, and flew off — and it was just me, my father, and my sister in our home in Appleseed. It wasn’t a surprise when she left; she’d been planning to leave, telling us she was leaving, for months. And everything else that she’d predicted had come true — the blight, the loss of meaning, all of it.

Even so, we were shocked when she actually went through with it. There was no official goodbye, no pep talk. My sister and I were in the TV room that afternoon when my Mom appeared in the doorway, wearing her flightskirt and goggles, a suitcase at her feet. “Well, I’m all packed,” she said.

My sister looked over at her from the couch. I pulled my headphones off.

“I’ll see you both soon, OK?” my Mom said. Then she saluted us and walked out the door and into the backyard.

My sister and I ran out after her. “Wait — right now?” said Briana.

My Mom lowered her goggles over her eyes and lifted off the ground.

“Mom—wait!” my sister said. “You can’t — what about — when will you be back?”

My Mom didn’t answer — it was like she couldn’t even hear Briana.

“What about dinner?” my sister shouted up.

My Mom looked down and made a face. “You’ll figure it out,” she called back. “Make some. Or have make some.”

“Who’s going to do the grocery shopping?”

My Mom huffed. By then she was twenty feet high — then thirty, then forty.

I didn’t say anything. I was pretty sure that this was my fault — that I was the reason my Mom was leaving. I’d done something wrong, but I didn’t know what.

I was sad watching her go, though, and I missed her in the days that followed. I missed the obvious things — our trips to the Library and to the Bing for movie matinees — but also the things I never thought I’d miss: the sound of her footsteps as she vaulted up the carpeted stairs two at a time; the way she leaned over the kitchen counter while smoking a six-foot cigarette; the sound of her working out — practicing martial-arts moves in the worryfields, hitting the heavy bag in the garage, perfecting flight techniques out back. The house felt empty without my parents’ arguments — their subtle barbs, their all-out shoutfests. I even missed being yelled at — the way my Mom spat out the words spoiled and selfish, and, more recently, brat and blabbermouth and badseed, and in the days before she left, piece of crap, and piece of shit. I was all of those things — I was a spoiled, selfish piece of shit. I ruined everything. That was probably why I didn’t have many friends — why I rode my Bicycle Built for Two alone.

Then, a few weeks after my Mom flew away, Mr. Santos assigned us — you and I — a project in History about the founding of Appleseed. I told you maybe we could go see the Memory of Johnny Appleseed and interview him, and you looked at me funny and said, “I thought Johnny Appleseed was a myth.”

I considered that. “I don’t think so,” I said. “His Memory works with my Dad sometimes.”

“And he knows about the founding of Appleseed?” said the Reader.

“Sure,” I said. “He planted, like, every apple tree in Appleseed. I think that’s why they call it—”

“Does he know what happened to them?” asked the Reader.

“He says he does,” I said.

You — the Reader — shrugged. “I’ll go with you,” you said, “if you’re sure you know where to find him.”

“He doesn’t technically have an address?” I said. “But I can usually track him down.”

Truth was, I wasn’t sure I could find the Memory of Johnny Appleseed by myself. Usually he found me. I’d been on dozens of drives with my Dad, though, when he was trying to locate the Memory for one job or another. Sometimes we spotted him hitchhiking on Old Five; othertimes he was riding his treecycle past Wolf Swamp or standing outside the Big Why, handing out brochures. Once we spotted him turning cartwheels on the Town Green. The last time we needed him, we asked at the Recycling Center and they said they heard he was up on Appleseed Mountain. When we got to the base of the mountain, we saw Johnny Appleseed walking through the trees with an armful of ifs.

There were also those times, though, when we didn’t find him at all — when my Dad drove around for an hour or two, pounded the dashboard with the heel of his hand, turned the truck around and went home.

The Reader and I pedaled past the Amphitheatre, the Arcade, the Library — there was no sign of Johnny anywhere. Soon, we’d crossed the off-white pages of Highway Five, bumping over prints and railroad tracks. In the distance you could see Appleseed Prison, the Mental Hospital, and back behind that, the beard of Appleseed Mountain. It was a tough ride, what with the extra weight of the Reader and all, and out past Jonquil I had to stop and catch my breath. At one point I turned around and looked back at you. “Are you pedaling?” I said.

“Of course I am,” said the Reader.

“It doesn’t seem like you are,” I said.

“I am,” you said.

I stood up from the seat and bore down on the pedals.

Finally I saw Old Colton Road, and, up ahead, the Colton deadgroves. When we reached the edge of the groves we laid the bike down in the grass and walked through the fields. My thoughts were clamoring; I leaned over, opened the top of my head, and let the thoughts spill out and run free on the dead pages. “Woo!” shouted one of my thoughts, sprinting forward. Another thought began digging.

“Don’t get lost!” I shouted to them. “And think right back here if you find the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.”

A third thought ran up to me. “I have to pee,” it said.

“Go over there by that tree,” I told it.

The Reader looked out across the page. “Should we shout for him or something?” she said.

“Shouting won’t do much good,” I said. “These groves go on for years.”

We trudged across the marshy ground. We saw some memories and scenes; a few wild sentences crossed behind a treeline. Soon I spotted a figure in the foggy fields; he wore a satchel around his waist and he was kneeling in the soil. When he heard our footsteps approaching, he stood up and put his hand to his forehead. “?” he said.

The Memory of Johnny Appleseed didn’t look good. He was wearing jeans that were too big for him, a green corduroy hat, and someone’s old Converse hi-tops. His white beard was patchy and his eyes were tired. “Who’s this?” he said.

“Reader,” I said.

“I can see that,” he said. He smiled a near-toothless smile. His face was stained with ink and soil. “What’s she doing here?”

“School project,” I said.

“About the founding of Appleseed,” said the Reader quietly.

In the distance, two of my thoughts ran past, one chasing the other with a tree branch.

“We were hoping we could interview you for it,” I said.

“What do you want to know?” said the Memory.

“About the first pages,” I said. “The planting of the first apple trees.”

The Memory stood up. “Sure,” he said. “I can go through it for you. How ’bout you help me with what I was doing — pulling out these stalks?” he said, leaning over. “And then I’ll give you the history.”

I looked out at the field. Five or six rows of black, spiny clumps stuck out from the ground. I could see the Reader studying the stalks. “What are you growing here?” you asked.

“Only thing that will grow in the deadgroves,” said Johnny Appleseed. “Those are stories.”

“I didn’t think anything could grow in the deadgroves,” the Reader said.

“Stories will grow anywhere,” the Memory told the Reader. “You can grow stories on the bottom of the ocean floor! In a tree! On the back of a song! These rows,” said the Memory, “are overripe. They need to be told today. So how ’bout it?”

I looked to the Reader, who nodded.

The Memory positioned himself over a stalk. “This inky part here? You grab it and pull.” He pulled, and up came a story. We looked at it; it was the story of Cora Morris, one of the first Mothers.

“See? There’s some history right there,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. “Now you guys give it a try.”

I knew I didn’t have a choice about the stories we were harvesting: they were already fully formed. But if I’d had a choice? I would have grown more of the small, dumb stories that I’d lived and lost: family of four goes out to Appleseed Pizza for an extra-large pie. Family of four has enough meaning to pay the mortgage. Family of four never has to worry about bookworms, meaning-losses or blights. There were never any problems and nothing bad ever happened. Were those even stories? Anyway, that’s what I wanted.

The Reader and I leaned down and took hold of a storyroot. We pulled, but the root held firm.

“It’s stuck,” I said.

“Oh, come on,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. “Pull! With your arms!”

We tried again — you put your back into it; I dug my feet into the fibers. The root finally budged, and loosened, and gave. Together, we pulled the story out of the page.

GOLDEN NOBLE

As far back as I remember — this page, even — I used to kneel on the margin with my Mom and send out prayers: thoughts, honed and directed. Prayers, if you don’t know, can be sent to other people — the dead, the memorized, the far-away — or, with the right words and codes, directly to the book’s Core.

Some prayers are public, like the prayers you get from Town Hall or announcements from the newspaper, but most of them are private—“holy,” my Mom would say — between you and another person or you and the Core. My Mom liked to pray out loud sometimes, though, so I’d hear snippets of her psalms to my grandfather, Old Speaker, or to her mother the GameMaster, or a quick hi-prayer to her brother in Baltimore. “I miss you so much,” she prayed to Old Speaker once.

“Are you exercising?” he prayed back.

“Yes,” she prayed.

“How’s your eating?” he prayed.

“Fine,” she prayed through clenched teeth.

“You’re not throwing up?”

“No,” she said.

When I first started praying, I just prayed to people I knew. Like, I prayed to my friend Large Odor: “Hey.”

“What?” he prayed back.

“Nothing,” I prayed.

But my Mom taught me how to pray better: how to make a thought in your mind and send it up, off the page and into the night. “Prayers are just sentences,” she told me once as we knelt in the worryfields, the wet page cold on my knees. “Sometimes you can direct them, sort of shape them in your mind. But they can also get away from you—” Just then a small sentence scampered across the page. My Mom lunged at it, picked it up by the scruff of its verb and tossed it into the margin. “—wander off,” she continued, “like a thought. You understand?”

“Sure,” I said. I didn’t. I wouldn’t for a long time.

“If you want to control your prayers — really direct them — you’ve got to practice. Pray a lot. Pray even when you don’t have to.”

When I got better at praying, I’d send out prayers almost as far and heart as my Mom did. When my sister broke her leg in gymnastics? I prayed for it to heal. When my Dad went into debt? I prayed for more meaning for our family.

When we finished praying, my Mom and I would stand up and brush the page from our knees and walk back home. “You’re a good praying partner,” she told me one day. “Where’d you learn to pray like that?”

She was so nice then.

“I have a good teacher,” I said.

But then the language rose up and the rot set in — into my mind, the town, our hearts — and my Mom stopped bringing me out to the margin; it was just too dangerous. Then my Mom left altogether. Months after she floated upward, though, I started going back out to the margin again to pray. I didn’t care if it was safe or not — I had a missing I couldn’t meet. I’d pray out as far as I could, and sometimes my Mom prayed back. But it was always a cursory response—“Tell your sister and Dad I said hello!” or “Hope you’re having a nice day!” or “Do your homework!” Once I didn’t hear from her for a whole month, so I submitted a Missing Persons Prayer to the Core. All it did, though, was generate an automatic response: “Thank you for praying to Appleseed — we appreciate your prayer, and regret that we cannot answer every prayer individually.”

When I couldn’t reach my Mom I’d pray to someone else: my Dad at work, my friends Chamblis or Berson, the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. Sometimes I’d send out psalms to the dumbstars. Once, just to see what happened, I tried praying to myself. I thought the prayer would just boomerang back and feedback my thoughts, but it didn’t; it went — somewhere — and reached a me on a different page. “Hello?” said the other-page me.

I prayed to myself that I was here in Appleseed, basically all alone with no one to take care of me. That I needed help. “I just don’t know what anything means anymore,” I prayed.

“And you’re where?” the me prayed back.

“Appleseed,” I prayed back.

“I’ve never heard of that place,” I prayed to myself. “Is it near Norwich?”

Somewhere, in a stuck drawer in my mind, I think I always knew about the blight. I probably knew about the bookworms, too — where they came from, what they wanted, who brought them. Some thoughts rise into the sky, but others are just too heavy — they sink into the pagesoil, where they fester and rot. One person’s imagination can cause a lot of damage — destroy a whole town, even!

Before you read any further, though, I want to apologize. I’m really sorry — I am. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. If we work together, though, there might still be blank pages — room to fix all this.

Reader: Work together?

Maybe I could carry these stories, and you could carry those.

Reader: That whole stack? What is all that, even?

“This is most of my childhood right here,” I said.

“I’m not sure I can even lift that many stories,” you said.

No, no — you can store them in your mind. Here: I’ll — open the top of your head, move some thoughts around—

Reader: Ow.

— and we’ll stuff as many stories as we can in there.

Reader: They smell like cigarettes.

Those are my Mom’s. Don’t smoke them! They’re special MotherSmokes, six feet long and strong as Baz. Once I tried one and my mind started coughing and hacking and it almost puked into my skull.

Reader: That all of them?

Just — one more. There. Now we’ll just close up your skull good and tight, and you’re good to go. Hey — what page are we on?

Reader: 17.

OK — let’s go. We’re late already.

Reader: Go where?

Forward. To try to fix this. We’ve got to try to save Appleseed.

FIESTA

Turn the page, step onto the margin, and you’re at the edge of Appleseed, Massachusetts, standing right on the Connecticut-Massachusetts border, next to the Connecticut River. See? You can see Appleseed City — the smokestacks of Bondy’s Island, the Meaning District — off behind you. To your right is the town: the Amphitheatre, the Town Hall, the Appleseed Free Library, the Shoppes. Back behind them, but before you reach Appleseed Mountain, are the Prison and the Mental Hospital.

I wasn’t born here in Appleseed. We lived off the northwest margin until I was three, and moseyed here the way most of my friends’ families did, as part of the Housing Boom of ’77. That year, droves of houses — two-stories, ranches, Victorian mansions, cottages — stumbled across New England, looking for a space to settle. The boom began as a murmur in Vermont and bombasted into New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Houses started crossing the Connecticut River in March of ’77, marching through Greenfield, Easthampton, and Agawam. Our house walked that entire summer, carrying my family inside it every step. My parents spent all day steering from the porch while my sister Briana, who was four at the time, sat in front of the TV and I slept in my steel case.

By the time the houses reached Massachusetts, my Dad said, every major road was blocked. “The old highways were literally clogged with houses,” he told me once, on a drive out to visit The Ear. The Ear was a handyman, like my Dad, except he always had much better tools. “What’s sad is?” my Dad said. “Some of those houses—”

“Died right there on the road,” said a thought lying on the couch in my mind. I’d heard this story a hundred times before.

“Died!” my Dad said. “Right on the road! Their foundations cracked from all that idling!”

“Those are the suburbs now,” said the thought, shoving some crackers into its mouth.

“And they closed down the roads and made those the new suburbs!” my Dad said.

By the time my parents made it into the Pioneer Valley, most of the towns along Old Route Five had closed their exits. You’d see signs, my Dad said, reading NO PLOTS AVAILABLE.

“It was nervewracking,” said my Dad, driving us through the Meadows. “You know how your Mom gets. And the TV antenna broke somewhere around West Springfield, so your sister was so bored.”

“What about me?”

“You were,” he said, “you. Quiet. Thinking in the Vox.”

At three, I had not yet made a single sound — not a gurgle, not a bleep, not a screech. I used to just sit still and stare like a reader, my Mom said, with a terrified look on my face. Sometimes tears would run down my cheeks, my Dad said, but no sound would accompany them. My parents thought that I might never speak, that I was mute, that I might not have been born with a voice. My thoughts kept repeating the same words, over and over: “You won’t,” they’d say.

Reader: Won’t what?

Won’t anything — won’t talk; won’t be. My parents took me to see a doctorcoat who specialized in early speech, and he sent us home with something called “the Vox”—an iron-lung-type case which was designed to help with vocal development.

I remember that box — the hours, days, years lying awake inside it. Speakers inside the box filled it with sounds: squawks, yipes, zoops, words, and sentences. “The capital of North Dakota is Bismarck,” the speakers would say. “B-I-S-M-A-R-C-K.”

“I’m not,” I thought to the Vox.

“Water freezes at thirty-two words per second.

“You live in America. A-M-E-R-I–C-A.

“You have one nose and two ears. Ears rhymes with years. Years rhymes with fears.”

Slowly, I learned more words. “I’m lonely,” I thought to the Vox.

“Everyone is lonely,” the Vox replied. “At least you have the Reader.”

Which was a good point.

“I want to get out of here,” I prayed.

“No, you don’t,” said the Vox. “You wouldn’t survive a year in Appleseed.”

“Why not?” I prayed. “What’s wrong with me?”

The Vox looked me over. “Where to even begin,” it said.

That box became my first cage. Remember looking through the foggy glass and seeing the sunlight shouting through the window?

Reader: Who — me? I just got here. I just now arrived in Appleseed.

How I’d send my thoughts to run around the neighborhood so they could tell me what it looked like? How, sometimes, my sister would peer down through the glass at me, her curly blond hair obstructing almost all of the light?

“Help!” my thoughts would say to her.

“?” she’d say. “Can you hear me?”

“Get me out of here!” I’d think.

I remember my Mom’s visits, too: how she’d open up the Vox to feed me food or vitamins. If there were tears on my face, she’d wipe them away. If I still didn’t stop crying, she’d lift me out of the Vox and cradle me. “This is only temporary,” she’d say. “OK?”

“OK,” my thought would say.

Then she’d put me back into the Vox, lock it, and leave.

“We were getting desperate,” my Dad said, as we neared The Ear’s neighborhood. With the house inching along Five, my parents started to panic: how far would they have to go before finding a plot? “We were starting to think that we might have to live in Connecticut!” my Dad said.

Then, just a few miles from the Connecticut border, my house spoke up. “What about that one?” it said, and pointed to a banged-up sign. I knew that sign — it sang, APPLESEED, EST. 1775, and below it, ALL NEW WORDS MUST REGISTER AT THE TOWN HALL.

My parents had never even heard of Appleseed. Was it a real town? When they checked the map, though, they found the word “Appleseed”—a tiny round quell in the corner of the state.

Just at that moment, my Dad said, he and my Mom heard a sound from the other room — a “chirp,” my Mom called it. They ignored it at first, but then they heard it again. My Mom once told me that it sounded like a baby bird.

They followed the sound through the house—“Chirp! Chirp!”—and into the TV room, where Briana sat next to the Vox. “What’s making that sound?” my Mom asked Briana.

“That’s ,” said Bri, matter-of-factly.

My parents looked at the Vox. They heard the chirp again.

“See?” said Briana.

My Dad opened the steel case. I have a foggy memory of this moment — of everyone standing over me, and of opening my mouth wide to make the biggest sound I could.

“Appa,” I said.

My parents looked at each other.

“See?” said Briana.

“Appa,” I said again.

“He’s saying apple,” my sister announced.

My Mom once told me that tears appeared on my father’s face when I made my first sounds. My Dad, meanwhile, said my Mom ran back out to the porch and steered the house off the winding ramp and into Appleseed. “Your Mom thought it was a signal or something,” my Dad said.

“So it’s my fault we ended up here?” I said.

“It’s no one’s fault,” my Dad said. “We’d just been praying for so long for you to speak. We took this as the reply.”

It was another two hours of house-traffic before our house actually crossed the line into town. My Dad steered us past sentences about schools, a town hall, a town green, a small downtown, an amphitheatre, and long stretches of wilderness.

“And apple trees everywhere,” my Dad said, turning onto the old dirt road where The Ear’s shack stood. “So many different kinds!”

“There are different kinds of apples?” I said.

“ ’Course there are,” he said. “Dozens. Don’t you remember?”

I shook my head.

As my parents steered the house through the town, though, they became discouraged: there were plots available with FOR SALE signs on the lawns, but all of them cost far more meaning than my parents could borrow. It wasn’t until they drove the house over to the Northeast Side — down Bliss Road, past Laurel Brook, and onto Converse Street — that they started to see houses in their range of meaning. The houses in that corner were shabbier, my Dad said: one had a stain on its pants; another drank from a bottle wrapped in paper.

On the far corner of that street, right across from some worryfields and the margin, was a plot marked forty thousand truths. It was the smallest piece of available land in Appleseed — the house had to scrunch up its elbows to fit on it — and still it was more meaning than my parents could afford. But that was the best option, my Dad said; it was there or back into the month-to-monthing in the margins. So my Dad picked up the FOR SALE sign, drove the house to Appleseed Town Hall and signed a Promise of Truths with an interest rate of thirty percent.

“There — Ear’s abode,” my Dad said, pointing to a wooden shack with a dirt driveway. “Now let’s see if he’s home.”

“What does that mean, thirty percent?” I said.

My Dad pulled into the driveway and honked the horn. “It means,” he said, “that if you borrow ten ideas, you pay back thirteen. If you borrow twenty? Pay back twenty-six.”

“Holy crap,” I said.

The Ear came out of his shack. He looked older than I remembered him; he had lambchop sideburns and some sort of skin irritation. “Ralph,” he said. He peered into the cab. “Bring your assistant with you?”

“Teaching him the business,” my Dad said.

“Oh yeah?” The Ear turned to me. “Going to be a landlord, like your Dad?”

“I’m going to be a movie person,” I told him.

“Hoping I could borrow your steth,” my Dad said to The Ear.

“Two-meter?”

“Four,” said my Dad.

The Ear motioned for us to follow and we stepped out of the truck. The Ear led us into the shack. There was all sorts of recording equipment inside: tape decks, microphones, wires, and dozens of other devices I couldn’t identify.

“Let’s see here,” The Ear said, searching in a closet. “Ah.” He lifted up a black plastic case. “Four-meter steth,” he said.

On the way back home, I asked my Dad more about the debt. “Weren’t you worried about paying all that meaning back?” I said.

“Of course I was,” he said. “I still am — I worry about it every day. But we didn’t want to live on the margin anymore. Don’t you remember what that was like? Moving every few months? Not really ever having a home?”

I shook my head. “I don’t remember that.”

“We just wanted a good place for you and your sister to grow up.”

“How much do you owe on the house now?”

“All told, about a hundred thou,” he said.

“Seriously?” I said.

“At the time, though, I didn’t care about the meaning. I was just happy that you were out of the voice box. You just kept running around the house, saying ‘Appa-seed,’ ‘Appa-seed.’ You sang it like a song! I would have paid any amount of meaning to see you that happy,” my Dad said.

NORTHERN SPY

Because of the Vox, I couldn’t walk correctly for another two years; I had to wear braces on my legs to keep them straight. I remember trying to hobble through the yard, how tired my legs would get. When he had time, my Dad would take me for walks around the block to strengthen my ankles and knees.

If he was at work or busy, my sister and I would play in the yard. She’d run around with her friends on the grass while I sat in the dirt and dug holes in the page. Before we moved to town, I don’t think my parents knew that most of the towns in the county dumped their deadwords in Appleseed, or that the soil was filled with dead language. I’d find all sorts of interesting bugs and deadwords there: commas, semicolons, fragments, wordbones, and other carcasses. My thoughts didn’t know to be worried — they didn’t understand that these vots were once as alive as the wild sentences you’d see across the street in the white woods of the margin, hopping from tree to tree. How was I to know that worry could manifest and worm its way into your mind? I couldn’t even read yet!

One day, I found a deadcomma and took it over to my Mom. It was her day off from work, and she was sitting in a lawn chair, a book on her lap, a six-foot cigarette sticking out of her mouth. My sister was outside, too — sanding a wooden clock on the patio — while my father stood on a ladder, fixing a gutter.

“Appa,” I said to my Mom.

“Shhh, honey,” my Mom said to me, without looking up from her book.

You never knew with my Mom. Some days her eyes held calm seas, but others — like that day — they held storms.

I offered her the muddy comma — I’m sure it smelled terrible. “Appa,” I said again.

“Uh-huh,” my Mom said.

I put the comma on the page of my Mom’s book.

“Oh, shit, ,” my Mom said. “Ralph!”

“Appa,” I said.

“What?” my father said from the ladder.

“Look at what is playing with,” she said, standing up and shaking the comma off the book. She pointed to it on the ground. “He found this in the yard, Ralph. A fucking comma carcass, for Christ’s sake!”

“Can we not swear?” my Dad said, climbing down the ladder.

I picked up the comma and walked over to him on weak legs. “Appa,” I said to him.

“Do you know how many diseases that thing has?” my Mom said.

“Put that down, ,” said my Dad. “Those can make you sick.”

“Wash ’s hands,” my Mom spat, and stormed inside.

My Dad led me over to the spout and held my hands under the freezing cold water. My Mom appeared at the kitchen window. “Did you wash his hands?” she shouted.

“Yes,” he said.

“Are they clean?”

“Yeah,” my Dad said.

Then my Dad led me to the back door. He tried to open it, but it was locked. “Door’s locked,” my Dad said.

Smoke billowed through the screen and up the side of the house.

“Diane,” my Dad said.

My Mom stared out the kitchen window at us.

“Open the door,” my Dad said.

My Mom took a drag on her cigarette.

I was a badseed — I knew that from the very first pages. I just couldn’t be good, no matter how hard I tried. I remember, at six or so, making a trueheart sentence-gift for my Mom on the lawnpage. In the time that it took for me to go get her and bring her outside, though, the sentence changed. She read it and said, “You loaf me?”

“Love,” I said.

“Now it says,” she scanned the lawn, “loathe. You loathe me?”

I was confused. “What the heck?” said a thought. “No,” I told her. “That’s supposed to say—”

“How dare you,” she said. “I’m your mother!”

Those were the years when my Mom worked long hours at the hospital. Sometimes, if my Dad was working, too, I’d have to go with her to work; she’d put me in an empty room in the hospital with some paper and paints and a snack. I wasn’t supposed to leave the room until she came to get me. But my legs would hurt from sitting, and so sometimes I would step out of the room and go for walks: down the halls, over to the elevators, to other floors. Most of the time I could get back to the room before my Mom returned, but every once in a while I’d get caught. Then my Mom would punish me by giving me double the snack — dumbcrackers and sadcola — and I wasn’t allowed to leave the room until I’d finished every bite.

Once, I was walking the hallways of the hospital when I saw my Mom in a room of doctors and nurses. All of their backs were turned to me, and something was screaming in the room — I didn’t know what or who. When my Mom turned around there was oil on her hands. “!” she yelled. “What are you doing out here?”

Then I saw what was on the table: a motorcycle, its body bent and contorted. Everyone was shouting. The motorcycle screamed and then the screaming died.

“Vocal pressure’s dropping,” said one of the doctors.

My Mom turned to me. “Go, ! I don’t want you to see this. Get back to the room right now.”

I went into the room with new thoughts. “Where did the screaming go?” one of my thoughts asked.

“I’m pretty sure it’s sleeping,” said another thought.

“It’s not sleeping,” said another. “That screaming died, dumbass.”

“Died for how long?” asked the second thought.

“Forever,” said the first thought. “It’s dead.”

I turned to the hospital bed. “Have people died on you?” I asked it.

“What do you mean?” said the bed. “Of course they have.”

“A lot?” I said.

“Hundreds,” said the bed. “That’s my job, to be died on.”

A few days later, I was in my room in the hospital when I rolled up my sleeve, opened the tube of yellow paint, and poured it on my arm. Then I walked out to the nurse’s station. My Mom was smoking a six-foot cigarette and talking with another nurse.

“I’ve had an accident,” I announced.

My Mom looked up at me. “Go back in the room, ,” she said.

I held out my arm. “I’m bleeding.”

“That’s paint,” she said.

“I’m bleeding yellow,” I said.

“You better not have spilled any paint in that room,” she said. “Did you?” She rushed out from behind the desk, grabbed me by my yellow arm, and marched me back to the room. Then she studied the walls and the floor. “I better not see one drop of yellow paint in here.”

“People have died in this room!” I announced.

“Wash off your arm,” my Mom said. Then she slammed the door.

As I was rinsing my arm off in the sink, I noticed a supply cabinet underneath. When I opened the drawers I found cotton balls, wooden sticks, bandages, and a pair of scissors. I pulled out the scissors; they blinked their eyes in the light. “What year is it?” they asked me.

“Nineteen eighty-six,” I told them.

“Eighty-six?” they said.

“Can you help me?” I said.

“Help you how?” the scissors said.

“I want you to cut me,” I told them.

The scissors studied my face. “Why?” they said.

“Just do it. Cut me,” I told them.

Two minutes later I walked out of the room again. This time there was blood on my wrist, dripping down my hand. “I’m injured,” I said. I held out my arm.

None of the nurses responded. My Mom was sitting with a patient — a heavy woman with gray toiled skin — and wrapping a blood-pressure cuff around her arm.

“I’m bleeding,” I said.

“Go back to the room, ,” said my Mom.

“I’m injured,” I said.

“Sal,” my Mom said to another nurse. “Can you check on him?”

“You do it,” I said to my Mom. “You check on me.”

“Sal?”

Another nurse came over to me, crouched down, and saw my wrist. “Jesus, ,” she said. She called my Mom over. When she saw the blood, her face norsed and all of the color drained from it. “What did you do, ?” my Mom said. I remember how her hands shook as she wrapped the bandages around my arm and said, “How did this happen?”

SENTENCE THE SENTENCE

GLOCKENAPFEL

One night when I was eleven, though, one of my thoughts — a thought of green — thought over to the Hu Ke Lau (“Puke-E-Lau,” we called it) while I slept. At last call my thought hopped off his bar stool, pushed through the heavy doors, dropped his skateboard on the sidewalk and thought across the parking lot. He waved goodbye to some friendthoughts at the bike rack and then coasted past the snoring stores — the Big Why, Bagel Beagle — when car headlights suddenly grazed his shoulder. The thought of green turned around and studied the car: an old, brown Plymouth Duster with a number 8 behind the wheel. As my thought was watching, the number 8 changed into a B.

The thought darkened to a deeper shade of green. At home in my basement bedroom, I turned over in my sleep.

Shrugging off the worry, my thought turned around and pushed the skateboard toward home — down Grassy Gutter Boulevard and onto Apple Hill Road. When he looked back over his shoulder, though, he saw the round lights of the Duster still behind him. Was that car following him? He stopped his skateboard and stared into the windshield. He saw a flash in the B’s eye.

The thought custom-swore and sped up, skating down Apple Hill and then a quick left onto Coventry — a shortcut. When he looked back again, he didn’t see the Duster. He took a few deep breaths and slowed down, coasting down Coventry and back toward its intersection with Apple Hill. When he hit the corner, though, the thought saw the Duster’s lights again. The driver gunned the engine. The thought bore down, hauling toward the intersection with Converse, the car’s bumper inches from the skateboard’s tail. Emerald green. Military green. When he saw the backyard of my house through the trees, the thought jumped off the board and sprinted — through the grass, over the bushes, into the yard. The driver stopped the car, jumped out, stretched into a single line — a —and slithered after the thought.

The thought slid across the hatchway and dove through the open basement window. Then he turned and looked back at the figure on the lawn. Standing upright at the edge of the patio, the figure changed shape from an! to a? to an &. Then it grinned, straightened out, and dove into the ground.

The thought shut the window and thought across the room, back into my ear. I sniffed in my sleep — I was dreaming of green.

NEWTON WONDER

Once I began to talk I wouldn’t shut up. It was like my thoughts had stored all of those words I’d heard in the Vox, and now that I’d figured out how to translate them from my ears to my mouth, I couldn’t stop making language. At four or five, even, I’d walk around all week repeating one word. “One week it was sundry,” my sister told me once. “Sundry Sunday and sundry Monday and sundry Friday. Sundry socks and sundry macaroni and cheese. It was so annoying.”

Then, in the fourth grade, I roykoed this habit — a “nervous tic,” my Mom called it — of repeating anything anyone said. I couldn’t help it — the words I heard mirrored themselves in my mouth and resounded without my even thinking about it. I’d be sitting in Mrs. Trombly’s fourth-grade class when the dialogue would start to form on my tongue. “Turn to page twenty-two,” Mrs. Trombly announced one day, while her white-blond wig pointed to words on the chalkboard, “and you’ll find a study guide for tomorrow’s quiz.”

“Tomorrow’s quiz,” I muttered from my seat.

“I’m sorry, ?”

“?” I said.

“Did you have something to add?”

“Something to add?” I said.

The class laughtracked.

“Stop that,” said Mrs. Trombly.

“Stop that!” I said.

“That’s it. Detention! After school!”

“Detention! After school!” I shouted.

Detention, in our school, was a series of cages. The usual detention terms were two weeks for tardiness and three weeks for an outburst. I got four weeks for mimicking Mrs. Trombly. “Shit, man,” asked the cage during week two of my sentence. “What did you do?”

“Shit, man,” I said.

“Seriously,” said the cage.

“Seriously,” I said.

“Stop it,” said the cage.

“Stop it,” I said.

When detentions didn’t curb the behavior, the school convinced my parents to send me to a special quietschool — Appleseed Silence Academy — three afternoons a week. I was there in Principal Booth’s office when he suggested the idea to my parents. “’s teachers concur,” said the phone booth, “that he’s something of a pest.”

“Excuse me?” said my Mom.

“That was Mrs. Bowe’s word,” said the principal — who was, as his name said, a phone booth. Booth opened up a folder and showed my parents a sheet of paper. “See, ’s creativity scores are very high. But emotionally?” He held up a piece of paper.

My Dad looked at my Mom.

“How dare you,” my Mom said to the phone booth.

I sat there in my chair, drawing on the soles of my Converse hi-tops.

“We don’t advocate total silence as a rule,” said Principal Booth, adjusting his toupee. “But we are trying to teach verbal control.”

“Control,” my Mom said.

“That’s why I’m suggesting Silence School,” said the phone booth.

“ doesn’t need lessons in silence,” my Mom said. “He was in a Vox for the first three years of his life!”

“Which may be why he’s having trouble, actually,” Booth said. “He’s overcompensating.”

“How much meaning is it?” my Dad asked.

“Silence School?” Principal Booth told him the cost.

“Total?” said my Dad.

“Per month,” said the phone booth.

My Dad took off his thick glasses and rubbed his eyes.

The Academy was located up on Homicki Hill. It was built to house a small group of silent bessoffs who supposedly prayed, silently, every moment of the day.

I only ever saw one or two bessoffs my entire time there, though — the classes I attended were in the classrooms toward the front of the building. In a lot of ways it was like regular school — they still chained you to the desk with math, and all the clocks were dead or dying — except that the only lesson was silence. The teacher, a giant feather boa, wrote SHUT UP! in big bold letters on the blackboard, and every day she’d create new prompts designed to challenge our ability to keep quiet. Once, she brought in an entire pizza from Red Rose, ate one slice, and then asked all of us if we wanted any. If we answered, we were punished with an additional week of classes. Another time she showed us a video disc of Decision Man and stopped it right before the final battle with the Multiple Choices. If you shouted for her to continue the movie — to finish the story? More classes.

I really struggled in Silence School. One day, the boa walked up to my desk and asked me a direct question. “, what is the brightest spot in Appleseed?”

I knew I was supposed to just sit there quietly, so that’s what I did. But when I didn’t respond, the bright purple boa put her hands on her feathery hips. “You live in Appleseed, , and you don’t know the brightest spot?”

Of course I did — it was Fialky’s Worryfields! I rocked back and forth in my seat.

“Wow, ,” said the boa. “And I thought you were smart.”

“It’s Fialky’s Worryfields!” I said. “Everyone knows that!”

The boa slammed her fist down on my desk.

One afternoon a few days later, the boa ordered us to practice writing as quietly as we could. That’s what had landed several of these students in Silence School in the first place: their writing — either the sound of the pen on the page, or the noise of the words themselves — was too loud, and their teachers couldn’t take it anymore. That afternoon, we were focusing on the art of saying nothing, in words, on the page. The boa walked from row to row, looking over everyone’s writing. When she reached my desk she stopped. “Today is nice,” I’d scrawled on the page.

The boa held up a lavender finger. “But nice has some meaning, doesn’t it?”

I stared at her.

“It’s not negative. It’s actually quite positive!” she barked. “These words should say nothing, people!”

A few minutes later, a call came in on the classroom phone and the boa had to go down to the office. She left us writing silent sentences. As soon as she was gone, one of the erasers jumped down from the chalkboard, sidled over to me, and hopped onto my desk. “Ey,” he said.

“You got chalk on my page,” I whispered to him.

“Listen,” said the eraser. “I can’t sit up there watching you fuck up over and over. All she wants is for you to shut up. To just not talk. Why can’t you do that?”

“It’s my thoughts. I don’t even know that I’m saying the words.”

“Just take all the things you want to say and store them.”

I thought about this. “Store them for when?”

The eraser furrowed his brow. “What do you mean?”

“When do I say them?”

“You don’t say them, ever,” said the eraser. “Just keep them in your mind.”

Then we heard the boa’s heels clack-echoing through the halls; the eraser dropped off the desk and scurried back up to the blackboard just as the boa stepped into the room. On her way up to the front of the room, the boa walked past my desk. She looked at my page, where I’d written “Today is the day after yesterday.”

She pointed to the sentence. “That still has meaning!”

I studied the words.

“You’re still saying something about today!” she shouted.

I looked at the eraser. He put his finger to his lips.

I didn’t say a word all the next day. When I walked out to the bike racks after school, I saw Large Odor unlocking his Haro. “Yo,” he said. “That Trombly is a bitch, isn’t she?”

I shrugged.

“You don’t think so?” said Odor.

I shrugged again. When my thoughts made words, I put the words in drawers in cabinets in my mind. When the cabinets were full, I emptied them out into mental plastic garbage bags. Soon my skull was full of garbage bags of words.

I don’t know if this is related, but it was shortly after that — shortly after I started holding my tongue, or “maturing,” as my Mom called it — that I began to lose my hair. It also might have been a long-term effect of the Vox, which was taken off the market in 1980 after it was found to cause numerous side effects (hair loss among them).

Anyway, that was the year — fifth grade — that I went bald. My hair came off in all one clump one day. I was riding my skateboard and my hair — whoosh! — just fell off my head. I hopped off the board, backtracked until I found the hair, and stuck it back on my head. It wouldn’t stay on my skull, though — it just fell right off again. I had to hold the hair in place as I skated home.

I tried everything I could to keep my hair: baseball hats, chin straps, glue. But it just wouldn’t stay. It had made up its mind to leave, and there wasn’t anything I could do to convince it otherwise.

There wasn’t any goodbye party for my hair — it didn’t want one. Two weeks after it fell off my skull, I put it on a small hairboat and pushed it off into the Connecticut River. My hair looked back, waved, and paddled away.

I missed it like crazy. I wrote my hair letters and prayed to it. “I know you’re busy,” I said in my prayer, “but please let me know how you’re doing when you can.”

“I’m good — great, actually,” my hair prayed back. “And you?”

“Just OK,” I said.

“It’s beautiful here,” my hair prayed. “I’m working at a radio station.”

“What radio station?”

My hair prayed the call letters but I didn’t recognize them. “I doubt you can get it where you are,” prayed the hair. “Anyway, I don’t make a lot of meaning, but I really like it. The people are so nice.”

“That sounds so awesome,” I prayed.

“And I’m renting a house near the beach.”

“Cool,” I prayed. “Maybe I could come visit.”

“Maybe sometime, sure,” said my hair.

I guess I always thought that my hair would come back to its life in Appleseed — that it and I would reunite at some point. But that was an invention on my part. One day I prayed to my hair and the hair didn’t answer. I tried praying again a week later and the prayer channel had been closed — my prayer went right to an operator. “I’m trying to reach my hair,” I prayed to the operator.

“That prayer channel has been shut down,” the operator said.

“Is there a forwarding channel?”

“I’m sorry, there isn’t,” prayed the operator.

So I stopped praying to my hair. When I got older, I understood. That hair had its own life to lead, a whole world to see, while I was stuck here in this tiny town, the sun laughing off my pate.

THE APPLESEED FLEA MARKET

How I miss those Sunday mornings in Appleseed, the applesun rising over Mount Epstein, my father and sister and I already out the door, in my father’s truck, on the hunt: on our way to an estate sale, a tag sale, or the Appleseed Flea Market. I’ve searched every corner of my mind for an unread page with a flea market on it, but with no luck: once a page is read, it can’t be unread; once the past has passed it’s gone. Still, I can go back in my mind to those quiet streets, the morning chatter of my thoughts, the cough of the dashboard and squeal of the struts as we roared down Highway Five.

My father’s truck wasn’t like other trucks — it was a strange metaphor of a vehicle, assembled from pieces and parts of other cars. It was asymmetrical, and it had a porch, a beak, and one eye. And it was controlled entirely by ropes. The steering panel reminded me of the wings of an old theater; it contained pulleys, and lever-locks, and complicated hemp ropes running in every direction. One rope was the go-rope; another rope was for turning. You pulled a rope over your head to beep the horn; the seat belt was a rope; the emergency brake was a rope attached to some sandbags stored above the back axle.

My father might have worked different jobs — insurance, real estate, solitudor — but at his applecore he was a collector. He loved finding old stranges, odd forgottens, hardly-brokens — uncovering life among the dead; going to great lengths to save something that someone else had dismissed; spotting meaning that other people looked past. He’d carry around a thrown-away clipboard with lists of items he was looking for: Doorknob for 2D, or, Spare casters?, or, BX cable. Every building he worked on was filled with re-remembered lamp fixtures, whitebearded sinks, ghosty carpets, finickal lightswitches that he’d found or traded with someone. My Dad took the same approach to every expense — everything was recontextualized, almost-but-not-quite broken, hanging on by a thread. All my clothes came from Goodwill, which meant that I was perpetually out of fashion: I wore bandannas when bicycling hats were in vogue; parachute pants during the stonewashed-jeans fad; unmatched Converse hi-tops (one yellow, one purple) when my friends were wearing Eastman boat shoes with the laces tied in twisty-knots; jampants and concert T-shirts when everyone wore izods with the collars turned up. At least my Mom took us to the thrift stores, though. My Dad’s clothes? Were the memories of clothes. He wore shoes he’d found in a dumpster, glasses that had belonged to a cousin of his who’d died.

One of my Dad’s many talents, though, was networking. He knew all the wheeler-dealers in Appleseed — The Ear, Glen Ukulele, Don La Valley, Armin LaFlame, Murphy, Jack D’elnero — and he worked with all of them in one way or another. He always knew who to go to for help with a repair, to borrow a tool, to find a used strow or a deal on a belloy. He always talked about one day opening an antique store, a knickknack spot, a trading post. Then every day would be Sunday, he’d say. For all three of us, Sundays felt free.

My sister Briana inherited my Dad’s talents. As far back as I can remember, she was his assistant — my Dad always said she had a great eye for meaning. When she was ten, Briana’s favorite hobby was collecting and refinishing furniture. Then she switched to collecting raw materials — copper tubing and wire, scrap steel — which she’d trade at Appleseed Salvage. Later, she taught herself about electricity: she could repair a light fixture, wire up a three-way switch or a fuse box, fix a garage door opener or the ignition on a heater.

I wasn’t that smart — I just liked going along for the ride. Sundays were one of the only times of the week when I didn’t feel lonely, when I wasn’t consciously aware of how few friends—real friends, I mean — I had.

Reader: What about your Mom? Did she go with you?

Hardly ever, actually. She was either working an overnight at the hospital or at home, training in the gym she’d set up in the garage. She looked forward to Sundays, too, though, because she loved having the house to herself. Sometimes my Mom would joke that maybe she should live in another house, separate from our house, “where I can train in peace and quiet,” she snorted.

“Train for what?” I asked her once, and she sort of glared at me.

“I’m just kidding — you know that,” she said.

When my Mom wasn’t working or training, she would read. Sometimes I’d read next to her. We wouldn’t talk — my Mom would smoke, and sometimes I would eat chips — but I guess I thought I could connect to my mother through the books, if that makes any sense.

Anyway, it was usually just the three of us on Sundays. And every trip to the flea market began the same way: my Dad steered the truck past the tables toward a parking spot while my sister scanned the tables for any potential deals. “Aisle—five,” my sister said one Sunday. “ ’Bout halfway back.”

“The mirror?”

“The bureau.”

“Is that oak?” My Dad said.

“I can’t tell,” my sister said.

Then we’d park the truck in the fields and the two of them would go charging through the grass toward the bureau.

I went off on my own, meanwhile, looking for used books. I’m not talking about the bound brochures they forced you to read in school — the pages that made a sucking sound when you looked at them, that made your eyes sting and your ears echo. I’m talking about true mysteries and war stories like the ones that you could buy for a theory or two or sometimes even find for free at the Appleseed Recycling Center. It’s weird: until I was twelve or so, I couldn’t have cared less about books or reading. One afternoon that winter, though, I found a truebook on a low shelf in our living room. The book was called The Appleseed Strangler. I remember opening it up, seeing all the words trapped there on the page, and feeling an affinity for them. Holding in so many words, I myself sometimes felt like a book — like a cage for sentences.

As I was sprawled out on the living-room floor that day, reading about the Appleseed Strangler, a shadow flashed across the carpet. It was my Mom. “Good story, huh?” she said.

I didn’t say anything.

“Wait until you get to the end — the hanging,” she said.

Two days later my Mom took me to the Appleseed Free Library, where she signed me up for a card and let me check out two books of my choice. Ever since, I’d collected and read as many books as I could find: murder mysteries, histories, histrionics, fallbacks, toronados, you name it.

One day, though, I was sitting next to my Mom at the Library and reading a fallback when I saw a sentence on the page itch itself. “Woah!” I said.

“What?” she hissed.

“That sentence just moved!” I said.

My Mom scorned. She had this one particular scorn that she saved just for me: her whole face squinted, like she was staring into a fierce wind.

“There it goes again!” I said. “It just changed, from—”

“,” she hissed. “Be quiet. You’re embarrassing m—”

“Now it’s running off the page!”

She grabbed the book from me, closed it, and led me down the red-carpeted stairs and outside. And that was the last time she took me to the Library.

I still continued going to the Library myself, though. When I wasn’t kicking around commas or other dead language out back, I spent almost all of my free time reading in my room in the basement. That basement was dark and cold, and the reading helped me keep warm.

Most of the books in the Library were old, though; for newer trues, the flea bee was a much better bet. All of the local dealers set up tables: Psyches from the Rebel Peddler, Old Gordon from Appleseed Books, Kathy from Sue’s Mysteries, Del from Wilbur’s. They brought bestsellers, overstocks, oddities, you name it. And since I stopped by every week, all of them knew me by name.

Sometimes, though, you found the best fleabooks at the occasionals: a hey who just liked to read; a forget with some swashbidders that they found in the attic and just want to unload. As I was scanning the tables for titles that day, for example, I saw a pig in a van pulling boxes out of his truck. Most of the boxes held tools and old board games, but some of the boxes had books in them. I looked through them, pretending to be only mildly interested. In my skull, though, my thoughts were shouting. “Look — warbooks!” one said. “There’s a self-help!” said another. “And a historical!” said a third.

I held up a book called The Absolutely True Story of the Northampton-Appleseed War. “How much for this one?” I said.

The pig was sweating; he winced as he stood. “Two theories for the hardcovers, one for paperbacks,” he said.

“Take one and a half?”

He thought about it. Then he said, “Sure.”

I tried to keep my thoughts cool as I paid the pig and walked away from the table, but I was thrilled. I loved warbooks — the wars’ personal lives, their political leanings, their dispositions. Wars were mysteries to me, even though I used to see them frequently in Appleseed.

Reader: Wars? In Appleseed?

Sure — you saw them all the time. Most of them were quiet, some so subtle you wouldn’t even know they were there unless you were looking for them. Once, maybe about a year later, I was waiting for my Mom at the hair salon when I noticed a war sitting under one of the hair dryers a few seats over. She was knitting, and when I looked over she smiled politely.

“What are you knitting?” I said.

“A graveyard,” said the war.

Then my Mom stood up from the hairdresser’s chair, studied her buzz cut in the mirror, and told me we were leaving.

I found my sister and father on the other side of the flea — they were carrying the heavy bureau toward the truck. “What’d you find, ?” said my Dad.

I held up my book.

“Grab a corner, will you?” my sister asked.

I put my book under my arm and took a corner of the bureau. Trying to fit in, I said, “Is this oak?”

“Duh,” said my sister.

“Bri,” said my Dad. “Be nice. It is oak, .”

We moved the bureau onto the bed of the truck; then we got in the cab and drove toward the exit. It was later now, seven a.m. or so, and more people were arriving. By now, my Dad would say, all the deals were gone — everything meaningful had already been bought or traded.

My Dad steered the truck onto the dirt road. “Gus and Paul’s?” he said.

“Or Bagel Beagle,” I said.

“Gus and Paul’s,” my sister said.

“OK, ?” said my Dad.

“Sure,” I said.

We drove through West Appleseed and five pages east to Gus & Paul’s, the best bakery in town. As we bumped along the city streets, I leaned my head against the cold window and read the first pages of my truebook.

The hallowed mystery of the Northampton-Appleseed War still bellows in the pause of night. While the war itself was originally believed to have died in truce in 1965, most now believe that to be a hoax. Some say the war moved to Shelburne Falls and died there, under an assumed name, in 1979. Others say the war still lives down in the Quabbin or high on Appleseed Mountain. This book offers no speculations as to the war’s current whereabouts. Rather, The Absolutely True Story of the Northampton-Appleseed War chronicles the facts: when the war began, why, where he was last seen, what those who knew him say about his personality, his love life, and his groundbreaking philosophies — his unique way of looking at the world.

Gus & Paul’s was humming with activity — it seemed like all of Appleseed was there. We stood in line for twenty minutes before finally stepping up to the glass case. “A dozen water rolls,” my Dad said to the fluffy hat behind the counter, “and whatever these guys want.”

The fluffy hat moved over to the glass case.

“Cider Creme, please,” Briana said.

“?” said my Dad.

Everything looked so delicious. “I’ll take one of those,” I said, “and one of those, and one of those.”

“One thing only, Fatty,” my sister said, nudging me.

I looked to my Dad. “Can I get two?” I said.

It wasn’t until years later that I put apple and seed together: that I realized how meaningless we were. I didn’t know, for example, that my Dad skipped lunch all those years; that he had to beg his own truck to get him to work sometimes; that he’d borrowed meaning, by that point, from everyone he knew.

“Whatever he wants,” my Dad told the hat, and I pointed to pastry after pastry. The hat collected them in a brown box, tied them with a small white string, and handed the box over the counter. I reached up for the box and took it.

SENTENCE THE SENTENCE

Sentence was my friend, probably my only true friend through the mothering, the forging — most of my high school years, really. Everyone has their pet expressions, but Sentence was something more. For a long time, that expression was the only thing that really understood me.

I found Sentence while working with my father at Belmont, one of the two apartment buildings that he owned and managed. He bought them in the early 1980s, during a meaningful time in Appleseed when the town still ran on apples. Led by the Memory of Johnny Appleseed himself, who once lived and groved here, Appleseed’s apple industry thrived; we sold apple pies, apple cider, appleburgers, applefish, apple chicken, apple pad thai, even apple art made from cores and stems. Something like ninety percent of all the apples in Massachusetts were grown in Appleseed, and people came from all over New England in search of meaning in the apple trade.

My father didn’t know the first thing about apples, but he was a skilled handyman, trained by his father — the Rabbit Eater — in the arts of tenancy and the mysteries of landlording. When we first moved to Appleseed, my Dad worked as a caretaker for a local moustache, answering service calls — heating, plumbing, maintenance — for any one of nine apartment buildings in the downtown. Then the moustache went gray and started selling off his property, and my Dad took out a second mortgage on our house to buy the two least meaningful buildings of the lot. It was a risk — they were located in an iffy neighborhood — but my Dad hoped to translate sweat into meaning.

It didn’t turn out that way, though; the buildings were more stubborn and mysterious than he’d bargained for. Drunk plumbing, missing rooms, snoring wires, you name it — tenants called with problems at all hours of the night. Remember that story I told you a few streets back, about driving to The Ear’s house?

Reader: Sure. To get a “stetch” or something.

A steth—a four-meter foundation stethoscope, which we needed to investigate a strange scratching sound coming from the foundation of Woodside. When my Dad put the listener against the rock, though, he frowned and swore. “Christ,” he said. “Something in the soil.”

“What?” I asked.

He put the headphones over my ears. I heard a steady scratching. “What is that?” I said.

My Dad shook his head.

“Termites?”

One of the whatevers burped in my ear.

“Those would be some big fucking termites,” my Dad said.

My Dad prayed to Armin, an exterminator who’d work for meaning under the table, and he tested the soil all around Woodside. After studying the page fibers, Armin declared the problem to be doubts.

“Sorry?” said my Dad, as we stood on the page.

“Doubts,” Armin said.

“Doubts, are you sure?”

Armin nodded. “You know what’s funny? I’ve been getting more and more of these calls.”

My Dad raised an eyebrow. “I have trouble believing that.”

“It’s true,” said Armin.

Armin had to instill the soil with confidence, which cost a shitload. And that was just one of dozens of mysteries and problems that stumped my father. The buildings were just too much for him to manage alone. Soon he started paying his brother Joump to help him with odd jobs. He enlisted me and my sister, too. My father taught me some of the basic hows — insulation, foyer mediation, missing room listening — but like I said, my sister was the one with the real talent. She really immersed herself in it, reading truebooks on wainscoting and ancient plastering techniques, learning special chants for plumbing and lighting and landscaping, mastering all of the old building arts.

Anyway, I’m getting off track — I was telling you about Sentence the sentence. One day when I was about twelve, my Dad and I were patching up some stucco at Belmont when I saw this eager statement reading through the grass. “Hey,” I said to it, but my Dad stood up and imposed over it. “Shoo!” he said.

“Hey, buddy,” I said to the sentence.

“Git!” my Dad yelled. “You git! Git out of here!”

The sentence skimmed off.

“Dad! What the hell?” I said.

“It’s a stray, ,” my Dad said. “It’s just begging for food.”

“I have some seconds for it,” I said.

“Don’t even think about it,” said my Dad. “What have I told you about feeding wild sentences?”

This was in 1987, when stray language was everywhere in Appleseed. I know that’s hard to believe now — now that every word is counted, and counted on, and counted toward — but in those days it wasn’t strange to see verbing on Epstein Street, infinitives running through the deadgroves. Growing up in Appleseed, you were taught how to respond to wild language. If you saw a semicolon, you paused for a second. If you saw a preposition, you let it pass by you — to the left, or to the right, or over your head.

My Dad couldn’t come with me to Belmont the next day — he had to go see Fox, a master welder in the western margin — so I went back to Belmont myself. When I got there, the Memory of Johnny Appleseed was cutting the grass using an old manual mower. My Dad had a gas-powered one in the basement, but the Memory liked this one. For a while, I could hear the swishy blades of the mower as the Memory shoved it forward. Then he finished, put the mower away, and walked off.

I was adding a third coat of stucco, though, when I felt the breath of words on my ankle. I turned and saw the sentence looking up at me.

“Hey there,” I said. I petted the sentence, and it made a sound. I could tell from its words and its eyes that it meant me no harm. Hark, it was only a newborn — just a subject and a verb: “I am.” That was the whole sentence!

I reached into my pocket and found some seconds and minutes — timecrumbs I carried with me just in case I was late or my thoughts wandered. The sentence leaned in and ate right out of my palm. The poor thing was starving! It finished the seconds and sort of stumbled toward me. Suddenly, I was holding the sentence in my arms.

What was I supposed to do — push it away? Abandon it? These words would die out here. Who would feed them and read them if not for me?

I held “I am.” in my arms while I packed up my tools. Then I sat the sentence on the handlebars of my Bicycle Built for Two and started pedaling home. “Hold on tight!” I told the sentence, and it did — it squinted its eyes as the wind ran through its “I” and “a.”

I got back to 577 just as my Dad’s pickup was turning into the driveway. I hopped off the bike and wrapped the sentence in my coat. My Dad stepped out of the truck and slammed the door. “Well?” he said.

“Hi,” I said.

The sentence was making noises: whimpers and nouns.

“Djou finish?” my Dad said.

“Yup,” I said.

“It doesn’t need another layer?”

“I don’t—” The sentence started bucking and kicking. “Don’t think so,” I said.

“It either does or it doesn’t,” my Dad said.

Just then, the sentence kicked me in the stomach and I lost my grip on it. The words leapt out of my coat and ran across the driveway and onto the grass.

“Whoa!” my Dad said, leaping back. He stepped into the grass and leaned over the quivering words. “Goddammit, ,” he said. “What did I say?”

“I know,” I said.

“What did I say?”

“It was hungry!”

“You fed it?” my Dad said. “You never feed stray language. It won’t leave you alone now!”

The sentence looked up at my father, and then at me.

“I’ll take care of it,” I said.

“What do you mean?” said my Dad. “As a pet? No. . No.”

“I’ll walk it and feed it.”

“Feed it what?”

“Minutes,” I said.

“And keep it where?”

“I’ll keep it in the basement.”

“It’ll shit and piss all over the place,” my Dad said.

“I’ll make sure that it doesn’t.”

“You know your mother has a strict no-language-in-the-house policy,” said my Dad.

“It won’t make a sound—I promise.”

My Dad sighed. “What about the smell?”

“It doesn’t have a smell,” I said.

“All language smells,” he said. “I can smell that thing from here — it stinks of adjectives.”

“I’ll keep it clean,” I said.

The sentence read over to me and stopped at my heel.

“Shee-it,” my Dad said, and shook his head.

That afternoon he took me to Brightwood Hardware, which had a pet store in the basement, to buy some supplies for the sentence: a cage, a collar, a leash. When we browsed the aisles for food, though, we didn’t see anything. My Dad found a clip-on tie stocking shelves and asked him if the store carried any food for words.

“For what?” said the tie. He was old and faded.

“Food for sentences?” my Dad said, and I held up “I am.”

“I don’t think we—” the tie looked confused. “Let me — I’ll check.” He disappeared behind a curtain and never came back.

We ended up buying dry dog food and a cage intended for a rabbit. Then we put it all in the truck and drove home.

That night, I put the cage in the basement and “I am.” curled up in the corner and went to sleep. In the middle of the night, though, I woke up to a howling and rattling. I turned on the light and “I am.” was ramming his head into the cage.

“ ‘I am.’,” I said. “Stop.”

My Dad walked in, his hair exclaiming, and stared down at the cage.

“Stop, ‘I am.’!” I shouted.

“This is what I was talking about, ,” my Dad said. “You’re lucky your Mom’s working an overnight.”

“What’s going on?” said Bri from the top stair.

“I am.” howled.

“Why’s it doing that?” Bri said.

I picked up the sentence. It was whimpering and shivering. “It’s just scared,” I said.

“You’re going to spoil it, and then it won’t listen to a thing you say,” my Dad said.

Around five that morning, “I am.” finally fell asleep. It woke up three hours later, which was right before my Mom usually got home from her overnight shifts. I fed it and took it for a walk. When I saw the Cloudy Fart — my Mom’s crappy, sky-blue station wagon — ambling down Converse, I picked “I am.” up and ran inside. My Dad met us in the breezeway. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he said.

My Mom walked in wearing her nurse’s uniform and smoking a six-foot cigarette. “Hey,” she said. She put down her purse and took off her coat. Then she saw us standing there. “What?” she said.

“Your son here has something to show you,” my Dad said.

“Now what?” she said.

I held Sentence out to her.

“Wait — what is that?” my Mom said. She walked closer. “Is that language?” Smoke poured out of her face. “What’s it doing in the house, Ralph?”

“ found it at the building and fed it,” my Dad said.

“You fed it?” said my Mom. She looked down at the cage by my feet. “Get it out of here. Get it out of here right now.”

My Dad bowed his head. “I told him—”

“Wait a minute,” my Mom said, looking at Sentence’s collar. “No. You didn’t, Ralph. You didn’t.”

“His name is Sentence,” I said, “but he’s called ‘I am.’ ”

“ promises it won’t be any trouble,” said my Dad. “We bought it a cage to sleep in, a leash, the whole nine yards.”

My Mom stormed toward my father, grabbed him by the chin, and pushed him against the wall. “How dare you. After all the work I’ve done? You bring infested words inside — invite bookworms into our house?”

“What’s a bookworm?” I said.

“I figured,” my Dad said, rubbing his elbow, “it’s just two words—”

“ ‘I am.’ is not infested,” I said.

“Into our house?” my Mom said.

“It’s positive, though,” my Dad stammered.

Sentence smiled.

“See?” my Dad said. “It’s not a bookworm.”

My Mom shoved my Dad backward and looked him up and down. “You wouldn’t know it if it was,” she hissed.

THE MARGINALS

HOWGATE WONDER

Ever since my days in the Vox my thoughts had wandered. During the day, they’d open up the top of my head, slip off my ears, vault off my shoulders, and hop away; at night, they’d sleepthink without bound, all through Appleseed: they’d roil out to the Hu Ke Lau, where ex-Cones sat at the bar husking regrets; jump the fence at the Appleseed Recycling Center to rummage through Memories; climb up Appleseed Mountain in the dark and get lost in paragraphs of wilderness; skateboard down Old Highway Five; vault forward into the future, back into the past, into the margin and beyond into the ifs: what might be, what could be, what should be but won’t. They’d bring back stories of their travels — adventures, struggles, strange characters and unnamed objects (machines that grew hair! chatterglass! an underground cone society!) — from places and worlds I never heard of.

Once, one of my thoughts fought in a war and returned with a bullet in its knee. I woke up my parents in the middle of the night. When I shook my Mom, she sat up in bed and punched the air. “What is it?” she volted.

“I think we need to go to the emergency room,” I told her.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“One of my thoughts has a gunshot wound,” I told her.

“One of — what?”

“My thoughts,” I said. “Just back from the war.”

My Mom turned over and went back to sleep.

“Mom!” I said.

“Go back to sleep, ,” my Dad muttered.

So I dressed the wound myself. As I wrapped the thought’s leg in mental gauze, I thought, “What happened to the other thought?”

“I killed it,” said the thought.

“How?”

“With my bayonet,” he said. And then he held up a mental bayonet, covered in a blue liquid.

What’s that blue stuff? I wondered.

“The thoughtblood of my enemy,” said the thought.

That thought recovered, but it was just one in a legion of thoughts who wandered into — or sometimes went looking for — trouble. Sometimes they made it difficult for me to concentrate; I made mistakes when working with my Dad at the buildings, and I was always getting detention in school. After a while, I didn’t mind it — I’d sit in whatever cage they put me in. I always carried a few deadwords in my pocket for just that occasion. In a cage, I could spend days on a single phrase: I’d take apart the expression, the words, the letters themselves.

Then, in the spring of ’88, something terrible happened. I woke up one morning and a thought of sidewalks was sitting at my desk. His skin was pale and there were rings under his eyes. “What is it?” I said.

“Something — terrible,” he said.

“Show me,” I said.

He led me out the window and down onto the driveway. I unlocked my Bicycle Built for Two and the thought leapt onto the handlebars. I took the front seat and the Reader got on the back. “Where to?” I said.

The thought pointed east. “Heights,” he said.

Appleseed Heights was a new condominium development down by the east edge of town. A year earlier that area had all been wilderness. Now, Orange Traffic Cones were driving yellow bulldozers in there and knocking down the trees. The trees were holding protests, singing songs, fighting back. Every week there was news of another tree/bulldozer scuffle. The week prior, a bulldozer had been jumped by a bunch of trees and a rumble had ensued.

As we approached, I saw Orange Traffic Cones standing in a triangle right off the road. Some of the Cones were holding fluorescent tape; others were kneeling around a thought-shaped chalk outline.

When I rode the Bicycle Built for Two up to them, I saw what they were kneeling over: a dead thought. My dead thought, a thought of the future, bleeding into the sienna dirt.

A dented Cone with a moustache held up his orange rubbery arm. “Nothing to see here,” he said.

“That’s his thought,” said the Reader. “He’s the thinker.”

The Cone’s eyes darkened.

“How did he—” I said. I began to cry. “What happened?”

The Cone crossed his arms. “He was — there was a—”

Another Cone approached. “You the thinker?” he asked me.

I nodded.

“Thought was mauled,” said the Cone.

“By what?” said the thought of sidewalks.

The Cone shook his head. “We’re not sure,” he said. “We’ll know more after the thoughtopsy. Did he have any enemies that you know of?”

I shook my head and wiped my face. “He was such a kind and thoughtful. Into surfing and meditation. He wouldn’t have thought about hurting the thought of a fly.”

“Sometimes a thought leads a double life,” suggested the Cone.

I shook my head again. “Not this one,” I said.

The following week I held a funeral in my mind. All of my available thoughts attended. I held it on a Wednesday morning. The body of the thought was displayed in a coffin, and all my thoughts walked past it and thought about praying.

Outside my skull, meanwhile, I was in algebra class. The teacher, a hairy plus sign, was drawing some bullshit on the board. “This makes Y equal — who knows the answer?”

The thought’s mother ambled up to the coffin and collapsed in tears.

“,” said the hairy plus sign.

“My boy,” said the motherthought. “My son.”

“Y equals?” said the plus sign.

The fatherthought consoled his ex-wife.

“Earth to . What does Y equal?”

But I couldn’t answer, because it was that part of the service where they were lowering the thought into the ground in my mind, throwing mindirt over it and saying goodbye forever. It was so sad. A thought with its whole life ahead of it!

“!”

“What?” I shouted.

“Do you know the answer?” said the plus sign.

“Who cares!” I roared. “Don’t you have any respect for the dead?”

YOU CAN’T DO THAT ON TELEVISION

Like most of the kids I knew, we had televisions watching us in every room, recording our movements and prayers, and praying them out as sitcoms and laugh-out-louds to other families in Appleseed. Our sitcom was called The Marginals, about a family that lives really close to the margin. I think back on those times, the times of the show, as some of the best of my childhood. Every day between the ages of five and thirteen I came home from school, looked over my script, and put on my costume: shiny Nike shoes instead of my secondhand unmatching Converse hi-tops, stonewashed jeans instead of vinyl parachute pants, an Ocean Pacific T-shirt over my cigarette shirt from the Salvation Army, a toupee cut in the latest fashion — a tail in the back or pleats shaved into the sides — to cover my bald head. Then I’d open up a closet of smiles in the back room, pick one out, and put it on. Sometimes I’d choose a wide smile, but usually I’d pick a smirk, like this one:

In the story of The Marginals I was Scooter LaFontaine, always getting into trouble that led to valuable lessons. My signature lines were, “Who, me?” and “Nice fine good OK!”

Everyone in my family was part of the show. My sister played Samantha LaFontaine, the town’s tap dancing champion (even though Bri hated tap dancing — her real passion was for collectibles, antiques, and junk). My father played a cambridge and my Mom a really kind nurse. And she was great at it. When she was in costume, I saw kindnesses from her that she rarely showed in person. In one episode, I saw her cradle a dying sentence in her arms as if she were its mother. In another, I was crushed by a last-second loss in a swim meet. In the car, she turned to me and said, “You tried your best, Scoot. Didn’t you?”

My character, Scooter, nodded.

“And wasn’t that your fastest time ever in backstroke?”

I shrugged.

“Then you won. You did better than ever before. What more could you want, honey?”

The show had certain tropes. Like, every show included a dinner scene.

“How was your day today, Scoot?” my Dad would ask.

With that line and almost every other, we’d hear the laughtrack: our cans in the pantry, chuckling and guffawing.

“We learned about photosynthesis,” I said. “How plants transform light into food.”

Haw.

“I wish we could transform this food,” my sister said.

Ha haw haw ha.

“Now, Sam,” said my Mom. “It’s just a pleasure for the four of us to eat together.”

“I think the ham is great,” said my Dad. “Don’t you, Scoot?”

“Nice fine good OK!” I said.

Every episode ended with a moral, delivered to me or my sister from my father or mother while sitting on the back stoop: “If they’re cruel to you,” the mother-character told the Scooter-character once, “then they aren’t really your friends. Friends will watch out for you through thick and thin.”

Or,

“Sometimes we have to put other people’s interests in front of our own,” the father-character told the sister-character. “That’s part of being an adult.”

“But I really wanted to go on the ski trip,” said the sister-character.

“There’ll be other ski trips,” said the father-character.

I look back on that show now — here, in this cramped room, with a head full of doubts — and man, I miss those half-hour arcs: Mr. LaFontaine Gets a New Job. Scooter Gets Lost. Mrs. LaFontaine Meets a Friend for Coffee. Scooter Needs a Hug. Samantha Makes a Friend, and so many others.

We weren’t the only show in town, of course. Every family I knew had a sitcom — their shows were broadcast into our eyes just as ours were broadcast into theirs. With so many shows to choose from, it was difficult to keep your family’s ratings up. You had to say the right things to make people keep watching. After a few seasons on-air, our show became less popular and we needed to make changes. My Mom suggested that we make the show more serious — more dark. In one episode, the father-character’s brother-in-law died and the last scene was Scooter and Mr. LaFontaine on the front stoop. “There’s no sense to the universe,” said Mr. LaFontaine, swigging from a bottle of beer. “The Core? Some central meaning? It’s a fucking joke. Or else how could people suffer so much and die so young?”

“I guess cancer is the Core’s way of saying ‘Screw you,’ ” I said.

“I guess so, sport,” my Dad said.

The mother-character that season was closer to my actual mother: moodier, more unpredictable. “Parents don’t have to love their children,” she said in one moral.

“I thought love was unconditional,” said my sister.

“Not necessarily,” said my Mom. “You have to earn it.”

When our ratings didn’t improve, we tried the opposite tack: we made the show light, funny, almost vaudeville. Instead of death or illness there were spit-takes and pratfalls. My Dad’s signature line was “Waaa!” his eyebrows leaping away from his eyes.

By this time, though, I was tired of changing. My sister and mother complied, but not me — I was rambunctious, remember? Rebellious, a badseed. At a dinner scene one day, my Mom asked me how school was. My line was, “Nice fine good OK!” Instead, though, I said, “Freaking terrible.”

Haw.

My Mom’s eyes were blades, but her smile held. “Why terrible?”

“Chamblis’s Mom has HIV,” I said.

Haw haw haw.

“Cut!” the television in our kitchen yelled. “Let’s keep it lighthearted, Scoot!”

“,” said my Mom.

I didn’t say anything.

“And,” the TV said, “rolling!”

“How was your day, Scoot?” asked my Mom again.

“My brain hurts,” I said. “Like, my skull is too small for my thoughts.” And I slammed my head into my plate of spaghetti.

“Cut!” said the television. “What the fuck, ?”

Our ratings continued dropping. Soon, our TVs lost hope — you could see it in their eyes when they looked at us. When the physical comedy didn’t work, my Dad pushed us even further: we went cartoon. Doing so meant going to the doctor every week for animation injections, and retooling our dynamic again. My Dad’s repetitive gaffe that season was banging his thumb with his hammer. He’d do it over and over. “YeOW!” he’d shout, and run around with his red thumb in the air.

Soon, even our cans stopped laughing. Then one of our TVs quit, and my Mom started flubbing her lines — she’d stare out the window, or pray silently in her seat, or absentmindedly pick up a book on set and start to read, and we’d have to shoot the whole scene over. My Dad didn’t give up; in one last-ditch attempt to stay on the prayer-air, he decided that we’d stop the injections, go back to the original formula, and invite on guest characters: Chamblis’s Mom, the town’s oldest Orange Traffic Cone, the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. But by then even our living-room TV wouldn’t watch us for half an hour.

In our last episode, my Dad and sister and I chose our smiles and took our places when we realized that my Mom wasn’t on set. The TV gave the five-minutes-to-places call and Mom still hadn’t shown up for costume or makeup. “Where is your mother?” my Dad asked between cambridges.

“I’ll go find her,” I said. I looked upstairs, in the front yard, in her gym in the garage. I found her in the far corner of the backyard, kneeling in the wet grass.

I ran over to her. “Mom?” I said.

“—and please,” she was saying. “Protect us from doubts. And worries. Protect us from ourselves.”

“Mom, the show’s starting,” I said.

“Take care of them,” she said. “Take care of them while I’m gone.”

“Mom?” I said.

“I’m praying,” she said. “Do the show without me.”

I heard the credits and the music and I ran inside. “And now,” the TV said, “the MARGINALS!”

The three of us stared at each other. My Mom was supposed to deliver the first line.

“How was—” my Dad stumbled, “your day, Sam—?”

“Cut!” said the TV. “We need the whole family! Goddammit!” The TV unplugged itself and stormed out of the room. “Fuck this noise!”

The TV didn’t come back until late that night — it smelled of beer and cigarettes for the whole week afterward. And from that day forward? The screen wouldn’t look at me. All it did was show me things. Maybe to hurt me, it mostly showed me other families, families happier than mine, getting great ratings, raucous laughs, happinesses. Our house, meanwhile? Grew lonelier. Colder. Emptier. And no one even saw it. No one even cared what happened to the Marginals.

THE BICYCLE BUILT FOR TWO

Wait a second. I just realized that I never told you the story about my bicycle, the Bicycle Built for Two. It’s an easy one to pull from the page. Here, grab ahold and pull.

Pull!

Bicycles, in Appleseed, were very meaningful. A good used bicycle — my father’s ’49 Robinson three-speed, say, well-maintained, with chordspokes and a flim — would run you about seven hundred theories. That was more than one month’s rent in an apartment at Woodside!

My father was given that bicycle by his mother, the Rosary, who prayed for it, and he let me ride it all over Appleseed. When I was ten, though, the bike was stolen out of our garage in Appleseed. It was my fault — I was supposed to lock the bike up with math but I forgot. I woke up the next morning and the bike was gone — you could see the tire tracks in the dewy grass where someone had just walked off with it. Our neighbor Bob Lonely later said that he might have heard the bike shouting, but thought it was some wildwords in the margin.

For about a year I didn’t have a bike; I rode my skateboard or I walked.

When I was about eleven, though, the kids that I hung out with — Spondee, Kielbania, Large Odor, the Couplets, Canavan — started getting dirt bikes: single-speed bikes with knobby tires, pegs on the back wheels, and hardware built especially for jumps and tricks — for their birthdays or Core Days. Some of my friends — the Couplets, O’Hara — had meaningful parents, and Canavan inherited his bike (after his brother served in the Trenches and died from glue poisoning). Large Odor stole his Haro from a bike rack in East Appleseed.

Reader: Stole it? Odor? No. That’s not true.

I swear to the Core it is.

Reader: Odor’s a good kid! He wouldn’t do that.

He told us himself! And none of these guys in the Syntax Gang — that’s what we called ourselves — were good kids. We were the troublemakers, the kids in the special classes, the ones you’d find in detention cages or Silence School. We were ugly and we knew it. I was fat and bald; Kielbania had two faces; O’Hara didn’t have a face at all.

The Syntax Gang used to hang out in the parking lot of the Pear or behind Cordial Carl’s, but once everyone got dirt bikes we spent all our time in the Dunes.

The Reader flipped through the pages. “Is that what they were called? ‘The Dunes’? I can’t find those pages,” she said.

You won’t — they’re the fancy Appleseed Vista now. Back then, though, those houses hadn’t been built; it was all sand except for a few ideas of houses and concepts of roads. So my friends and I turned the whole thing into a dirt-bike track, with swooping trails and jumps as tall as we were or taller. Usually someone would bring six-foot cigarettes; once, Spond brought Kaddish Fruits. We’d smoke or get high and jump.

Everyone except me, that is. I helped with the jumps and then I watched as my friends rode the tracks. Sometimes Canavan would lend me his Diamondback, but usually I sat at the edge of the Dunes, where the road ended and the sand began, ollying on my skateboard. Odor saw me there one day and said, “You’re never going to get good at jumping bikes unless you practice.”

I shrugged. “No bike,” I said.

“Just ask your Dad for one,” he said.

“It was my fault the last one was stolen.”

“Who cares about that old goatbike?” Odor said. “It was so heavy it couldn’t jump shit anyway.”

I knew we didn’t have much meaning; my Dad could barely pay the mortgage. But one night about a year after the Robinson was stolen, I turned to my Dad while he was watching TV and asked him if there was any way I could get another bike.

He didn’t say anything at first — he just sighed and stared at the TV. By this time in my life, I think he’d started to feel bad for me — to understand that I was unpopular, that I was lonely, that the Reader was my only real friend. My sister had such a bright future — she was so smart, and she had skills. And me? My brain just held shouts. Sometimes my mind puked into my skull. Other times it felt like my skull was caught in a vise or a drill press, and I had to lie down on the cold tile floor of the basement and wait for the feeling to pass. Once, my Dad came downstairs to see if I’d help him with a drainage problem at the buildings and he found me lying on the floor in the dark. “?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Tell them to stop digging,” I said.

“What?” my Dad said.

“My thoughts,” I said.

A bike meant friends; it also got me out of the house, which would make my mother happy. Sitting there in front of the TV, though, my Dad filled up his belly with air and said, “I really don’t see a way to make that happen, .”

“All my friends have them, though.”

“Does Bob have one?”

Bobby Lonely was my neighbor. He was poor like us. “No,” I said. “He’s not my friend, though. Odor has one, and the Couplets each have one.”

“Have what?” my Mom said, walking into the TV room.

“A bike,” my Dad said.

“You had a bike,” my Mom said, “but you were lazy and irresponsible. Lazy people lose things like bikes. End of story.”

A few days later, though, my Dad and I went to see a trader he knew named Murphy. Murphy lived in a tiny house out past Appleseed Silence Academy — literally, the house was about the size of a closet — but he had a big amazing barn behind that house where he hoarded away items to trade. The barn was so full you couldn’t even walk in there; one time, Murphy opened the door and a giant spool came crashing down and almost hit me in the head.

When my Dad told Murphy what we were looking for, Murphy cleared his sinuses and crossed his arms. “Sure,” he said. “I got bikes. Least three of them. But they’re meaningful.”

“How meaningful?” my Dad said.

“Cheapest I got?” Murphy peered back at the barn. “Three hundred.”

My Dad winced.

“Is it a dirt bike?” I said.

“A what?” said Murphy.

“Can you jump with it?” I asked.

Murphy shrugged. “Yeah. I’m sure you can.”

My Dad thanked him and we went home. When I skateboarded over to the Dunes that day, I sat on my board and told Odor what had happened. “There’s no way I’m getting a bike,” I said. “My Dad asked a friend of his and it’s just too expensive.”

Odor leaned over his handlebars. “Freaking steal one then, man,” he said. “It’s easy.”

“I’m not doing that,” I said. “I’d get caught.”

“You won’t,” said Odor. “I can show you how to do it.”

I shook my head, and Odor put his feet on the pedals and rode around me, onto a nearby trail and over a jump, jackknifing his handlebars in midair.

But one day that fall, my Dad and I were sifting through some construction memories at the Appleseed Dump — the memories of windows, the memories of stairs — when a pickup truck pulled into the yard and I noticed a wheel sticking out over the back gate. “Dad,” I said. He looked and saw: the wheel had spokes and a thick rubber tread: it was a bicycle wheel.

We jogged toward the truck. The door opened and a woman stepped out. She was old, with stories all over her face, but she was imposing. Her biceps were huge, and one of them displayed a wrinkled tattoo of a skirtblade: she was a Mother.

“What you got there?” my Dad said.

The Mother didn’t answer. She just reached into the bed and pulled the bike out. I saw the rest of the wheel rise above the gate, and then the shiny handlebars, and then the red frame, and—

“Crap,” said a thought.

— and then another pair of handlebars, and then one seat, and then another. It was a two-person bicycle; a bicycle built for two.

My Dad didn’t seem fazed. “Work OK?” he said.

The Mother nodded and handed the bike over to my Dad. I saw now that it was military grade, a bicycle built for combat back when wars were fought on two wheels. “Just don’t have any more use for it,” the Mother said.

My Dad nodded and started to roll it away.

“Enjoy,” said the Mother. Then she got back into her truck and started it up.

I followed my Dad and tried to catch his eye — to say, with my face, What are you doing? “Doesn’t he realize that bike is for two people?” said one of my thoughts to another.

Just then an old vulture approached; he wore a tweed sweater, stained khaki pants, and a mesh hat. “What you got there?” said the vulture.

“We’re taking it, Claude,” said my Dad, and he hoisted the bike into the bed of the truck.

When I got into the cab, my Dad’s face was bright. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he half-whispered. “So great, right?”

“What do you mean?” I said.

My Dad nodded over his shoulder.

“You know I can’t ride that, right?” I said.

My Dad’s face fell. “Why not?”

“Through the Dunes?”

“You said you wanted a bike,” my Dad said.

“A dirt bike.”

“What’s the difference?” my Dad said.

“That bike’s for two people,” I said.

“That there is an absolutely meaningless bike, military grade, in great condition,” my Dad said. “You can ride that thing for the next five years!”

“I can’t jump with it, though,” I said. My eyes filled with liquid words.

“Oh come on,” my Dad said. His jaw hardened and he shook his head. “You know what? Sometimes I think your mother’s right about you.”

I started to cry.

“You have no idea how privileged you are, . To even live in Appleseed. To ask for something, and boom — to have it given to you.”

I wiped my face. “I can’t jump with it, though.”

My Dad shook his head. “Unbelievable.”

We didn’t speak the rest of the way home. When we pulled into the driveway, though, my Dad hoisted the bike out of the truck and went to work fixing it up: he lowered the seats, tightened the chain, put air in the tires. I sat in the truck, pouting, until he came to the window. “Give it a try at least,” he said.

I got out of the cab and silently swung my leg over the front seat. Then I pushed off and tried to pedal. The bike wobbled and I almost fell; I could barely push it forward — it took all my strength to get it up to speed. I slowly ambled to the intersection of Converse and Lake and then turned back around; when I reached the driveway I was completely out of breath. I jumped off the bike and let it drop to the pavement. “I can’t even pedal it,” I said.

“You just did!” said my Dad. “And it’s probably great exercise.”

“This sucks!” I shouted, and I ran inside.

“What sucks?” my Mom said.

“Dad got me a bike built for two people!” I hollered.

“Cool!” my Mom said.

When I showed up at the Dunes the next day with the Bicycle Built for Two, my friends were already pedaling up the trails. As I was huffing up Erskine, though, Joyce saw me and stopped. “Look at !” he said.

Everyone rode over to me.

“That bicycle

has two seats,” said Rory Couplet.

“It’s a bicycle

built for two,” said James Couplet.

I was breathing heavily.

“That bike’s a parody,” said Spondee, smiling dumbly. “Does it speak Middle English?”

Large Odor laughed.

Then they took off and I followed, taking the last place in a sentence of bikes that whipped up the path, looped back, and tore down the sandy hill. I fell behind a little, but stayed with them as best I could. When I hit the loose sand on the path, though, my tire wobbled and I fell onto my side. Large Odor saw me fall and circled back. “You OK?” he said.

I pushed the bike off me and sat up, trying not to cry.

Then someone shouted “Capital!” and Odor and I looked up to see Dave Capital pedaling over Homicki Hill on his Viper. Capital skid-braked right in front of us. “HEY,” he said. “HEAR ABOUT TEMPLETON?”

“What about him?” said Odor.

“HE’S ABOUT TO FIGHT PAYNE.”

“Where?” said Joyce.

“THE PATH,” said Dave.

“When?” said Spondee.

“RIGHT NOW. LIKE, TEN MINUTES AGO,” said Dave.

Everyone got on their bikes. I righted my Bicycle Built for Two and followed: we snaked over Homicki Hill, up Redfern, left onto Williams, and toward the town line.

A mile or so before the line, though, I started falling behind. The rest of the gang pulled twenty feet ahead of me—“Slow — down,” I tried to shout — then fifty (“Guys!”), then so far they couldn’t hear me. No one even looked back to see where I was. Like I said, they weren’t good people — they certainly weren’t my friends, at least.

Right around Wolf Swamp I lost sight of the Syntax Gang — they were just too far ahead. After another few minutes of pedaling, I turned around and rode for home. When I reached my house I was drenched in sweat. I threw my dumbike on the grass and went inside, opened up the chip drawer, found a bag of Sour Cream and Onion and tore it open. I picked up a chip and it read my face. “What’s wrong?” it said.

I ate that chip and picked up another. “Tell me your troubles,” it said.

“I hate my life,” I said, and ate it. Then I picked up a handful of chips and shoved them into my mouth all at once. “Stupid bike,” I said, my mouth full. “And my friends—” I chewed, “—and my mother—”

“I understand,” said a chip in the bag.

“I’m all alone,” I told the chip, and ate it.

“No, you aren’t,” said another chip in the bag. “You still have us.”

“You mean it?” I asked it, and ate it.

“We aren’t going anywhere,” said another chip. I ate that one and another one and another one and another one. I ate them all.

I showed up at the Dunes a few more times, but soon I stopped going. I continued talking to some of those kids — Large Odor, Spondee — but after a while we kind of drifted apart. One day a few months later I said hi to James Couplet and he looked through me like I wasn’t even there.

“Couplet!” I said, but he just kept walking.

Maybe I wasn’t there, a thought suggested.

I watched James smooth around the corner and I turned and walked the other way. Then I saw a fire alarm in the hallway up ahead. Without even really thinking about it, I ran up to the alarm and pulled it. Blue ink sprayed all over my hand and face.

All of the classroom doors sprang open; kids poured into the halls.

“See?” I told my thought, the ink running over my arms. “I am here.”

Later that afternoon, an Orange Traffic Police Cone sat down with me in the office at school. “,” he said. “I want you to be honest with me. Did you pull the fire alarm?”

“No,” I said.

The Cone looked down at my blue hands — I hadn’t even tried to wash them. “Did — you — pull — the fire alarm?”

“No,” I said again.

The Cone crossed his orange plasticy arms.

A few weeks later, I was unlocking my dumbike when I saw my neighbor, Bobby Lonely — Loneliness, everyone called him — picking his face off by the lacrosse fields. “Hey, Loneliness,” I said.

Loneliness looked at me.

“C’mere,” I said.

He walked toward me. Loneliness smelled like cats, probably because he owned about a million cats. He also had really bad acne; even his acne had acne.

“Need a ride home?” I said.

“Seriously?” he said.

Everyone was always playing tricks on Loneliness: sending him fake prayers, stealing his memories, that kind of thing. I could tell he didn’t trust me.

“Do you or don’t you?” I said.

He shrugged.

I pointed to the backseat and he got on. We started pedaling. It was much easier with another person. In no time at all we were over Apple Hill and coasting down Tanglewood.

“We’re not friends,” I shouted back to him.

“No,” said Loneliness. “I know that.”

Later, Loneliness became really popular. Seemingly overnight, it became cool to have acne. Suddenly everyone wanted acne. I used to send out prayers for it; people used to put acne on with makeup.

When we were in our twenties, though, Loneliness joined the U.S. Army and died. His acne made it back across the mountains, the spine and the margins, but he did not. Loneliness’s acne showed up one day, years after he went missing, limping through West Appleseed, its eyes longing for the past.

THE BOOKWORMS

THE BOOKWORMS

For a while I thought the bookworms were just something I’d imagined: figments chasing my thoughts through Appleseed. One time a thought of an arcade said a worm with a beard threatened him outside the Appleseed Amphitheatre. And years later, a thought of green told me that a worm in a leather coat tried to run him down on his way home from the Hu Ke Lau one night.

“Run you down in what?” I said.

“A brown Plymouth Duster,” he said.

“A worm?”

“A worm,” said the thought. “It shaped itself into different letters, and—”

“Driving a car?” I said. “That doesn’t make any sense!”

But then I started seeing the worms around town. I was standing in line at the Bagel Beagle one day when I noticed that the beagle behind the counter looked very wormlike. His ears and snout were clearly a costume, I saw when I got closer: you could see the chin strap of the dog nose running over gray skin.

I stepped up to the counter. The beagle’s name tag said, “Your Mom will die and then who will take care of you?”

“I’ll take a pumpernickel,” I said.

“Butter?” said the wormdog.

“Yes,” I said.

A few months later, a new student showed up at school. He had a Mohawk haircut and earrings, and when he introduced himself to the class he said his name was Everyone hates you. But you can call me Everyone,” he said.

“Welcome to the class, Everyone,” said the teacher, a beehive.

He was sitting right next to me, and I remember sneaking a look at his arm. “Know what?” said one of my thoughts to another.

“What,” said the second thought.

“That worm’s a sentence,” said the first thought.

“No shit,” said the second thought.

And then I remember going to the Bing with my Mom one day for a matinee — she took me every year for my birthday — when I noticed a gang of wormy sentences sitting in the far-left corner of the theater. They were whooping it up, really making noise. The movie was The Legend of Goggles Beaman, about a pair of goggles that is raised in the wild, believes himself to be wild goggles, and then must return to society.

In the middle of the film, though, something went wrong with one of the projectors and the screen went dark. All of a sudden the lights came on. “What the FUCK!” a sentence with long hair yelled at the screen.

“So weird,” I said to my Mom.

“Probably just a problem with the reel,” she said.

“I’m going to go get some more popcorn,” I said, and I walked out to the lobby.

As it happened, I was in line right behind two sentences — they ordered Jujubes and Fun Dip. When the second worm paid, he put his credit card down on the glass case and I snuck a look at the name on the card: “You will be left all alone.”

I went back to the seat and held my popcorn out to my Mom. She looked at the giant bag and smiled. “No thanks,” she said.

Just then the lights lowered and the screen lit up. The worms continued their chatter, but I tried to ignore them — I stuck my hand in the buttery mess and shoveled some popcorn into my mouth.

PRAYER PIANO

Sometimes it seemed like the pages of Appleseed would turn forever. At others, though, you could sort of hear the townspine breaking, smell the glue melting, see pages tear off into the wind.

One day when I was fourteen, my father heard a prayer about a free piano. This sounded meaningful, so my Dad prayed back that yes, he was interested. The prayer prayed back the name of the manufacturer — a name we didn’t recognize. Fine, my Dad prayed back. You have to move it yourself, said the return-prayer, and my Dad prayed that we would. But his truck had the flu, so we needed to borrow one. “Could we ask Joump?” I said.

“Let’s go see the Possum,” my Dad said.

The Possum was, or was not, a possum. Everyone called him one, though, because he was covered in fur. I don’t know if he was really hairy, or if in fact he was a possum with normal hair. One fact about the Possum? I’d never seen him eat anything but energy bars. Also, beer. Do possums eat energy bars?

The Possum had a shed at the edge of Appleseed, out near the Appleseed Library. Someday I’ll sow that story — the story of the Library. That library had secret books, books that I’d never heard anyone talk about or mention in conversation. (Not that people talk about books. But if they did.) Once I opened a page in a book and I saw that all of the words were naked. I’d never seen naked words before! For example.

I was standing at the door, lost on a road in my mind, when the Possum opened it. “!” he said. “Ralph! Come in! I’m cooking — you want something?”

“We’re not hungry,” said my Dad, “but we were hoping that we could ask you for a favor.”

“Anything!” said the Possum.

We drove out to South Appleseed to see the piano. The owner said that she might or might not be home, but that the piano was easy to spot: she prayed it stood in a field about a hundred yards from a big blue house. “Why is it in the field?” my Dad had prayed. “Because,” she prayed, “I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

We located the blue house and, a hundred yards away, the piano, vowing like a soldier against a backdrop of flat, electric green. The piano and bench stood all alone in that field, and it looked like they’d been there for some time — the piano was sunk up to its knees in mud. Moss grew over the instrument’s chest, and vines crawled up one shoulder. “It’s a part of the earth,” I said.

“Does it even work?” asked my Dad.

“Only one way to find out,” said the Possum, and he sat down at the bench. My father and I sat down beside him, and the three of us studied the keys.

“We’re here now,” my Dad said to the piano. “So you can play.”

The Possum looked at my father.

My Dad leaned closer. “Do it. Play!” he said louder.

“What are you doing?” said the Possum.

“I’m waiting for it to start playing,” my Dad said.

“It’s not one of those types of pianos,” said the Possum. “Is that the kind you were looking for?”

“I didn’t know there was a difference,” my Dad said.

“There is,” said the Possum. “There are automatic pianos and manual ones. This one’s manual.”

My father nodded — the Possum would know. Something that is surprising about the Possum? Is that he was actually a very good piano player — a child prodigy. He used to travel the world, playing music that no one else could. You were probably expecting that we brought along the Possum for his truck only, and it’s true that we needed his truck. But we could have asked Uncle Joump; we could have asked one of the Muir Drop Forgers. Of the three of them, the Possum was the only one who knew anything about pianos.

Which is why, sitting there on the bench in the field, I asked him to teach me something. “Can you show me a cord?” I said.

“Chord,” he said. “There’s a silent h.”

“C-hord,” I said.

“It’s been twelve years since I’ve played a note of music,” said the Possum.

I made my face pacific.

The Possum put his paws on three keys and let them rest there. He closed his eyes. I leaned in — I was expecting to hear something amazing.

The Possum pressed down on the keys, but I didn’t hear any notes — what I heard instead was a click, and the sound of the point of view shifting. Then the Possum and the Father and looked at each other. “Where’s the music?” said .

The Possum played another chord and the point of view shifted again: you were confused and disappointed.

“This piano is out of tune, or something,” said the Possum.

Just then a figure came running down the road. She was dressed in chartreuse green spandex and her face was hampden: bright but sad. She cut across the field and ran up to you. “You found the piano,” she said.

Your father stood up. “It’s ours,” he said. “We got here first.”

“I know it,” she said, catching her breath. “I’m the one you prayed to.”

“What’s the story with this thing?” the Possum asked.

“It was my mother’s,” said the spandexer. “But I don’t play.”

“It doesn’t make any sound,” you said.

“Of course it doesn’t,” she said. “I said that in the prayer.”

“You did?” said your father.

“I prayed, it’s a POV Piano — a point-of-view piano.”

“I thought that was the name of the brand,” your father said. “I didn’t know—”

“Watch,” said brightsad, and she pushed a single key on the right side. I heard the clicking sound again.

“Hear that?” she said.

“First person plural,” we said.

“Do you want it, or not?” She pushed another key and the point of view was hers: I didn’t tell them about the stories in these fields, the other instruments beneath the soil. I didn’t tell them that my mother died at this piano. I just wanted to be rid of the damn thing.

Then the Possum joined in. As the spandexer played the point-of-view melody, the Possum (I didn’t care what sound came out of it — I was just so happy to put my paws on the keys again) played the chords.

My Dad stared at the piano. “This isn’t what I envisioned,” he said.

“It is free,” said brightsad.

“I think you should take it,” the Possum told my father. “Just imagine: to be able to see things from another angle whenever you wanted.”

“I really wanted a note-based piano,” my Dad said.

“And you’ll find one,” said the Possum. “But take this one, too! Put it out in the fields! Just in case!”

The Possum was right. This was an interesting object that, at the very least, we might be able to trade down the road. My Dad said OK, and the Possum led his truck into the field. When the truck got to the piano, it knelt down and picked up the instrument in its arms. The piano made a terrible pok when it lifted from the earth, and I heard the sound of snapping roots and vines. The truck put the piano in its bed, walked out of the muddy field, and settled on its tires. Then we got into the truck and the Possum pulled onto Highway Five. I turned back and waved at the spandexer, who was standing in the mud.

On the way back to Converse Street, I asked the Possum why he’d stopped playing piano. “Because of a medical condition,” he said.

“What kind of medical condition?” asked my Dad.

“I developed tinnitus,” he said. “Ringing in the ears. For me, it was one single note. A slightly-out-of-tune A.”

“The note was in your mind?” I said.

“Twenty-four-seven.”

“Wow,” I said. “Even as you slept?”

“It didn’t stop for a minute, not for nine years,” he said. “Then I woke up one morning and realized I couldn’t hear the note anymore. Now I can’t hear that note, A, at all.”

“What do you mean?” my Dad said.

“My ears skip the note. I just can’t hear it.”

“And that’s why you don’t play music anymore?” I said.

“How could I?” he said.

He meant it as a rhetorical question. In my mind, though, I thought: Aren’t there are a lot of other notes? Bs and Gs and Xs and Zs?

“There are,” said the Possum, “but you can’t play a melody if you’re missing notes in the phrase.”

“Wait a second,” my Dad said. Had he just heard ’s thought?

“Of course I heard it,” said the Possum. Then he looked over at me. “Oh, fuck,” I said to Ralph. I pulled the truck over, and the Possum looked back at the piano, leaning to one side of the bed.

“I think I know what’s happening,” I told the Possum.

“Me, too,” I told Ralph and .

“What?” said .

“We must have screwed up the point of view when we disconnected the piano from the land,” I said.

“Fuck me,” you said. You knew we shouldn’t have agreed to help Ralph. Something awful always comes of it. “So what’s this?” he said.

“This is all points of view,” you all said.

It was; we could feel the sudden pressure of new narrators — of your point of view, and your point of view, and the passing tree’s point of view, and every morsel of roadside sand’s point of view. But there wasn’t anything we, I, or they could do except get home, plant the piano, and see if rerooting it would help. And that’s what they — we; he, he, and he — did. We/they made it back to Appleseed and I/the Possum drove the truck out into the worryfields and instructed my/his truck to drop the piano into the soil.

I dropped the piano where they told me to.

So this is my new home, I thought.

By then it was dark, so I went back to my shed, and we went into the house. We ate quickly and then lay down in our beds. The force from all those points of view was tremendous for us. The only way we could sleep was to believe that this would change — that the story, the switching POVs, the pressure, would soon be over. Make it stop, we prayed. We sent out those prayers, but they went unanswered.

STARK’S EARLIEST

I thought my Mom would grow to love Sentence, but she didn’t. I found it cool that “I am.” was always changing — to “I am older,” and then “I am seeing,” then “I am hearing,” and “I am hearing new things,” but my Mom didn’t appreciate it. If the sentence pooped or peed in the house (which happened hardly ever—“I am.” was basically housebroken), she lost her shit. “Look at this!” she’d shout at me, pointing at the droppings of language. “Whose letter turds are these?” As if there was any question.

When Sentence tried to befriend my Mom, that only made her angrier. I remember seeing “I am aware that time is passing” trying to curl up next to my Mom while she was reading on the gold couch one day. My Mom pushed the sentence off. “No!” she told him, and Sentence whimpered and recoiled.

“You don’t have to be mean to him,” I said.

My Mom went back to reading.

A few weeks later, I came home from school and I couldn’t find Sentence — I walked all over the house looking for him. Then I went out to the gym, where my Mom was levitating. “Have you seen ‘I am.’?” I asked her.

“Nope,” she said.

I went outside and then back into the house. Suddenly I heard a very quiet repetitive sound: scuff scuff scuff. Something was scratching. I followed the sound to the pantry door. When I opened it I saw “I am.” standing there in the dark, his “I” ’s wide and panicked.

My Mom came in from the garage a few minutes later. “Sentence was locked in the pantry,” I told her. “In the dark!”

“Really?” she said.

“Did you do this?” I asked.

“Oh, honey — of course not,” she said.

“He was probably scratching for hours!”

“I honestly had no idea he was in there. Or else I would have let him out!”

“I think you put him in there on purpose because you hate him so much,” I said.

“I don’t hate anyone, ,” she said. “Just because I recognize the risks of—”

“That’s such bullcrap!” I said.

“Excuse me?” she said.

“You hate everyone!” I shouted.

My Mom pointed her finger at me. “I’ll be gone someday, —”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“—and then you’ll wish you were nicer to me.”

Shortly after that, two clauses got in a fight in the margin across the street. This would happen every once in a while — you’d hear the wild, high squeal and pitter-patter of language chasing language through trees. That day, I ran outside just in time to see the clauses scamper across Converse and tussle on the treebelt, ripping up the page right in front of our house.

My mother heard the commotion from her gym and stormed out through the garage door. “Oh, Christ!” she said.

By then the sentences were gone.

“What the hell happened to the lawn?”

Neither the Reader nor I said anything.

“Did you do this?” Mom asked the Reader.

“Me?” you said. “No.”

“?” said my Mother.

“We were just standing here,” I said.

“Don’t lie, ,” she said.

“I’m not,” I said. “It was two sentences fighting across the street.”

“Piece of crap,” she said. I don’t know if she was talking to the sentences or to me.

My Mom was changing — being replaced by a sadder, more angry version of herself. She stopped eating — eating anything, I mean. She grew resentful about work and my Dad’s minimal meaning, and impatient with all the junk my sister kept around the house and with my perpetual lateness. One time? She was supposed to pick me up from school, and I was a few minutes late as usual. When I went out to the circle and looked for her car, I saw the Cloudy Fart driving away down Grassy Gutter. I waved my hands and ran down the sidewalk shouting. And I know she saw me — I saw her eyes in the rearview mirror. But she turned down Williams and drove away, and I had to walk home in the snowy cold.

My mom wasn’t the only one souring, though. About three months after I found “I am.” in fact, the happiness taps in our home faltered and sputtered and ran dry. My sister noticed it first, when she turned on the happiness faucet in the backyard — to wash a dead icebox that she’d found at the flea market — and the faucet coughed and spit. As a landlord, my Dad knew a lot about happiness — where the shutoffs were, how to check the gauges, how to increase the feed. When he read the meter, though, he saw that the supply was low.

“Well?” said my Mom from the top of the stairs.

My Dad checked the expansion tank. When he shook it, you could hear a pinging inside.

“There’s air in the tank,” he said.

“Ralph?” hollered my Mom.

“It’s empty!” my Dad called up.

“I’m calling the DPWC,” my Mom said.

The Public Works Cones confirmed it: our whole neighborhood was out of happiness. There was a problem with a conversion facility on Tanglewood, they said, and they didn’t know when it’d be up and running again. For the time being, the Cones said, we all needed to make do with little or no happiness.

As soon as my Mom hung up the phone, my Dad got into his truck and drove to the store for some bottled joy. He returned empty-handed an hour later, though. “You should have seen the lines,” he said.

We were downtrodden — just plain sad—all that week. My father ignored calls from tenants and spent the afternoons drinking hard cider on the porch. My sister gave up on the icebox she was trying to restore and just put it out on the curb. Me, I was so sluggish I couldn’t do anything — not even read or walk “I am.” He started peeing on the rug in the corner of the living room and no one even said anything about it.

My mother handled the sadness differently: she spent most of the weekend in her home gym. This was right around the time when my Mom became fascinated with the Mothers — the highly trained, heavily armed militia group that lived in Nests perched in high trees, flew in formation above Appleseed, and descended at the first sign of trouble. All of a sudden, the Mothers were all my Mom talked about — how heroic and brave they were, how thankful the town should be for their protection.

Reader: Protection from what?

From intruders of any kind: thoughts sent from other towns to confuse us, meaning-scammers, traveling rust or decay, dangerous words or sentences, etceteras, et cetera. If they picked up a threat or imbalance in some history or exposition, they’d take the long, difficult flight back through the years to the page where that imbalance appeared. According to my Mom, the Mothers would revise right there on the spot: change a word, a sentence, a whole paragraph, even, if they needed to.

My father scoffed at all this. He didn’t dispute the Mothers’ presence — you could often see them, plain as ink, floating over the pages in their flightskirts and goggles — but he thought their reputation was exaggerated. Their brochures boasted of training in aikido, thought-stopping, judo, size-changing, and karate — they bragged about victories in secret wars, saving Appleseed from near-coups and future infestations, changing the histories of disease and oppression. My Dad had his doubts. “No one is that strong or that tough,” I heard him tell my Mom once.

“The Mothers are,” she said, shoving a brochure in his face.

My Mom never explained to me why she wanted to be a Mother, but I had my theories. When my Mom was younger, she was tormented by eating disorders. She’d told me the stories — how, at school, they poured loathing in her locker, badgered her with fakeprayers, spread fictional rumors about her. Once, two disorders cornered her on her way home from school and beat my Mom so badly she missed a week of school.

It was a Mother who saved her, my Dad said. One day, my Mom was in a knockdown-dragout with a gang of disorders when a Mother dropped down from the sky and unfurled her warskirt. Those disorders landed in the hospital with fractured everythings — fractured egos, fractured goals, fractured sorrow.

You couldn’t just be a Mother, though — you had to be chosen. They hadn’t recruited for over five years, so my Mom was training for the day they opened the books again. She worked hard: she fasted; learned to box; bought a video about levitation and another about size-changing, which taught her how to think herself taller or shorter at will. She took meaningful courses on seeing the future and revising the past.

Once, when my Mom was at work, I found her videos and asked the TV to show one to me. I thought I’d impress my Mom if I could learn how to change size like she did. Just ten or fifteen minutes into the first taped lesson — how to reduce — my Mom walked in from work. “What are you doing?” she said.

I was about the size of a Converse hi-top. “Nothing,” I said.

She turned off the TV.

“You’ve caused enough trouble already,” she said. “Or will in the future.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

She shook her head and held up her hands. “I’m just saying,” she said, “you can’t go around taking other people’s things, .”

“OK,” I said.

The following Monday, we received a general prayer that the happiness would be restored. When we turned the faucets on that afternoon, though, they spat out happiness caked with sadness and the carcasses of doubts. I remember the four of us standing in the kitchen, waiting for the pipes to clear. My Dad let the happiness run for a few minutes, and then he poured some in a glass and held the happiness up to the light.

“Is it OK?” my Mom said.

“I don’t know,” he said.

My sister grabbed the glass from him and drank from it. “Augh,” she said, spitting it back.

“Is it happiness?” I said.

Briana shook her head. “No,” she said. “I don’t know what it is.”

My mother took a sip. “It’s not sadness,” she said. “Ralph, try it.”

My father reached for the glass, but I took it from him and drank. The liquid was thick and sludgy. It wasn’t happiness, but it wasn’t sadness either. “It’s bitter,” I said. “Is it bitterness?”

I handed the glass to my Dad; he studied the liquid, swished it around and took a sip. “It’s melancholy,” he announced. “They must be flushing the pipes still.”

I took the glass back. I took another sip, and another.

“Easy, ,” said my Dad.

“ likes it,” Briana announced.

I gulped down the rest of the melancholy, turned on the tap, and poured myself another glass.

THE BIG WHY

WHITE TRANSPARENT

That winter I developed a skin condition — an itching — and soon it had spread all over my arms and my neck and my ears. When I showed it to my Mom, she waited until my Dad came home and then called me into the kitchen. “Show your father,” she said. I held out my arm, and my father made a face at my mother.

The next day my mother took me to see our doctor, Doctor Coat. Coat and my Mom sometimes worked together at the hospital, but we went to see him in his office in Appleseed Springs. He took one look at my arm and said, “Ah. OK. Sure. No big surprise here, given your family history.”

I just stood there. “What’s he talking about?” said one of my thoughts.

“I’m almost positive this is divorcitis,” he said. “We knew that someday this might be a possibility.” Then he looked to my Mom, whose face was a blade.

“It’s what?” I said.

“Oh,” said Doctor Coat. “I didn’t mean — I just assumed—”

The word was too big for my mouth. “Divorce—”

“—itis,” said Doctor Coat. “It causes eczema — that’s the skin irritation here — moodiness, blurred vision, nausea, and an inability to have romantic relationships.”

“What do you mean, my family history?”

Doctor Coat held up his hands. “I am really sorry, Di,” he said. “I didn’t mean to complicate things.”

I looked at my Mom. “You have it?”

“Both me and your Dad,” said my Mom.

“But you’re married,” I said.

“A lot of married people have it,” Doctor Coat said. “About forty percent of Americans, actually.”

“And there’s a treatment for it,” my Mom said.

“Several, actually,” Doctor Coat said to me. “Most people with divorcitis take passive-aggressiveness, which you can buy in pill form or as a salve.”

“I take the pills,” my Mom said.

“But there’s a brand-new treatment on the market — evidence suggests that it quiets the divorcitis over time. So, who knows! With these meds, you may be able to stand in the same room as someone — maybe even, years from now, give them a hug!” He pulled a notepad from his pocket and wrote a prescription.

I took the paper and read it. “Music pills?” I said.

The Coat nodded. “Now, there are some side effects — defamilization, fatigue, that kind of thing. But they’ll keep the eczema at bay.”

“When will this go away?” I said.

They both stared at me.

“I don’t want to sugarcoat this for you, ,” said the Coat. “It will probably always be very difficult for you to have a happy romantic relationship.”

My Mom nodded and led me out of the office. She put her arm around me as we walked back to the Fart. “How long have you had this?” I asked.

She unlocked the passenger’s-side door. “I got it in my twenties,” she said.

“You and Dad are divorced?”

“Of course not! We fight it.” Mom pulled the Fart into traffic.

After a minute I said, “Why do you?”

My Mom lit a six-foot cigarette, rolled open the window and rested the cigarette against the top of the glass. “Why do we what?” she said.

“Why do you fight it?”

“What do you mean?”

What I meant was, what did they love about each other? Did my Mom love my Dad’s French Canadian frame — the barrel chest and skinny legs? Or his wild black hair and thick square glasses? Did my Dad like my Mom’s shaved head? Her muscles? The lighthouses in her eyes? What specifically?

“Because you love each other?” I said.

“Of course!” she said.

“I can’t believe this,” I said.

My Mom took a drag from her cigarette and blew smoke out of one side of her mouth. “It’s like Coat said — lots of people have it. Odor’s parents.”

“Really?”

“And the Lonelies.”

“They do?” I said.

My Mom nodded.

We farted to Ryan’s Pharmacy to fill the prescription. It took a long time — I read a magazine while my Mom waited in line for the pills. When they were ready, my Mom found me and handed me the bottle. “Here,” she said. “Sooner you take them, sooner you’ll start to feel better.”

The music pills were blue and translucent, and filled with what looked like strobe lights and dancing people.

“Take one,” she said.

I took out a pill and popped it. As soon as I did, the music surged through my body: the magazines started shouting, my knees buckled, and everything improved. “Bluh,” I said.

“You OK?” my Mom said.

Everything was different now. I looked back at the pharmacy counter and the tall, gray-haired, thick-glassed pharmacist behind the glass. I read his face — the mole on his cheek — and realized who he was. I ran right up to the glass. “You’re my mother,” I said.

“,” my Mom said, and put a strong hand on my shoulder. The pharmacist said something to my mother, but his voice was low and bubbly notes.

“My mother,” I told the pharmacist.

“OK. Let’s go home,” my Mom said, and she pulled me away from the glass.

“No! Mom!” I said to the pharmacist.

“We’re leaving, ,” my Mom said, leading me past the line of sick people. After a few steps, though, I tore away from her. “I’m not going anywhere with you,” I spat at her. A man coughed on me and I looked in his face. “You’re my brother,” I said. He looked to his right, at an old woman standing behind him. “You’re my sister,” I told her. “Or my father.”

She was. And I’d missed them so much!

“Come on, ,” said my Mom, and she pulled me forward.

“You’re all my brothers and sisters—” I slurred, “—my family,” and then the very strong stranger pulled me outside into the sharp daylight.

TOPAZ

That spring the apples grew small — ten percent smaller, on average, than they’d been for any year on record. This might not seem like much, but it had serious, immediate ramifications for people in my town. Some clients — surrounding towns who’d bought apples from Appleseed since the days of Johnny Appleseed himself — demanded a discount or sent back their apples in disgust. It was worryfields — everyone was a little less meaningful. My friend Berson’s mother lost her management job, and the time factory where our neighbor Roger Lonely worked shifted him from full time to part time. Then one of my Dad’s tenants — a maître d’ at the East Margin Grill, a fancy apple restaurant downtown — broke his lease and left town.

A month after the harvest, the Board of Select Cones held a special meeting at the Town Hall. I wasn’t there, but my Dad showed me the article in The Daily Core. The article said that there were Mothers in attendance, and that the Memory of Johnny Appleseed was asked to speak to the Board. “It was a very warm winter, is all,” the Memory of Johnny Appleseed was quoted as saying. “Spring was too short and the apples had no chance to finalize. These are like,” he said, “rough drafts of apples.”

Select Cone Calumet Johnson held up an apple from one of his own trees. “This is a major disappointment,” he told the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. “Are you praying for the apples to return to size?”

“I am,” the Memory of Johnny Appleseed told the Board. “Every day.”

“It’s not only the size of the apples,” Select Cone Rhonda O’Martian was quoted as saying. “They don’t taste like Appleseed apples. Has anyone noticed that?”

Then one of the other Orange Traffic Cones on the Board, Select Cone Hedge Miles, took a bite of the apple on the table. “She’s right,” he said. “It tastes flat. Like paper.”

A day or two after that meeting, my Mom took my sister and me for our weekly shopping trip to the Big Why. The Big Why sold fresh, organic inquiries — everyone in town went there for their questions. It was a nice store, clean and well-organized, with classical music playing in the background and the askings organized by section. If my father went with us, he’d load up the cart with doozies: “What is life for?”s, or “What does it mean to be ‘authentic’?”s. My Mom liked the practicals: “What’s the least amount of food someone can live on?” “How does one survive a bookwormbite?” Bri liked the nuts ’n’ bolts: “How does a planer work?” “What’s a dovetail joint?”

Me? I let my thoughts wander through the aisles. Most of the time they came back with questions about the page itself. “Why do words have to die?” “Does a sentence have a soul?” “If the sentence ‘A tree dies in the woods.’ dies in the woods, does the sentence ‘Does anyone hear it?’ hear it?”

That day, though, we drove right by the Big Why and kept on going. At first I thought my Mom had made a mistake — I turned in my seat and looked back at the big question mark hanging over the sliding glass doors.

“Mom?” said Briana.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Where are we going?”

“Shopping for questions,” she said.

“But you just passed the Why,” Bri said.

“We’re going somewhere else today,” she said.

We drove down Williams and toward the Appleseed Line. “What the heck,” I said.

“Where are we going, Mom?” said Briana.

Soon we’d crossed the border into East Appleseed. My thoughts were pacing back and forth across the floors in the rooms of my mind. What, they wanted to know, was wrong with the Big Why?

Ten minutes into East Appleseed, my Mom pulled the Fart into a crumbly parking lot; to the left, I saw a store with a shabby clock over its door. “What’s this?” said Briana.

I read the name on the store window: “The Big When?”

“It’s exactly the same,” my Mom said. “Come on.”

We followed my Mom inside. The store was big and moore, with a funny smell and paint chipping off the walls. I read the signs above the rows — one read “Never,” another “Soon.” “All of these questions are time-based,” said Briana. My Mom ignored her and began pulling questions off the shelf: “When will there be peace?” and, “When will everyone and everything have meaning?”

“These questions suck,” I said, in earshot of a lady stocking Nows in the aisle.

“,” my Mom hissed, looking over at the lady. “They’re fine. Now pick out a question or don’t.”

Briana went one way, my Mom went another, and I wandered over to the bargain bin. There were some really old, faded questions in there, plus some open-ended ones and some broken asks. Before I even had time to choose one, though, I saw my Mom wheeling her shopping cart to the register. I grabbed the closest question and ran to catch up.

When we got back in the Fart my Mom said, “Pretty rad place, huh?”

“Rad?” my sister said.

“Isn’t that what people say? ‘Cool’?” my Mom said. “Was it cool?”

“It was OK,” Briana said.

“It was lame,” I said.

“What questions did you get?” my Mom asked.

“I got one about rain,” said my sister. “When will it rain?”

“It’s supposed to rain tomorrow,” my Mom said, and my sister smiled.

I took my question out of the brown paper bag. “I got ‘When the sky?’ ” I announced.

Neither my Mom nor my sister said anything for a second.

“When what?” said Bri.

“When,” I said. “The sky?”

My Mom looked at me in the rearview mirror. “I’m not sure how to — answer that one, .”

“That’s because he got it from the bargain bin,” Briana said. “None of those have answers, dumbass.”

I looked at the question.

“Crap,” I said. “Mine sucks!”

“Idiot,” Bri said to me.

“Bri,” my Mom said.

“I want to go to the Big Why,” I doaned.

Bri looked at my Mom. “Me, too,” she announced.

“No one’s going to the Why,” Mom said. “We already bought our questions for the week.”

“Mine doesn’t have an answer, though,” I said.

“Well,” my Mom said, lighting a cigarette, “some questions are like that.”

“I already have enough no-answer questions,” I shouted.

“Lower your voice, ,” said my Mom.

“Like: why didn’t anyone tell me about the divorcitis?” I hollered. “Like: where is my hair?”

“I said lower your voice,” my Mom said.

“Like, why am I so fat?”

“You’re fat because you eat so much crap,” my sister said.

“And who’s killing all my thoughts?” I wailed. “And why don’t we have more happiness? What does it all mean?”

“,” my Mom said through clenched teeth, “you stop shouting right now.”

“I want answers,” I yelled.

“Shut your mouth,” my Mom roared.

“I want ANSWERS!” I howled.

“Sonofabitch,” my Mom said. She pulled the Fart over, got out, scorned around to my side and tore open the door.

“What are you doing?” I said.

She grabbed me by the collar and pulled me out of the car with one hand. “Fucking brat,” she spat, and pushed me back onto the shoulder of the road. I fell back and dropped my question; it broke on the pavement.

“My question,” I whined.

My Mom stormed back around the car, got in, and slammed the door shut.

“Where are you going?” I asked, starting to cry.

Briana looked at me from the backseat, her face a mix of satisfaction and pity.

“Mom!” I said.

“… his fault anyway—” I heard her say, and then, “—goddamned piece of shit.” Then she pulled the car back into traffic.

“Wait!” I shouted. I thought my Mom would turn the Fart around, but she didn’t. The car farted farther and farther away — soon I couldn’t see it.

I stood there crying for a minute or two, looking down at the broken question in my hand. It had cracked at the space seam, right between “when” and “the”—now I held “when” in one hand and “the sky” in the other.

I looked around and tried to get my bearings. I was on a strange page outside Appleseed. I started walking in the direction of the Fart. I walked past houses separated by vast white space. Then I passed a prayer center, an office park, and another prayer center. In twenty minutes or so, I saw the margin for Appleseed. I crossed the thick, smudgy space; soon I was at the edge of the paragraphs describing southeast Appleseed.

As I walked down Williams Street, I heard a rush overhead. I looked up to see a woman — a Mother — twenty feet above me, her green skirt flaring and her long gray hair whipping in the wind. She landed in front of me and lifted up her goggles. “Afternoon,” she said. She smelled like clouds and she had tattoos all up and down her arm. Her skirt was dirty from flight. As it settled, I saw blades and weapons in the folds of the fabric.

I just stood there.

“Saw you walking across the margin,” she said. “Where are you coming from?”

“East Appleseed,” I said. “My Mom took us to the Big When, but she got — angry — and made me walk home.”

“Where’s home?” she said.

I told her my address. “577 Converse Street, Appleseed.”

“What’s your name?” the Mother asked.

“,” I said.

The Mother’s eyes narrowed. “Do you have any words on you, ?”

“Just these,” I said. I held out the broken question.

The Mother took the question, read it, and handed it back to me. “Living language, I mean,” she said. “Did you see any sentences moving through here?”

I shook my head. “Am I in trouble?”

“You’re sure?” said the Mother. “We’ve seen worries crossing through here. Threats. Doubts trying to sneak into Appleseed.”

I was scared. “I swear to the Core,” I said, “I didn’t see any.”

“Stand there and don’t move,” the Mother said. Then she prayed to my Mom, who confirmed that I was who I said I was. The Mother prayed that she’d get me home safe. Then she closed the prayer, turned to me, and said, “Need a lift home?”

“That would be awesome,” I said.

The Mother took me in her arms and rose up into the sky. We ascended high over the margin, and soon I saw the edge of town: the shrug of Appleseed Mountain and the distant lights of the Big Why and Cordial Carl’s. Something was happening in the Amphitheatre. Then I could see Van Tassel’s Groves, and rows and rows of spidery tree-shadows. Somewhere over town I dropped my question, but I didn’t even care.

“Is it difficult to learn how to fly?” I shouted.

The Mother smiled but didn’t answer. When we got to my house, she landed in the driveway and knelt down until my feet were touching the ground. But I didn’t let go — I held on to her shoulders. “Let go,” said the Mother finally.

I hugged her tightly.

“Let go of me,” she said again, and pulled me off of her. Then she stood up. “No more wandering in the margins,” she said.

“OK,” I said.

“I mean it,” she said. “It’s dangerous.”

“I promise,” I said.

She lifted up into the sky and was gone.

RIVAL

The story of the founding of Appleseed — the one that the Reader and I pulled from the page — was about how Johnny Appleseed, moving to a barren town of stone in the mid-1700s, heard a strange prayer and followed it, as if driven by something beyond himself, high up Appleseed Mountain (which was known as Geryk Mountain then). It was there, in a clearing in the clouds, that he found a lone crooked tree holding a single alien fruit. At that point, no one in America had ever seen an apple — they wouldn’t have even known about them unless they’d read about them in ancient European planting brochures. Pioneers and pilgrims had tried to grow apples on American soil, but to no avail; it was believed that something in American soil kept apple trees from taking root.

The old prayers say that when Johnny Appleseed approached the tree, a bookworm — a slithery sentence — rilled forth from a hole in the page and warned him not to pick the fruit, that it was meaningless and would only make him ill. When Johnny tried to push past him, the worm stood at full height to frighten him away. But Johnny had heard the fruit praying to him and believed it to be meaningful, so he drew the word “sword” from his satchel and told the worm to stand down. When the worm didn’t, Johnny slew him with the word. Then he picked the fruit, ate it, and planted the seeds. The seeds grew more trees. The trees grew more seeds. Appleseed collected those seeds in his holy satchel and started planting groves all over Appleseed.

A few weeks after the Memory of Johnny Appleseed told me and the Reader that story, though, the Memory of Johnny Appleseed and I were arranging those paragraphs on the pagefield when two Mothers landed in the fresh soil. One of the Mothers held a giant pencil; another was wearing headphones on her ears and a giant tape machine strapped to her chest. The first Mother told the Memory of Johnny Appleseed to put down his hoe, and he complied. “What’s this all about?” he said.

“Are these your words?” said the taller Mother.

“Yes,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

“You grew them?”

“With ,” he said.

“Who?” said the taller Mother.

“Me,” I said, raising my hand.

“We’re picking up some anomalies here,” said the headphoned Mother.

Then the other Mother picked up the word “sword” and studied it. As she held it, the “s” in “sword” shivered. “Shit,” said the Mother, and she dropped the word. The “s” detached from the “word” and slithered into the grass.

“What was that?” asked the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

“Bookworm,” said the first Mother.

“A what?” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

“We’re going to need to confiscate these,” said the headphoned Mother.

“Confiscate — the words? Which ones?”

“These,” said the first Mother, pointing to the paragraph. “All of them.” They prayed for backup, and soon other Mothers arrived and began lifting words—“bookworm,” “sword,” “American”—right off the page, leaving a blank space where they’d been.

The Memory watched from the margin, repeatedly taking off his hat, rubbing his hands through his hair, and pulling his hat back on tighter. “Oh,” he whined at one point. “Do you really have to take ‘American’?”

No one answered him—“American” was already gone. Now they were pulling up “soil” and “the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.”

“My name?” shouted the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. “Not my name!”

“Settle down,” a Mother told him. “We’ll just run some tests on it and then we’ll bring it back to you.”

“And what am I supposed to do in the meantime?”

“Make up another name,” suggested the headphoned Mother.

So he did — for a week his name was Martha D. Anger. During that time, it was Martha Anger who found the apple tree — Anger who plucked the apple, planted the seeds, grew more apples, planted more groves.

At the end of that week, Martha received a prayer from the Mothers saying that his name had been tested and cleared and was ready for pickup. I went with Martha to pick up the name — we rode the two-person bicycle over to the Word Pen, a temporary testing site in South Appleseed. We gave our names to the attendant and then waited in the mud for Martha’s name to be released. Behind high fences covered in barbed wire, two wildwords—“humble” and “negotiate”—fought with each other. Other words howled or paced in place.

Finally the gate creaked open. Martha Anger turned and said, “Heeeere’s Johnny!” Then his name bolted around the corner and jumped into his arms.

ROSEMARY RUSSET

That winter, some pipes froze at Woodside and two sinks cracked and died, so my Uncle Joump and I went out to Wolf Swamp to catch some new ones.

Joump worked with my Dad at the buildings. He was as tough as they come, and I’d never seen him scared of anything. When my Dad walked into the boiler room one day and saw some meaninglessers squatting behind the oil tank? Dad sent Joump in to marcia them out. When we needed to get rid of the “snowmen”—the ancient, obsolete asbestos-covered burners? The hazardous-waste companies would have charged us hundreds of theories, but Joump went in there one afternoon with a sledgehammer and a red bandanna over his mouth and he carried out those burners in pieces.

Joump was always nice to me — he gave me my Walkman and headphones on Core Day a few years earlier, for example, and if he found a book in his travels he’d always save it for me. With most people, though, Joump had a quick temper — I’d seen him get in fights with ricks and edgers way bigger than he was. Joump himself wasn’t big, but he had a bulb-round belly from years of gorging on Kaddish Fruits. Kaddish, which gave you mights and false memories, was abundant in Appleseed; there was a grove in Wolf Swamp, for example, and a cluster of trees out by the Appleseed Prison. Joump grew his fruits himself, from trees that he’d transplanted onto his property and covered with a fake page. He’d show up at the buildings with his eyes smudged and his teeth stained blue, and sometimes he was so blurry that my Dad would have to send him home. The problem got so bad that my Dad and Joump stopped speaking for a while — one day Joump showed up at Woodside too kaddished to work, my Dad told him to leave, and Joump didn’t talk to him for two years.

Then Joump’s wife, Rachel, died. She was a really nice person, too nice, and finally she died of niceness. When my aunt called from Canada to tell us the news, my Dad put me in the truck and we drove over to Joump’s house, a small duplex out near the Mental Hospital. We parked in the street and my Dad and I got out of the truck and walked toward the house. At the edge of the driveway, though, my Dad stopped and looked at the house in the distance. “Go see if he’s OK,” my Dad said.

“Me?” I said.

My Dad stared at the house. The grass was high and the house was dark.

“You do it,” I said.

“He’s your uncle,” said my Dad. “Just go knock on the door.”

I walked up to the door. “Uncle Joump?” I said.

There was no answer.

“Uncle Joump!” I said.

The door opened a little — I smelled the sour burn of rotten Kaddish Fruits. “?” Joump said.

“My Dad wants to know if you’re OK,” I said.

The door closed.

“Are you OK?” I said.

There was a shuffling inside the house.

“Uncle Joump?” I said.

“Tell him I’m hanging in,” Joump said. “That I’ll see him at Belmont next week.”

This was later, after Joump sold his house and moved into Appleseed Heights. He’d bought a new car, a Cadillac, and he was dating a woman who lived in the complex. Her name was Dot. I didn’t like her — she wore too much makeup. When she smiled, cracks appeared all over her face.

Joump drove out toward the swamp, the sinknets and the dead sink corpses and Joump’s own sad story sliding around on the plastic lining of the truckbed. When we reached the wetlands, Joump parked and we hoisted the heavy nets on our shoulders. Then we walked down toward the still waters.

That swamp. I love thinking back on it — the way the trees folded their hands together to make shadows over the damp pathways; the sound of porcelain running through the trees; the mildewy smell of the water praying in the sun.

We walked for about half a mile. Then Joump stopped and pointed. There, about fifty yards away, was a standalone old sink grazing in the shallow muck. The sink looked old, but strong — you could see muscles by the drain. Joump flashed me the “OK” sign, and I moved as quietly as I could through the grass, flanking the sink and stepping up behind it.

When I was about twenty feet from it, though, the sink looked up and sniffed the air.

“Crap,” said one of my thoughts.

“Get it!” Joump said.

I ran toward the sink and threw the net at it. The sink flinched, recoiled, and ran.

“Somanabitch,” I heard Joump say.

The sink turned and fled into the high grass. It was fast—I ran my fatbody after it, my thoughts’ glasses fogging and my lungs a burning house, but after ten seconds the sink just disappeared.

I didn’t slow up; I thought that maybe the sink had fallen, or that it was hiding in the tall grass. I sprinted toward where I last saw it. Then my foot caught on something, and my ankle cried out, and I landed face first in the grass.

“Somanobee!” shouted my uncle. “! You OK?”

I sat up. My ankle was weeping. I looked back to see what I’d tripped on. Was it a root?

It wasn’t. It was a — I’d tripped on a—

Reader: A what?

Hole.

Reader: A what?

A hole.

Reader: What do you mean, a hole?

My uncle jogged up to me and put his hands on his knees. “That bastard was quick,” he said.

I shimmied back to the spot in the ground — the hole — where I’d tripped.

“Twist your ankle?” said Joump, standing up.

I pointed to the hole. “What is that?” I said.

“Hole,” he said. He motioned for me to get up. “Let’s go — we’ll try again another day.”

“A hole in the page?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s a fucking hole in the page. So what?”

“I think that’s where the sink went,” I said. “Down in the hole.”

“No shit,” said Joump. “Can you walk?”

I stood up and leaned over the hole.

“How far down does it go?”

“Fuck if I know,” Joump said.

We turned and walked back toward the creek and the truck parked in the dirt. I winced with every step. “Easy now,” my uncle said. When we reached the truck, Joump opened the passenger’s-side door and helped me onto the seat. “Listen. Don’t tell your Mom about this, OK?”

“Why not?” I said.

“Because that’s all I need,” Joump said, chewing his lip. “She’s already anti-Joump.”

I snorted. “She’s anti-, too,” I said.

“Don’t say that,” said Joump.

“She hates me, Joump,” I said.

“No, she doesn’t. She loves you.”

“She really doesn’t, though.”

“You think you’re the only one in this book who suffers, ?” said Joump. “Don’t pretend you know what a parent goes through.”

I shrugged.

“Especially your Mom.”

“She’s just in such a bad mood lately,” I said.

“She’s got a lot on her plate,” my uncle said. “Hey. You hungry?”

When wasn’t I hungry? “Sure,” I said.

Joump didn’t even ask me where we should go — he drove us right out to Oh Death, one of my favorite restaurants in Appleseed. We pulled up to the drive-in and he ordered two sickburgers with diefries and two dementia-flavored shakes. Then we parked in the lot and sucked the food into our mouths.

Between bites Joump said, “Sure you OK?”

“No,” a thought said.

“Yeah,” I said, my mouth full. Then I said, “What do you think the story is with that hole, Uncle Joump?”

“There is no story — it’s a hole,” said Joump.

“Now that I think about it, I’ve seen those before,” I said. “I always thought they were cigarette burns.”

“Drink your shake,” Joump said.

I took a sip. The shake was really good — so good, in fact, that I forgot in that instant about the hole at Wolf Swamp. First I forgot the reason we went to the swamp, and then I forgot about the swamp altogether. I just remembered driving with Joump in the truck and—

What was I—

What was I talking about?

Reader: Wild sinks.

Oh yeah.

Reader: Did you ever replace them?

Replace whatnow?

Reader: The sinks. You were telling me about Joump and the sinks.

You want to hear a story about Joump? I’ll tell you a sad one. When I was about fifteen? The buildings were belly-up by then and Joump had to take a job at the sawmill on Kellogg River. He was back to kaddishing hard — ten, twelve fruits a day—and one morning he showed up to work all mourned and he was fired. His driver’s license had been revoked by then, so he was thumbing rides with coworkers. With no way to get home, he had to call my Dad to come pick him up. My Dad and I drove into the dirt lot of the mill just as Joump was walking out of the office. I remember he had this verb-eating grin on his face, like he’d just won a prize or something. A lateral armsaw who also worked at the mill was trudging through the parking lot, on his way into the office as Joump was walking out. The saw said something to him — I don’t know what — and Joump’s face fireworked; he rushed at the saw, belly pushed forward and arms flailing.

“What’s this?” my Dad said from inside the cab.

The saw whirred to life.

“Shit,” my Dad said. “Shit.”

I saw Joump pull his arm back, and then, a flurry of fists and blades. My Dad jumped out of the truck. A Mother, patrolling overhead, saw the fight and dropped down into the parking lot to break it up. It was over by the time she got there, though — Joump’s face and leg were cut badly. He was bleeding and he couldn’t speak.

The Mother prayed to an ambulance, but my father didn’t want to wait — he put Joump in the truck and we drove him to the hospital. He prayed out loud to my Mom that he was on his way, that Joump was with him, that he was in bad shape. I remember the way his voice trembled as he prayed. The past didn’t matter. This was his brother.

THE AUCTIONEER

LIBERTY

Sometimes my Mom would leave me in that room in the Appleseed Hospital for hours — a whole day, even. When I got bored of sitting there, I’d sneak out and go exploring. I met some amazing people in and around that hospital — once, I was standing in line at the cafeteria when I struck up a conversation with someone who told me that he had three minds. He spoke three words at once, so I believed him.

“Does that mean you can think three thoughts at the same time?” I said.

“Yes/No/I’m not sure,” said the man.

Another time I saw someone who bore a striking resemblance to a very large chicken. He was reading a book in the waiting room outside the emergency room, and I sat down near him. I wanted to understand if his chickenness was a costume or not. After a while, a woman shuffled out with a bracelet around her wrist. The giant chicken looked up. “Ready?” he said. The woman nodded and they walked through the revolving doors.

Every once in a while I’d see the Memory of Johnny Appleseed in the waiting room, too. As people forgot who Johnny Appleseed was, the Memory of Johnny Appleseed experienced health problems: contusions, confusions, delusions. He’d show up with his holy satchel and wait to be seen. They’d patch him up and he’d go back out to work in the fields.

One day, I was walking the halls of the hospital when I opened a door to an emergency staircase that I’d never seen before. It led me all the way down to the basement; I opened the heavy basement door to find a dusty storage room with cinder-block walls. There wasn’t much there — just some old bicycles, a vending machine, and a historical couch. That couch, I decided, was from the Revolutionary War. It had probably helped fight for our freedoms! And now here it was.

I put some meaning in the machine and chose a pack of gummy tables.

“Good choice,” said the vending machine.

“Right?” I said. The candy dropped to the bottom of the machine; I found it and ripped it open.

“Have you tried the gummy refrigerators?” said the vending machine.

“Refrigerators?” I said.

“They’re awesome,” she said, pointing to her navel. I looked through her belly to the stacked bags labeled GUMMY FRIDGES. “There’s some chemical that keeps them actually cold. And when you open up the gummy door there are gummy perishables inside.”

The vending machine’s name was Laura — she was a student at East Appleseed Voc. When I told her my name she said, “Your name is just an underline?”

I nodded and ate a table.

“I’ve never heard of anyone with that name before,” she said.

“It’s French Canadian,” I said.

“Is that where you’re from?”

I chewed. “I’m from the margin,” I said. “We moved to Appleseed when I was three.”

“Ooh la la,” she said. “Are you meaningful?”

I shook my head.

“Isn’t everyone in Appleseed meaningful?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “There are some nice houses, but.”

“You probably are and you don’t know it,” she said.

“Maybe,” I said.

We talked for a few more minutes and then I went back upstairs. I returned to the basement when I visited the following Wednesday, though, and again two days later. Soon I was spending hours with the vending machine. Chips, candy, mints — I spent all the meaning I had on her. I liked sitting on that veteran couch, talking to the vending machine and filling up on salt, corn syrup, sugar, and oil. For a long time, I think I associated that sadfood with the syntax in my heart.

Who am I kidding? I still do that now! If I told you what I ate last night — what, and what it was made of, and how much, you’d probably close this book right now.

Soon, Laura was calling me from the basement of the hospital almost every night. My Dad would answer the phone in the kitchen and hand it over to me, and I’d carry the receiver around the corner into the living room, stretching the coiled cord as far as it would go.

By that point I was visiting my Mom three or four times a week and spending almost all of those visits in the basement. One day I stopped by the hospital unannounced and I found my Mom wheeling the corpse of a problem down the hall. I talked with her for five minutes and then said, as casually as I could, that I was going downstairs. “Why are you always going down to the vending machine?” said my Mom, a star in her eye.

I shrugged. “I’m hungry,” I said.

She stared at my belly. “How can that be?” she said.

I was always careful, when visiting Laura, to keep my distance — to sit at the far end of the couch or on the steps across the room. But one day I was eating some FatCrackers and she looked over at me and said, “Hey.”

“Wha,” I said.

“You’re too far away,” she said.

“Mm?” I said.

“Why don’t you come sit next to me?”

I swallowed. “I can’t.”

“I want to be close to you,” she said.

“I can’t,” I said again.

“Of course you can.”

I said, “Do you know what divorcitis is?”

“What what is?”

I told her about it — the nausea, the skin irritation, the pre-divorce. When I mentioned that word, though, she laughed uncomfortably. “I’m not talking about marriage, . I just want you to sit next to me.”

“I’m telling you,” I said. “It won’t end well.”

“My parents are divorced,” Laura said, “and it’s not because of any sort of virus. My Dad was cheating on my Mom with his boss.”

I thought about that. “He must have had the virus. It was the virus that made him cheat.”

“But how could he get close to her in the first place if he had divorcis-whatever?”

I tried to sort that out in my mind, but my thoughts were feuding and giving each other the silent treatment.

“People just, fall out of love,” said the vending machine. “Or stop getting along. Or act stupid. That’s what causes divorce.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just know I’m not supposed to get close to anyone.”

The vending machine’s display dimmed. “Is it something about the way I look? Is it my weight?”

“No, it’s nothing,” I said. “I just told you—”

“You know what? That’s fine. Don’t get close to me. Stay far away. Way far away.”

“I don’t want to stay far away,” I said.

“I think you should, starting right now.”

“I just need to give the music pills more time to—”

“Can you please leave me alone?” she said.

I stood up. I thought about walking toward Laura and kissing her right then and there, to translate how I felt, but I was afraid I’d get sick.

“Please leave,” said Laura. “I don’t want you here.”

I turned around and walked up the stairs and out to the Bicycle Built for Two. I unlocked it and pedaled home.

I didn’t see Laura that whole week or the next. I thought she’d call but she didn’t. I called her twice, but she didn’t pick up the pay phone the first time and the couch picked up the second time. “Yes?” he said.

“Is Laura there?” I asked.

“Hah?” said the couch. He must have been partially deaf from being too close to concussion grenades during battles in the war.

“Is Laura there?” I said again.

“Is who where?” he said.

I hung up the phone.

Whenever I visited the hospital after that, I stayed upstairs. One day, I was reading my truebook and Nurse Candle said, “No snacks today, ?”

I shook my head and continued reading.

I thought about going down to the basement to talk to Laura, but then that thought left with all of the others. What would I say to her that I hadn’t already?

But that weekend, a twig snapped in the wilderness of my skull. Did I want to live my whole life alone? I would not, could not, let the future — divorcitis, music — sloan me. I resolved to go back down to the hospital basement, put my hands on Laura’s square shoulders and tell her how much I liked her. That I might even love her. Then I’d lean in and kiss her.

That Monday, I didn’t even go upstairs first — I walked right from the bike rack down to the basement. When I turned the corner at the bottom of the stairs, though, I saw a very different Laura: she was slimmer, and wearing a belly shirt, and she’d changed her hair: it was teased high and shone with glitter. There was another vending machine in the basement as well — a soda machine with a fluorescent green chest. The two vending machines were sitting on the veteran couch, their faces close, saying words I couldn’t hear.

I walked over to them. “Laura?” I said.

Both vending machines turned to look at me.

“Hello, ,” she said coolly.

“Hi,” I said.

“You want some gummy fridges?” she slurred.

“No,” I said. “Can I talk to you?”

“About what?” she said. “There’s nothing to talk about, .”

“I have some things I want to say,” I said. I looked over at the other vending machine — he was smiling dumbly at me.

“This is Chad,” said Laura. “Chad, .”

“Yo,” said Chad. “This the divorce guy?”

“Could you give us a second?” I asked Chad.

“I think Chad’s fine right there,” said Laura.

I stepped forward. “Laura,” I said, “I’m not going to let anything come between us.” Then my stomach seized, and I ran to the garbage can and threw up.

“Dude!” shouted Chad.

I wiped my mouth and walked back over to Laura. “I really like you,” I told her. “Maybe even—”

“,” said Laura. “I’m with Chad now.”

All my thoughts were speaking at the same time — I couldn’t hear a single one above the others. Without thinking about it, I leaned forward and tried to kiss Laura.

“Whoa!” said Chad, jumping off the couch and pushing me back. “That’s my girlfriend you just tried to kiss.”

“Chad,” said Laura.

“Unless you want me to kick your ass right in front of her? I’d walk up those steps right now. Comprende?”

I should have turned around — should have left that basement and never gone back to it. It was over — couldn’t I see that?

But I stayed where I was. “No comprende,” I said, bumping my belly against Chad’s plastic chest.

“Guys,” said Laura.

“Is this a joke?” Chad said, and he pushed me back against the wall. My head hit the cinder block; my ears rang.

I thought, I could kill this guy. “I’m warning you,” I said. “Leave me alone.”

Chad stepped right up to me, squishing me against the cinder blocks. I felt the air leave me and I thought I might pass out. “Or what?” gritted Chad.

Sometimes you don’t know what you know. It’d been months since I’d watched that tape about size-changing, and I’d only tried it that one time. At that moment, though, a thought said to me, You asked for it. Another said, Go small, . Go small.

It wasn’t difficult to become a sentence. You just arranged your thoughts in a line in your mind. As I stood there before Chad, I began to shrink: to five feet, four feet, three feet, two.

“What the fuck,” said Chad, stepping back. He looked at Laura and she smirked.

One foot, six inches, three inches, one inch. By then, both vending machines were staring incredulously. “Dude, what are you doing?” asked Chad.

“Stop laughing,” I said.

“It’s funny,” said Chad.

“I’m going to freaking kill you,” I said. By that time I was as small as a fingernail — I was that angry. I ran across the floor, up Chad’s body and into the meaning slot.

“Crap!” said Chad.

“!” shouted Laura.

I jumped into Chad’s chest and bolted through the rows of cans. I pulled a lever and freed them. “No!” I heard Chad shout.

“Thank you,” said a can of ginger ale.

I climbed a can of grape soda and pulled the tab — the purple bubbly spilled over the other cans and the wiring and machinery.

“Shit!” said Chad. “Dude, stop!”

I ran up into Chad’s brain: springs and wires and coils. When I looked behind the meaning-changer I found data storage: stacks of memories, some piles of ideas, a few emotions. I took ten years of memories and his love for Laura. I left him blank. Then I ran through a vent in the back of his mind and down his power cord, and through a tiny crack in the mortar and out into the fields behind the hospital. Chad wept and Laura hollered, but I left them behind and ran as fast as I could toward my Bicycle Built for Two, resizing with every step, the love and memories clanking together in my arms, my eyes full of tears.

CORNISH AROMATIC

See? I told you that there’d be a story about the Appleseed Free Library, where my Mom and I used to go every Wednesday. This is that story! Like I said, that library — which, like most libraries, doubled as a disco — was more or less the heart of Appleseed. Located in the direct center of town, you could still see all of the bloodlines running just under the surface of the grass, through the walls of the foundation, and into the Library’s basement. Someone once told me that there was a machine in that room that pumped actual blood—hundreds of gallons of bookblood a minute.

I used to look forward to those Wednesday nights, to farting with my Mom down Longfellow Drive, onto Highway Five, and into the parking lot of the AFL. It was always just me and her — my sister and my Dad weren’t really that into reading. My Mom, though? She read as if her books might disappear when she took her eyes off them; she probably read two or three books a week.

Anyway, we’d return our books to the desk and split up to wander through the shelves. The AFL didn’t have the best books, or the newest books, or the rarest books, or the nicest books (a lot of the language was rusted or bent, in fact, destroyed from so much reading), or the tallest books, or the loudest books, or the orangest books, but it had the strangest books I’d ever seen. They had books with naked words; books with hooks — literal hooks; books that, when you opened them up, spat at you. They had books made of dust and books made of cheese, books shaped like chairs and books as soft and furry as a winter coat. Some of those books were visible — i.e., you could see them — and others were beyond vision. With those books, you didn’t even know you were reading until all of a sudden you sensed the words on your eyes, heard the pages turning, felt the warmth of the book on your shoulders.

Sometimes I’d fall asleep and wrap the books over me. I’d make myself a small house of books and fall asleep in it. It felt like being back in the womb — it was that warm, that safe.

Reader: As you imagine it, at least.

Sorry?

Reader: Not like you remember the womb.

Of course I do. You don’t?

The Reader furrowed her brow.

I remember every moment of it! There were words in that womb with me, I’m sure of it. The Library was like those pre-page days — warm and verbal. Everything you could ever want or need was right there with you. You never had to worry about being alone — you were never alone! If you ever got scared or depressed — when your mind spun with worry, or you lost all faith — you could just listen for that heartbeat right next to your ear, all around you, actually, and you’d feel safe again.

Even though my Mom stopped going to the Library with me (“All you had to do was keep your mouth shut and read the words,” she’d shouted at me when I asked her to go. “But you couldn’t just let sleeping words lie!”), I continued to go by myself. I liked to open up the books and see the sentences move. I also went back there, though, because I missed her — the old her, the happier Mom. I missed going there with her; I felt closer to her there.

Another reason that I liked the Library? It was good exercise for my thoughts. Don’t tell them that I said this, but some of my thoughts were kind of losers. Not like, in thoughtgangs or anything like that; they were just lazy. Most of them lounged around on a couch in my skull, playing video games. Either that or they were troublemakers, wanderthoughts, renegades too dumb to know which parts of Appleseed to avoid. If a thought of mine went missing, I’d inevitably find it in one of the seediest parts of Appleseed: down in the Quarry, out at the Meadows, or sitting on a stool at Appleseed’s only bar for thoughts, the Think Tank.

Hey, look at that. My shoelace is untied. Do you know where I found this shoelace? It was crawling in the sand by Kellogg River, burrowing. Me and my uncle went out there specifically for shoelaces, and we’d searched all morning. I remember that day specifically, because—

Anyhoo.

And I wasn’t the only one in Appleseed with wandering thoughts — thoughts with minds of their own. Some thoughts lived on the streets: they were orphans, nomads, wanderers with no mind to go back to — just the thought of a shelter or a bench in McShane Park. It was important, I thought, to try to keep my thoughts together. The Library was one of the few places where I could open my skull, lean down and let my thoughts scatter and roam. They could go to their sections, my Mom to hers, me to mine.

Usually I’d read books about Johnny Appleseed. One of my favorites, The Book of Apples, was shelved in the Reference section — it told the story of how Johnny, born in the Massachusetts town of Lemontown, moved to Appleseed intrigued by the blank pages and the rich soil. The middle of the book was devoted to Appleseed’s philosophy — how he believed that apples held all the knowledge we needed; that they held our oldest stories; that they were, in essence, brains. There were also drawings based on one of Appleseed’s stories — one showed a naked vending machine in a secret Appleseed mountain garden, evil earthworms all around her; another showed historical applenuns and bessoffs praying on the Town Green. Plus, there was a whole section in the book devoted to apple fads and fashions, like that very short time when apples were worn as hats. Did you know that the apple-hat fad contributed to the First Apple War? A conservative appler named Jed Berson was so offended by Lox Homicki’s apple hat that he shot it right off his head with his revolver. Homicki wasn’t injured, but he demanded that Berson replace the hat. Berson refused, and both summoned backup. There was a standoff, and the war began soon afterward.

The Book of Apples also showed dozens of pictures of Johnny Appleseed: Appleseed walking with his holy satchel, Appleseed digging with his spade, Appleseed kneeling among the saplings. Because the Memory of Johnny Appleseed was old — white beard, vagabondy clothes — that’s how my thoughts thought of him. But the book showed Johnny Appleseed as a young hipster, with a top hat and an ambitious beard.

Like a lot of the books in the Library, this one was too old and too rare to circulate. So I read it right there at one of the tables, over three or four weeks’ time. I learned all about the different kinds of apples — Champion, Yellow Transparent, Hambledon Deux Ans — and about the last years of Johnny Appleseed in Appleseed, before he followed the smell of apples south and never returned.

One week, I beelined over to the Reference section and saw that The Book of Apples wasn’t on the shelf where I’d left it. I looked through the entire Appleseed section, but to no avail. When I went over to the study desks, though, I saw the Memory of Johnny Appleseed turning the pages of an oversize book. I approached his table and stood over him — he was reading the section about military technologies in the Fifth Apple War. “I was looking for that,” I said.

He looked up at me. “Still working on that project?”

I shook my head.

“Get a good grade?”

“C,” I said.

“How? I told you the whole story,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

“I forgot about the project until the day it was due,” I said.

The Memory of Johnny Appleseed smirked and shook his head.

I didn’t move. After a moment, the Memory of Johnny Appleseed looked up at me. “Are you going to just stand there and watch me read?”

“I was really looking forward to reading the end,” I said.

“Early bird catches the worm,” he said.

I stared at him.

“It is my story, after all,” he said.

I just stood there.

“Go away, .”

So I did — I walked out to my Bicycle Built for Two, unlocked it, and rode off the page.

The following day, though, I rode my bike to the Library right after school. I went directly to the Reference section, where a Librarian in a disco suit was stamping and stacking books. I knew my thoughts would be bored in that section, though, so I opened my skull in the lobby and let them run upstairs to Media; only one or two stayed behind in my mind. Then I found The Book of Apples, sat in a corner, and read for the next two hours, absorbing as much as I could. Every once in a while one of my thoughts would find me there and pester me by tugging on my sleeve or walking onto the page I was reading. “Can we go?” one asked.

“Not yet,” I whispered.

“I’m so bored.”

“Then read,” I said.

I was halfway through Appleseed’s anecdotes about language-planting, though, when I saw the lights overhead flicker. The library was starting to close. I knew what would happen next: the lights would go out altogether, the disco balls would drop, the shelves would slide to the walls and a light-up dance floor would be born. Some books would pick up keyboards and saxophones and drums while other books donned disco suits and dancing dresses. Read: flashing lights; booksweat; music so loud you couldn’t hear your thoughts think!

I put the book back on the shelf and opened my skull to collect my thoughts. Some of them scampered into my skull, but a few stood staring at me. “What are you doing?” said one. “I was really into that story!”

“The Library’s closing soon,” I told the thought.

“Can we check the book out?” said the thought.

I shook my head. “It’s a reference book,” I said.

“Then just take it, man,” said the thought.

Reader: Wait — what?

“You should,” another thought said.

“Who’s going to know?” the first thought said.

Reader: That’s stealing, . Stealing is illegal!

The second thought looked at the Reader. “Don’t you want to understand Appleseed’s planting techniques? How the stories are told?”

Reader: Sure, but—

“I’m not — I can’t — no way,” I said.

“Just put it in under your shirt, wussface,” said the thought.

I thought about it. “There’s a Librarian right there,” I whispered to my skull. Next to Mothers and Cones, Librarians were probably the most powerful people in Appleseed: they were dizzyingly smart, highly trained, paid a lot of meaning, and great at disco — they knew all the latest moves.

“We have to get out of here,” I told the thought.

“We want the story, ,” said the first thought. “We are not leaving that book here.”

A Librarian in disco gear whisked by. “Music begins in ten minutes!” he sang.

I smiled and nodded and thought to walk away from the shelves, but when I actually tried to move my feet they wouldn’t lift. I knew right away that it was my thoughts, conspiring to control me. “We need to go,” I told my thoughts.

“No one’s going to miss one book,” a thought of umbrellas whispered. Before I could object further he grabbed the book I’d been reading off the shelf, climbed my shoulders, opened the top of my head as wide as the hinge would go and stuffed the book into my skull. The book was a hardcover — big, heavy, with sharp corners. The weight on my brain made me shriek.

“Shh! Big baby,” said the thought.

I couldn’t see for a second — I blinked and blinked. My vision reversed, flipped upside down. My arm began tremoring. I let out an involuntary yelp. “You’re messing up his brain, dude,” said one thought to another.

I tried to object — to say “Stop!”—but I couldn’t make words; one of the books must have been pressing on my language center. Then even the thoughts of words vanished. I blurted whatever word was available to me. “Darjeeling!” “Pock.” “Historical!”

Meanwhile, the thoughts struggled to close my skull. I could feel them pushing and shoving one another, trying to make room for the novel they’d crammed into their living space. My eyes fluttered; my vision was blue. I clawed at the hinge on my skull but the thoughts held it closed.

Suddenly I heard the swish of guitars and recorded horns — the disco music was starting.

“Oop,” said the thought. “Time to vamoose, .”

The lights were dimming.

“?”

I pulled at the seam of my skull. “Stout,” I said. “Lasso.”

Out on the floor, disco Librarians were starting to assemble. A strobe light yawned, stretched its arms and started turning. I looked out the windows at the dusky purple light.

“Get moving, ,” said the thought.

I tried one more time to reason, to find language to name my thoughts, but I couldn’t. So I forced all my concentration toward a thought of walking: very slowly, one foot in front of the other. I edged away from the shelf, across the Reference section, over the dance floor, and into the lobby. It seemed to take forever to get to the circulation desk. I was sweating and dizzy. At one point I stumbled and a thought said, “Easy. Just act cool, .”

Cool. I tried to remember what that word meant. But I didn’t know.

When we passed the circulation desk, two Librarians in disco suits looked up from a pile of books that they were stamping. “Not staying for the dance?” asked the male discoer.

I stammered. “Yee. I—”

“Say ‘No thanks,’ ” said the thought.

“No — thanks,” I said.

“Sure?” said the female.

“Smile,” said the thought.

I smiled.

“Say ‘Have a good night, though,’ ” said the thought.

“Have a good night, though,” I said.

“Now move,” the thought said, and I pushed open the double doors into the foyer. As I did, though, an alarm rang out — a repeating beep, but a beep that had been eating right, working out, trying to turn its life around. “Dammit. Run!” shouted the thought, but I didn’t — I stopped; I rugged. The Librarians leapt over the desk and stretched their hands out at me. “Hold up just a second there,” said the discoer.

“Shit!” shouted a thought inside my mind.

“It’s the magnetic tags,” said another. “They put them in all the books.”

“Don’t let that fucker touch you, ,” said a thought of violence. “If he does, you punch that fucker in the fucking face.”

The Librarians put their hands on me, turned me around, and led me back into the lobby.

“Roundhouse-kick them!” said violence. “Pull out their esophagi!”

The Librarians stared at me. “Sorry about that,” said the discoer. “Scanner picked something up.”

“Not checking out any books tonight?” said the discoess.

“N — no,” I said.

“We’ve had problems with that thing,” said the discoer, pointing to the scanner.

“What’s your name?” said the discoess.

“Don’t tell them!” said a thought.

“Make something up!” said another.

“Head-butt the big one and sweep the leg of the small one!” said the thought of violence.

I tried to think of a name — any name. I gave them the first one I could come up with: “Chris,” I blurted. “My name is — Chris.”

“Chris what?”

“Chris B-ook,” I said. “Book.”

“Chris Book? That’s funny,” said the discoer. “Mr. Book? In a Library?”

“Can you hold out your arms, Mr. Book?”

I stretched out my arms and the discoess patted my shirt and my pant legs. In my mind, meanwhile, my thoughts were scrambling to hide. I could feel them ripping up pages from the book and cramming them wherever they could: in the empty channels and caverns in my skull, in my spinal column, behind my eyes, in my ear canals. The pain was terrible. I tasted words on my tongue, saw words in my eyes: there were letters on the male discoer’s face; the discoess had a W for an ear and her arm was a noun.

The discoess frisked me, stepped back, and looked to the discoer. “Nothing,” she said.

The discoer tapped his head.

“Bend down, please,” said the discoess.

“Everyone act natural!” shouted a thought.

I bent down. The discoess unlatched the lock on my skull and opened it at the seam. The hinge on my skull creaked as she lifted the lid.

I felt her eyes on my brain and I prepared for the worst. They would know that I stole. And then what? “They’ll interrogate you,” whispered the thought of violence. “Torture. Torture like only a Librarian can deliver.”

The female Librarian sighed. “I don’t see anything,” she said. “Just a bunch of thoughts sitting on a couch and watching television.”

“No books?” said the discoer.

“No books, no ideas, nothing,” said the discoess. “It’s like a tomb in here!” She stooped so she could see my face. “Is this place for rent?”

The discoer guffawed and slapped his knee.

“Hardy fucking har,” whispered the thought of violence, from wherever he was hiding in my mind. “I’ll kill both of you motherfuckers.”

The discoess closed up my skull. “My apologies, Mr. Book,” she said. “The alarm must have gone off by mistake.”

“No problem,” said my thought of speech.

“No problem,” I said.

I rushed out of the library and down to the bike racks, where I unlocked the Bicycle Built for Two. I started pedaling away, but I still couldn’t see; the whole world was words and terms. And the noise in my mind — my thoughts, high-fiving and dancing and celebrating — didn’t help either. “Thoughts rule!” shouted a thought of sidewalks. “Fuck yeah!” hooted the thought of violence.

Four blocks from the Library, when I could no longer hear the disco music, I collapsed on the dusky grass. I lay down on my side and my thoughts kicked open my brain and tumbled out of it. “Woo!” shouted the thought of violence, stepping into the grass. “We are badass thought mofos!” he roared. “Aren’t we?”

“That was so cool!” said the thought of walking.

I collapsed in the grass. I couldn’t speak; I was sick with words. The information was blurp reed, yazzing through my > mmm fulcrum.

“?” said a thought of home. “You OK?”

“Are you in need of gutter repair?” I said.

“What?” said the thought of walking.

“The fail is going on all weekend,” I said.

“What fail?” said violence.

“That’s our cornerback guarantee,” I said.

“He’s fucked,” said another thought.

My thoughts colluded to get me standing and walking; I hung over my bike and slowly made my way home. With every step, though, I felt changed; my cells were absorbing the stories — their sentences, symbols, and themes.

Halfway home, we ran into the Memory of Johnny Appleseed praying at the edge of a field of dead trees. “,” he said, and stood up. The knees of his pants were wet from the mud. “You OK?”

“You’re fine,” said my thoughts.

“I’m fine,” I said.

But I knew Johnny Appleseed wasn’t fooled — he could see the apples in my eyes.

D’ARCY SPICE

1987 wasn’t an anomaly; the Memory of Johnny Appleseed was wrong. The apples came back smaller the year after that, and smaller still — no bigger than crabs, in fact — the following year. In 1990, no apples grew at all — all the trees in Appleseed were bare. The Board of Select Cones voted to bring in a soil expert from the margins, but all she could do was confirm that the pagesoil was barren — she couldn’t say why or how to solve it. So the Board of Select Cones summonsed the Memory of Johnny Appleseed and demanded a solution. The Memory of Johnny Appleseed held out his hands to them. “I’m really not sure,” he said. “It has something to do with the stories we’re telling. They seem to be sapping the soil.”

The Memory was dismissed, and from then on, vilified. Or is it villainized? Cast out, outcasted: turned away at his favorite restaurants, denied meaning at his bank, locked out of his own apartment. Soon he was homeless. Rumor was he was sleeping on the streets or in the deadgroves. Sometimes you’d see him outside the Why, handing out brochures.

A host of theories ran through Appleseed: the blight was a curse, prayed upon us out of spite; it was some sort of wildword virus; it was a plot, spearheaded by East Appleseed to destabilize us. Meanwhile, we prayed for a different story, or a better ending to this one.

Overnight, it seemed, Appleseed lost most of its meaning. The applers tried swapping out their central ingredients for another — oranges, lemons, pears — but to no avail. Have you ever had a pearburger? A raw lemon? Ye — uck. Soon, applers began to leave town, hitchhiking over the margins toward richer harvests. The Planters who stayed in Appleseed gave up on perishables and tried their luck with solidifides: they planted chairtrees, for example, or fields of refrigerators.

It wasn’t long before the town’s appleloss hit home. My Mom lost hours at the hospital and had to pick up a shift at Appleseed Mental. That was the thought of small potatoes, though, compared to my Dad’s predicament. First, his tenants started sending in partial-meaning payments, forcing my Dad to hound them — to drive over to the apartments, knock on their doors, and ask them face-to-face where the meaning was. A few times I went with him. Once, we were driving down Belmont Street when we saw a pair of overalls who owed my Dad meaning walking toward the building. We parked the car and followed him inside. The overalls, who used to pick apples at Berson’s Farm before it shut down, answered the door with a four-foot cigarette hanging out of his mouth. When he saw it was my Dad, he nodded and leaned against the doorframe. “Ralph,” he said.

“It’s the ninth, Jaime,” said my Dad.

“Yes, it is,” said the pair of overalls.

“Nine days late,” said my Dad.

“Yes,” said the pair of overalls.

“Where is it?”

“I don’t have it.”

“You have to pay your rent, Jaime,” my Dad said.

“Do I?” the overalls said.

Soon it wouldn’t matter — more than half of my Dad’s tenants stopped paying. Some left in the middle of the night; some stayed behind even when the heat skipped town and the water died in the pipes.

With so few tenants living in the building, my Dad lost faith and fell behind on upkeep. And now that I think about it? That was right around the same time that my thoughts started turning inward, digging into my brain. My Mom took me back to Doctor Coat to see if this might be related to the music pills, and the Coat opened up my head and looked around. When he peered inside, one of my thoughts gave him the finger.

“Hm,” the Coat said. “Where are your other thoughts?” he asked me, his voice echoing off the walls of my skull.

“Out,” I said.

“Out where?” said the Coat.

“Out, OK?” I said.

“You see?” my Mom said. “He’s had that puss on his face for weeks now.”

“I have a headache, OK?” I said.

“It’s always something, isn’t it, ?” she said.

At home, our phone rang and rang. We were assaulted with calls and prayers from bill collectors, banks, disgruntled tenants. Soon my Dad stopped praying altogether. One day Mrs. Parker, who always paid her rent, prayed to me about a leaking toilet. I went to ask my Dad about it and found him on the back patio, picking pieces from a half-rotten Kaddish fruit. I told him about the prayer for service. “Sounds like a serious situation,” I said. “Do you want to go over there?”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said, looking out into the trees.

“Should I go over there?”

“Christ,” my Dad said. “Tell her I’ll get there when I can.”

“Today?”

“When I can,” my Dad said.

So that’s what I prayed to her. Hours later, though, Mrs. Parker prayed to me again. “Help!” her prayer said. “The water is up to my knees!”

I didn’t pray back.

“Now it’s up to my waist!” she prayed.

If I was really a good person? I would have ridden out there on my Bicycle Built for Two just to see what I could do. But instead I sat down on the couch with a bag of chips and watched TV, just like the spoiled, selfish piece of shit my Mom said I was. I didn’t move for the rest of the afternoon — not even when Mrs. Parker prayed to me that the water was up to her chin. Not even when the prayers stopped altogether.

YELLOW TRANSPARENT

As I said, my sister Briana was a towntalent in the arts of ancient construction and antiquing. Before I was even allowed to go with them, she and my Dad would take off for the dump in his truck and return with an overwhelm of strange objects. Growing up with her, I didn’t really appreciate the kind of eye it took to spot meaning — I couldn’t tell the difference between a worba and a forba, between a norch and a nouch — but my sister could spot truth in objects that your standard vulture or scav would look right past: she’d see the old in the warboots, hear the subtle sounds in a dead viola, recognize an entropy as a shrine from a goneby religion. When Bri was twelve, my Dad built a shed in the backyard where she could store her collectibles and tools. Once or a twice a summer he’d load up the truck with her fixed-ups and meaningfuls, drive her to the flea, and set up a table for her where she could sell. He’d subtract the meaning for the table and she’d get to keep the rest.

One day in the summer of her sixteenth year—1989, that would have been — my sister was cleaning out the shed, separating the meaningful from the seemingly-so. I was out in the yard that day, too, sanding window frames for my Dad. After working in the shed for a while, my sister took some of the less-meaningful objects — a nightstand, a sump pump, a faux-antique mailbox, and some other ifs and ands — out to the treebelt and left them by the road for the taking. Then she helped me with the windows; I taped and she painted. We had the tape deck blasting from the front steps. “Who is this?” I asked Briana at one point.

“UCs,” she said.

“Who?” I said.

We were midway through the stack of windows when a Pontiac pulled over in front of our house. A scarf stepped out of the car, walked over to the pile, and picked up the sump. He turned it over, held it up, and shouted out to us, “How much?”

My sister put her hands on her hips.

Before she could answer, a woman in an old, leaning veggiecar pulled up in front of the scarf’s Pontiac. The woman rolled down the window and said, “That sump pump for sale?”

My sister looked at me, and then back at the scarf and the woman.

“How much are you asking for it?” the woman said.

It felt to me like all of Appleseed stopped at that moment — even the clouds and the air and the prayers.

“How about,” Briana said, her voice pivoting, “two concepts?”

The woman got out of the car; she and the scarf looked at each other. Then the woman said, “Two, yes.”

“I’ll give you two and a quarter concepts,” said the scarf.

I saw a flash in Briana’s eye. “Do-I-hear—” she said, “—two-and-a-half?”

“What?” said the scarf. “What is this, an—”

“Two and a half,” said the woman.

“Three,” said the scarf.

Just like that, the Auctioneer was born. “Four?” she said. “Do-I-hear-four?”

I remember the music in her words. That first call wasn’t perfect — her bidding responses were mumbled, hesitant — but I think all three of us heard the natural rhythmic tumble in her voice. It was as if she’d been waiting for this page all her life, and finally you turned to it.

“Four,” said the woman.

“Five,” said the scarf.

“Do-I-hear-six?” said Briana.

The scarf and woman looked at each other.

“Six? Going-once? Going-twice?”

“Six,” said the woman.

With every bid, it seemed, the Auctioneer found more of a foothold. “Six. Seven? Do-I-hear-seven? Going-once! Going-twice?”

The scarf shook its head.

“Sold-to-the-woman-with-the-angry-ears!” said the Auctioneer.

The woman frowned.

That was the beginning of a new chapter for my sister. When she told my Dad what had happened, he set up a piece of plywood on some sawhorses in the backyard and she rifled through the shed for more items to sell. The next day, people showed up in our driveway as if driven by some external force; they sat in the grass while my sister stood on a chair and called the auction. She held auctions the following day, too, and all day that Saturday. Soon, she was skipping school so she could focus on building an inventory for her backyard auctions. She replaced the plywood with folding tables and the chair with a beat-up lectern. Within a few weeks, everyone in Appleseed knew about my sister and her auctions — there were always ten or eleven cars camped out in front of 577, waiting for bidding to begin. Every afternoon of my fourteenth year I’d pedal home from school, sit on the roof with a bag of chips, and watch the bidders shouting and arguing.

“Don’t-tell-me-good-people-that-twenty-four-is-the-best-you-can-do!” my sister shouted, standing at a lectern. “I-thought-you-were-serious-and-meaningful!”

“Twenty-six!” someone hollered.

“Still-an-insulting-amount-of-meaning-for-this-particular-washboard,” my sister shouted. “It-is-an-ANTIQUE-after-all—”

“Thirty!”

Soon, people started telling stories about my sister’s gifts: her discerning eye, the cadence and precision of her voice, her ability to engage with a crowd and elicit meaning. One night that fall, my sister sat down at the kitchen table for dinner and said she had an announcement. “I-will-no-longer-respond-to-the-name-Briana,” she said.

“Oh, yes, you will,” said my mother, without looking up from her plate.

“I think she can decide what she wants to be called, Diane,” my Dad said.

My Mom glared at him.

“As long as it’s within reason,” my Dad said.

“How about dumbface?” I said.

“,” my Mom said.

My sister didn’t seem fazed. “From-this-day-forward,” she said, “I-shall-be-known-as-the-Auctioneer.”

“Auctioneer?” I laughed. “That’s so stupid.”

“The. I-am-the-Auctioneer,” she said, and turned to me with eyes like arrows, “and-don’t-you-forget-it.”

THE MOTHERS OF APPLESEED

SENTENCE THE SENTENCE II

I walked that sentence all over Appleseed — he was my true good friend. In the cold months, I’d just lead him out across the street to relieve himself in the margin, but in the spring and summer we’d zell all the way to the Town Green and back, or out to the Amphitheatre, or sometimes to Wolf Swamp. I even put a basket on the handlebars of the Bicycle Built for Two so “I am.” could ride with me and the Reader. I remember the way Sentence would rest his chin on the front of the basket so the wind would push back the serif on his “I.”

That was right after the blight, when everything changed in our house. My sister was consumed by her auctions and my father was always out trying to scrape together some meaning. And I hardly saw my mother either — she was training harder than ever. So I basically raised that sentence myself — I fed him and walked him. If his words were tired, I carried “I am.” in my coat pocket. I took him to school with me, and to the buildings after school, and to Oh Death for food — everywhere I was, “I am.” was, too.

Soon, Sentence was no longer a single subject and verb. He grew from “I am.” to “I am here.”, to “Am I here?”, to “I think I am here.”, to “I think, therefore, right here.”, to “He therefores, thinks, and ams.” and on and on. The sentence was constantly revising — every day was a new iteration.

The point of this part of the story — of these sentences — though, is that “I am.” was there for me when no one else was. Looking back on it now, I can say—

It was like:

How do I put this into words?

Like, loneliness? It was like, sometimes I wasn’t. Wasn’t anything. Wasn’t anyone. I could stop being, and not be, and I didn’t know if anyone would notice. But at least I could turn that thought — that thought of loneliness, of unmeaning — into words, and say those words to Sentence. And “I am.” would just listen—he might fart or fall asleep, but he wouldn’t leave me or judge me. And I wouldn’t abandon him, either: senseless, smelly, whatever — I was just happy for the companionship.

Which isn’t to say that I was a pushover — I raised that language right. I always walked “I am.” on a leash — I had to, in accordance with Appleseed bylaws — and at night, Sentence slept in a cage in the basement. It’s very important to cage your language — otherwise, it can read in its sleep and havoc your whole house. My sentence was usually friendly, but a lot of language is vicious — quick-tempered, impulsive, violent. You know how, when you’re out in Appleseed late at night, you sometimes hear a mawing in the distance — like, a low vumble or a harl? That’s wild language, reading the city for food or a mate or fighting each other over territory.

As well-behaved as he was, “I am.” was wild as well. Sometimes he would run away. Once he disappeared for two days and showed up at the back door, his mouth covered in blood. Another time the Memory of Johnny Appleseed found Sentence wandering in a deadgrove. “I am.” had been gone for about twenty-four hours when the Memory of Johnny Appleseed rode over to my house on his treebike. “Are you?” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

It had only been a month or two since the start of the blight, but Johnny had aged. Instead of wearing his trademark straw hat and overalls, he had on Converse hi-tops, gaudy parachute pants, and a stained green blazer. His eyes were weary.

“Am I — what?” I said.

“Are you?” he said.

“I don’t know what you’re asking me,” I said.

“You’re supposed to say ‘I am,’ ” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed, taking the sentence out from underneath his blazer. “It’s a joke — get it?”

“ ‘I am.’!” I said. “Thank you so much, man.”

“You should train that rambunctious clause,” the Memory of Johnny Appleseed said, and then he put his foot on the wooden pedal, pushed off, and rode away.

To be honest, though, I liked that “I am.” had a wild streak — that he sometimes picked up the scent of language and pulled on the leash. I didn’t want to lose “I am.” but I always wanted him to be who he was — to follow his innate language animal instincts. Those instincts were often really helpful, actually. “I am.” could always tell if someone was wounded, for example; if I had a headache, Sentence would lead me to the sofa and sit beside me. And once, “I am.” and I got lost on a walk through Wolf Swamp and the wolves started jeering and throwing bottles. After leading us around the swamp in a circle, I asked Sentence to get us out of there. He sniffed the air with his “m” and forged forward; soon, I could see the edge of the parking lot.

Maybe two months into the blight, I was walking Sentence in the backyard one afternoon when he started pulling me toward the shed where my sister stored her items for auction. “I am.” was interested in a tarp-covered pile of junk outside the shed — he kept lunging for the blue vinyl. “What is it, buddy?” I said.

Then the door of the shed opened and my sister stepped out. “Hey,” said the Auctioneer.

“Sorry,” I said. “Sentence was just sniffing around. Is there time under there or something?”

“Don’t-think-so,” she said, and she pulled back the tarp. Underneath was a bunch of moldy old yellow pads of paper and clipboards of different sizes. I recognized them as the same pads my Dad was always writing notes and to-do lists on. “Those Dad’s?” I said.

The Auctioneer nodded. “A-stationery-store-went-out-of-business-and-gave-all-this-stuff-away. Want-one?”

“I am.” was spinning with excitement.

“Maybe just to calm him down,” I said.

My sister handed me a clipboard and a pad of paper. “What time does the auction start?”

“Three,” she said, and she stepped back into the shed.

I led Sentence down the hatchway and into the basement. I dropped the clipboard and pad on the ground and sat down with some chips. As soon as I opened the bag, though, “I am.” appeared next to me with the yellow pad of paper.

“What is it, ‘I am.’?” I said.

He put the pad in my lap and looked up at me. I put aside the bag of chips. “I am.” looked down at the yellow space — the blank page — as if he could see something I couldn’t.

I reached for a pen and wrote the words “I” and “am” on the page. “That’s your name,” I told him.

He looked at the letters. His eyes lit up. A thought in my mind said, “here,” and I transferred the words from that room in my brain to the pen to the page. “I am here,” I wrote.

He looked at me, and back at the page.

“I’m not here,” I wrote.

“I am.” frowned.

“I wasn’t here,” I wrote.

“I wasn’t born here,” I wrote.

“I wasn’t born in Appleseed,” I wrote.

With a steady time diet, shelter, and regular exercise, “I am.” grew and complicated. Soon he was “I am writing.” Then “I am writing words on the page.” Then, “I am writing words on the page about my own life.” And then, “I am going to transform my life through writing. I can do anything.”

Reader: “Transform?” That word is wild, .

I can do anything on the page.

Not using those words, you can’t!

“Yes,” I wrote. “Yes, I can.”

LADY SUDDELEY

For the first two months of the blight there was no word at all from the Mothers. You’d just see them overhead, in Reading Formation, scanning the page below. With more time on her hands, my Mom would sometimes drive around in the Fart, looking for a flock to follow. Once she saw some skirts in the sky on the way home from the Big When—“Look!” she said, “Look at them go!”—and she steered us down a side street in pursuit.

“I thought we were going to the When,” I whined.

“Tsk,” my Mom spat. “We’ll go where I say, when I say.”

My sister and I exchanged glances but neither of us said anything. We followed the pack of Mothers for almost half an hour, until they reached the southeast margin and swooped into a giant Nest. I think that was my first time actually seeing a Nest — which, I was surprised to see, really did look like a nest. Only this Nest? Was as big as a football field, and suspended about three hundred feet in the air, and made of twists of cement and dark steel. I could see glass windows in the gaps, and Mothers in goggles standing watch on some of the highest beams.

“Wow,” my mother said. “These woman are heroes. Heroes.”

“The-When-closes-in-an-hour,” the Auctioneer said. My Mom stared up at the Nest for another minute or two and then turned the Fart toward East Appleseed. “Heroes,” she said again.

Growing up with my Mom, I knew all about the Mothers — both the Appleseed chapter and the national movement, the Mothers of America. My Mom loved to tell us stories about the history of the brigade: the Mothers’ silent, ever-present support of the Suffragettes, the Anti-Slavery Conventions, the Woman’s Peace Party. Lucretia Mott was secretly a Mother, my Mom told us. So was Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth. Abraham Lincoln. Ida B. Wells! Allen Ginsberg.

Reader: Abraham Lincoln?

Mothers don’t have to be women, nor do they have to have children. They just have to go through the training and take the oath; Mothers pledge to guard and protect a story, or change it when need be. Mothers can kick ass when they have to — they protected Allied planes during Word War II, for example, by deflecting machine-gun fire with their warskirts — but their real talent is revision. Did you know that the Mothers flew back to the pages of WWII after the conflict, for example, and reduced the casualties by thousands?

In those days the Mothers were more visible — you knew their names, and their meetings were open to the public. In the 1970s, though, the Mothers clandestined. The real wars, they realized, were hidden, happening on the everyday pages of the American suburbs: women suffering, in other words, in their very own homes. So that generation of Mothers changed their tactics. Instead of flying in a pack of thirty, they’d send out a school of four matriarchal vigilantes who’d hover overhead with state-of-the-apple surveillance devices. If they heard a catcall on a downtown Appleseed street, for example, or the sound of a man raising his voice to a woman, they’d swoop in. That’s what happened to Pauline Bramley and her husband Norman. Do you know that story?

Bramley and his wife lived on Derby Dingle. One night, Norman came home kaddished and he and his wife got in an argument. Norman, a rougher who’d already spent some time in Appleseed Prison, punched Pauline in the stomach. The Mothers were listening overhead and they heard Pauline cry out. They dropped through the clouds, tore the roof completely off the Bramleys’ house, picked Norman Bramley up by one arm and carried him to a Nest. When they returned him to his home three days later, he had a broken collarbone and nothing but nice things to say to his wife or anyone else. I mean that literally — the only words that he spoke for the rest of his life, over and over, were the words “nice,” “good,” and “fine.”

Word of that story and others like it hurdled through Appleseed. Soon it was clear who ran the book. Men did what they could—pretending to work, pretending to take care of their houses and cars, growing hair on their faces, baring their teeth — but Appleseed was steered by its women.

As the weeks passed without apples, though, people wondered where the Mothers stood, what they were doing to help. The Daily Core ran headline after headline: MOTHERS SILENT ON APPLE BLIGHT, one read. STILL NO WORD FROM THE MOTHERS, said another. And then, finally: WHERE THE &*!$ ARE THE MOTHERS?

At last, the Mothers accepted an invitation to attend a meeting of the Board of Select Cones. The Reader and I went with my Mom to Town Hall for the meeting. We arrived early to get good seats. When we walked in I saw three Mothers — two women and one man — seated at the front near a screen and a slide projector. The Mothers were dressed in standard combat issue: goggles, cardigan, warskirt.

Reader: Warskirt?

A Mother’s main resource. Warskirts are just like regular skirts, with a few modifications: they’re bulletproof, they have razor-sharp edges, and they hold knives, artillery, and a variety of small tools.

When everyone was seated, Cone Johnson coughed and leaned into his microphone. “I think we all know why we’re here,” he said. “Mothers? Would you like the floor?”

The Mother who stood up had gigantic muscles, and her face was painted with strange colors: stripes of orange, green, and pink. “Evening,” she said. “We’ve been looking at every angle of this apple shortage — going back into the past, forward into the future, lifting words off the page to look underneath them, trying to get a sense for what’s going on here.”

“Sitting on your asses is more like it,” mumbled a sweater behind me. The second Mother — taller, leaner — stood up and the sweater looked down at his shoes.

“We don’t think the problem is with the pages themselves. Our tests suggest strong fibers; the glue is holding; the spine is intact. The problem,” said the muscled Mother, “is that the pages of Appleseed itself are infested.”

The crowd began to murmur. “The pages?” said someone behind me.

“Which pages?” someone else said. “This one?”

Cone Johnson leaned toward the microphone. “Infested with what?” he said.

One of my thoughts coughed.

The male Mother stood up and turned on the slide projector. An image of a worm appeared on the white screen.

“What you see there probably looks like your standard garden-variety pest,” said the muscled Mother, and the male Mother took a stack of brochures off the table and started handing them around. “But these guys are different,” the muscled Mother said. “These worms — we call them ‘bookworms’—are thoughts. In the form of sentences.”

“So it’s not a worm, then,” asked Select Cone Miles.

“Technically? It’s a literaficidae,” said the tall Mother.

“Pardon?”

“It has a printed body. They burrow and hide just like any other worm.”

I took a brochure—What’s So Bad About a Bookworm? — and passed the stack on.

“And the sentences change at will,” the muscled Mother said. The male Mother pushed a button on the projector and a new image appeared: a worm in the shape of the letter e. Then another image: a worm in the shape of an s.

“Are these all the — same worm?” said Cone O’Martian.

“This is bullshit,” said the sweater, standing up and pointing. “That one’s not even a woman!” he shouted. The tall Mother went over to the sweater, picked him up, threw him over her shoulder, and carried him out. “It’s bullshit!” the sweater shouted.

Cone Johnson raised his hand.

“Don’t need to raise your hand, Cal,” said the male Mother.

“So what if they change?”

“So what?” the male Mother repeated.

“Yeah,” said Cone Johnson. “Why is that a big deal? I think it’d be kind of cool to see a sentence change right in front of me.”

“It’s what killed the apples,” said the muscled Mother. “Appleseed is the story of happiness, soil fertility, and meaning. But now all that’s changing. It won’t stop with the trees. If we don’t stop the bookworms, they’ll erase all of Appleseed, destroy everything meaningful.”

“Or carry it away,” said the male Mother.

“Carry it away?” said Cone O’Martian.

The muscled Mother turned back to the screen. “What we don’t know yet,” she said, pointing to the pictures of the holes in the page, “is where those channels lead.”

“We don’t want to overreact and cause panic,” said the male Mother. “All we’re asking for right now is vigilance. You see a strange sentence? One that seems like it’s not from Appleseed? Pray to us about it.”

“In the meantime,” said the muscled Mother, “we’re doubling our reads and recruiting new Mothers.”

My Mom sat up in her seat.

“We’ll be trying out Mothers in O’Shady Groves next Friday at eight a.m.,” the male Mother announced.

Looking back, that was the moment I lost her — the moment that she became a Mother to the world, but the Memory of a Mom to me.

MOTHERS’ DAY

I didn’t attend the tryouts — I had school that day. I’d started at Appleseed High — a bigger, more dangerous place — the previous fall, and I was really struggling. It was easy to get lost in that school — to walk down a corridor toward your next class, take a wrong turn, and find yourself in a class on death or loss that you could never get out of. I know a scoom named Kyle who walked into a class on Aging? He emerged forty years later with wrinkles on his face and a curve in his spine.

I took the standard list of classes: Complicated World, Days of Joy, What to Be Most Frightened Of, the History of Depression, and Gym. I was failing almost all of them — it was like something was wrong with my brain. In Complicated World, Ms. Colton kept me after school to discuss my grades. “I don’t understand it, ,” she said. “The quizzes are open-book. Why is this giving you so much trouble?”

I shrugged.

“Don’t you find this interesting? The complicated world?”

“I guess I just don’t think it’s all that complicated,” I said.

“Are there problems at home, ?” said Ms. Colton. “Or with your friends?”

“My only friend besides ‘I am.’,” I told her, “is the Reader.”

“The who?” she said.

“Me,” said the Reader.

“The Reader,” I said.

“Is that a real person?” she said.

“Of course,” I said. “She’s right over there.”

“Jokes aren’t going to get you anywhere,” she said. “I’m trying to help you.”

“I’m trying to help me, too,” I said.

The only class I did OK in was Depression. I never studied for the exams in that class and still I got the best grades. In his comments on one of my papers, my teacher — a lizard named Dr. O’Rich — said that I had promise. “I seriously think that you should consider a career in depression,” he wrote.

In all of my other classes, though, my teachers gave up on me. In What to Be Most Frightened Of, the teacher even moved my desk into the corner. The weather in my school was generally pretty good — mild sun, a few clouds — but those corners were often cold and sometimes inclement. That day, in fact — the day of the tryouts — it had started snowing in my corner, right in the middle of class. We were supposed to be creating fear hierarchies, but the snow made it difficult to concentrate. I got up from my desk and approached the teacher, a cardboard cutout, and said, “It’s snowing in my corner.”

“Is it literal snow,” said the cutout, “or metaphorical snow?”

We’d studied metaphors the previous week.

“Real snow,” I said.

“Are you sure your thoughts don’t seem as snow?”

I went back to my desk, pushed the snow off my paper, and kept working.

I was even more distracted than usual that day, though — all I could think about was how my Mom was doing. That and what the Mothers had said about the bookworms. Was Sentence, I wondered, a bookworm?

No. “I am.” acted fierce sometimes, but his “bark” was way worse than his “bite.” My sentence wasn’t like the wild language you read about in The Daily Core—the sentences that had been seen slithering up storm grates, making holes in our stories. The previous month, someone had been killed by a sentence, even, when she mistakenly came between the clause and its mother-sentence while hiking in the margin. “I am.” wasn’t capable of that kind of cruelty — he was just a sweet, innocent statement!

That afternoon, though, I rode right home after school. My Mom wasn’t back from the tryouts yet, so I found the pamphlet from the meeting and sat down on the couch with Sentence.

WHAT’S SO BAD ABOUT A BOOKWORM?

BROUGHT TO YOU BY

THE MOTHERS OF AMERICA

In many ways, bookworms are similar to the common earthworm — the oligochaeta—except that the bookworm, which is known as the literaficidae, has a printed skeleton. This print-based body allows it to morph from one character or idea to another, shifting its appearance and meaning on a whim.

Diet

Literaficidae survive most readily in narrative, stories, or other text. They crave stories: predicaments, conflicts, crescendos, denouements. They digest the tension and secrete the rest. This results in a “trail”—a telltale pathway of inconsistencies or red herrings left by a passing sentence.

Font

Bookworms can change font and style at will, quickly emboldening and italicizing, shrinking to hide, underlining or enlarging to scare predators. The most common literaficidae fonts, incidentally, are Cambria and Palatino. Courier New is frequently seen as well.

Plot Transference

Reports of recent bookworm incidents suggest that they can carry elements of plot or premise in their stomachs. In other words, they transport settings and moments in order to ensure their survival. If they can contain the story, that is, they save their place in it.

Metaphor

Metaphoring is another word for meaning simultaneously. The bookworms’ ability to metaphor is unparalleled. They can represent literally any number of ideas, motifs, or themes. Literary scientists suggest that this metaphoring is the result of evolution over hundreds of thousands of years on the page.

Regeneration

Like the common oligochaeta, the literaficidae can regenerate if injured. Say that a sentence, prior to injury, represented the threat of nature. If a group of them were attacked and unable to regenerate as nature, they might opt for another syntactically similar comparison — the threat of the future, say.

Frequently asked questions about Living with Bookworms

Q. My community has been infested with strange words! What do I do if I see one?

A. Pray to the Mothers! Send them the page number and locale. Then stop reading in that direction and read the other away as fast as you can.

Q. Is metaphoring contagious?

A. Not that we know of, no. Metaphoring is not an illness or virus; rather, it’s the bookworms’ way of making themselves seen and known. Human beings show no tendency toward metaphoring.

Q. What have we done to deserve this invasion?

A. Nothing. The bookworms have chosen your story at random, in the same way that termites infest a house or typewriters attack smaller typewriters. It’s a question of narrative survival — nothing more.

Q. Do the bookworms have anything to do with the disappearance of apples (the blight)?

A. The current theory says yes, that the apple trees — which draw nutrients from the page — were not able to sustain the growth of appletree groves because of bookworm-inspired page-rot. This is one of the reasons that we’re aiming to stop, or at least curb, bookworm infestations. And with your help, we will!

Thanks for doing your part to help save Appleseed from bookworms!

I heard the Fart in the driveway and I put down the brochure. A minute later, my Mom walked in with her reading goggles over one shoulder and her nunchucks over the other.

“How’d it go?” I said.

“OK,” she huffed, but I knew it went great; her face was as happy as I’d ever seen it. And just two days later, I came home after school and saw two duffel bags by the door.

“?” my Mom hollered.

“Yeah,” I said, staring at the bags.

“We’re in here,” she said.

I walked into the kitchen and saw my father, mother, and sister sitting at the table. “Sit down, ,” my Mom said.

I sat in one chair and the Reader sat in the other. “No,” said my Mom to the Reader. “This is for family only.”

“Mom,” I said, embarrassed.

“She can go sit in the TV room,” said my Mom. Then my Mom looked at you.

“Go,” she said.

You got up and went into the TV room. The TV stared at you. “What do you think they’re talking about?” the TV asked.

“I don’t know,” you said, even though you did.

The TV made a face. “What’s the luggage for?”

Then you heard crying in the kitchen. That was me — I was the one crying. “This isn’t fair!” you heard me say.

“,” said my Dad.

“It’s not, Dad!” I shouted.

Then you heard the slam of someone’s fist on the table, followed by Diane’s voice. “There are bigger problems in the world than what you’re going to have for dinner, ! Appleseed needs me more than you do.”

Then there was more crying, and the sound of running feet and slamming doors.

“Sheesh,” said the TV. “That didn’t sound good.”

You sat in the TV room for a while, being watched, and watching others being watched, and finally you clicked the remote and walked quietly out into the living room. Diane was smoking a six-foot cigarette and looking out the window. You opened the basement door and went downstairs. I was sitting on the floor in the middle of a paragraph.

You wanted to say something to me, but you didn’t know what. You already understood what would happen next — you’d read the story about Diane flying away to join the Mothers and the missing that followed/would follow.

“You OK?” you asked. When I looked up and you read my face, you knew the answer.

AUXERRE

Reeling from a loss of meaning, thunderous debt, and my Mom’s sudden absence, my Dad turned to get-ideas-quick scams: long-shot prospects, wheelsanddeals, outlandish trades. First he tried trapping and selling memories, but no one would buy them. Then The Ear convinced him to invest some socked-away meaning in a new, virtual kind of reading—“People won’t need pages at all!” The Ear promised — but he disappeared two days later with my Dad’s investment. When my uncle heard about The Ear’s scam he came by the house to check on my Dad — he brought my Dad a Kaddish Fruit, and the two of them shared it outside on the back step. I was out there, too, sitting on the lawn with Sentence.

“Found you a job,” said my uncle, biting into the blue fruit.

“Can I have some of that?” I said, meaning the fruit.

“No,” my Dad said. Then he turned to my uncle. “What job?” he asked, spitting out a seed.

Joump just looked at him.

“Not Muir Drop,” my Dad said.

Muir Drop Forge, where my uncle worked, huffed on the Kellogg River a mile or so from our house. Muir Drop made work — most of the labor in western Massachusetts was forged there, in fact. In those days, work was all the rage in America — people couldn’t get enough of it — and so Muir was always looking for people. It was backbreaking work, though — the labor they made was grimy, tar-like, pulled from deep in the page. My uncle worked twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, repairing equipment. The injury rate was high at Muir Drop; there were accidents all the time. One day Joump came over with a big burn across his arm where he’d been splashed with toil. Plus, his hands were permanently black from labor that wouldn’t wash off.

“I can’t think of any place I’d rather not work,” my Dad said.

“No shit,” Joump said. “But somanabitch, Ralph. Look around. Just you and the kids now. The banks aren’t just going to stop calling.”

“Thanks but no thanks,” my Dad said. “I’ve still got a few tricks up my sleeve.”

“Tricks,” Joump said. “Like what?”

We found out two days later, when my Dad rounded up me and my uncle in the ropetruck and drove south across Page Boulevard and over Old Five. “OK, I give up,” said Joump. “Where we going?”

“To find the Memory of Johnny Appleseed,” said my Dad.

“Ah, Christ, Ralph — is it too late to turn around and take me home?”

“Yes,” said my Dad, and he drove on.

Since the blight began six months earlier, the Memory of Johnny Appleseed had become a pariah. The Memory didn’t help his cause, either, by proclaiming to anyone who’d listen — at Town Hall meetings, outside the Why — that salvation was just a harvest away; that he’d had dreams and visions of trees shaped like hands holding giant apples, the biggest fruits Appleseed had ever seen. “The blight is not Appleseed’s, but ours!” he’d preach to passerbys outside the Hu Ke Lau. “It’s a failure of imagination! A blight in our own minds!” Most people would ignore him. “And I have found the way forward,” he’d shout after them. “The new soil. We must shed our fears. Boldly move into the unknown. Only then will the apples return.”

We found the Memory of Johnny Appleseed further down Five, walking with his thumb out. My Dad pulled the truck over beside him and rolled down the window. “Where’s your treebike?” he shouted.

“It has—” the Memory of Johnny Appleseed paused, blinked, and sniffed, “—been apprehended.” Then he hoisted his satchel higher on his shoulder.

“What’s in the bag?” said Joump.

“Seeds,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

“So this new soil,” said my Dad.

“Yes.”

“Can you show us where to find it?” my Dad said.

“There are groves not yet named,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. “Pages not yet written. On these pages is where we’ll grow the new groves.”

“Oh, Jesus,” said Joump.

“Can we go there?” said my Dad.

“Ralph,” said Joump. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I can show you the soil,” the Memory of Johnny Appleseed said.

“Right now?” my Dad asked.

“It’s up on Appleseed Mountain. We can go at first light.”

“Get in,” my Dad said, and nodded to the back of the truck. The Memory of Johnny Appleseed climbed into the bed of the truck and my Dad pulled back onto the old highway.

The Memory of Johnny Appleseed slept at our place that night. My Dad offered him the living-room couch, but he chose to sleep outside instead. Before I went to bed, I looked out the window and saw the Memory, lying on his back in the grass, talking to the stars. He told a joke and all of the stars cracked up laughing.

We were on the road at sunrise. We picked up Joump and drove straight for Appleseed Mountain. That mountain was dangerous: full of haunted memories, false meanings, misfits, bookworms, and wild language of all sorts — rattlesnakes, old drafts, black bears, erased versions, transparent spiders, errors, menasentences, typos, and countless other threats.

It took us about fifteen minutes to reach the foot of the mountain. We drove up one of the mountainsocks, following the tire tracks as far as they went. Then my Dad parked the truck, got out, and lifted two nets out of the back of the truck. He handed one to me. “What are these for?” I said.

“For whatever,” he said.

We started up through the trees. The Memory of Johnny Appleseed led and my Dad followed right behind him; then it was me and Joump. A few minutes into the hike, I saw a flash of ink to my left: two giant letters sipping something out of cans wrapped in paper bags. “Worms,” said Joump, and he pushed me forward.

A bit higher up, I saw a strange chair-shaped bird. It stood on two spindly legs and squinted in the light.

“How much farther, Appleshit?” said Joump.

The Memory of Johnny Appleseed turned around and looked quizzically at Joump.

“I really don’t care for that shortname,” he said. “You can call me Johnny or Johnny Appleseed or the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. Or just Appleseed, if you prefer.”

“How much farther—Appleshit?” said Joump again.

“Joump,” said my Dad.

“Edge of the page in about half a mile,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

Just then I heard a commotion — someone, or something, was coming. We moved off the path just in time to see dozens of figures — maybe two hundred or more — trudging toward us. I looked to the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. “Old versions,” he said. “Draft refugees.”

The drafts approached and passed. All of us were there — everyone in Appleseed, probably. I saw a draft of my sister, an old version of Large Odor. And soon I saw my father. “Dad,” I said.

My Dad turned, squinted, and saw the earlier version of himself — a man maybe ten years younger, with different glasses and more hair. He was heavier and had more color in his face. “Handsome dude,” my Dad said, and smiled.

Joump followed right behind him. The Joump in that story, though, was clearly kaddished — he wore a blank blue look on his face. As soon as the now-Joump saw himself he broke into a sprint. His face took on a snarl that could only mean one thing: he wanted a fight. Before anyone could stop him, he ran full-speed at his old self and tackled him.

The rough draft of Joump fell back under the now-Joump, but then he stood up with a grin and a face full of blood. He launched right back at the now-Joump, driving him back against a tree. The now-Joump howled. My Dad pulled them apart. He pushed the old draft back into the past and led Joump over to the path.

Behind the draft of my uncle, I saw an old version of myself — me maybe four years earlier. I had pleats in my toupee, and I wore mismatched Converse hi-tops and a black-and-green cycling cap with pins on it.

The now-me and the draft me looked at each other. “Lose that hat,” I told him.

The then-me wrinkled his eyebrows.

“It’ll be lame in about a week,” I said.

My old self took off the hat. Then he continued down the mountain with the other drafts and we turned and kept climbing.

I could tell that Joump was hurt, though. He didn’t say anything, but he was limping and wincing with every step. My father, meanwhile, was grilling the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. “When you say ‘new soil,’ ” he said, “what do you mean exactly?”

“New pages,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. “Pages not yet written.”

“But what makes them different from the old pages?”

“We won’t make the same mistakes again,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

“Because I could really use a meaning infusion right about now,” my father confessed.

“Dad,” I said.

He looked back at me and I nodded toward Joump. “I’m fine,” Joump said. “Asshole just torqued my knee or something.”

Then we reached a clearing. Suddenly there was nothing but white space in front of us: no words, no ink at all. “Whoa,” I said.

The Memory of Johnny Appleseed stood at the edge and pointed forward. “We cross through here, over the spine.”

“Dad,” I said.

My Dad took a step onto the new page. His feet sank down. “It’s just the future,” he told me.

“Ralph,” said Joump. When my Dad looked at him, Joump gestured to his knee and shook his head. “I can’t,” he said.

“This is what we came here for,” my Dad told him.

“We either go together or we don’t go at all,” said the Memory.

My Dad leaned over and put his hands on his knees. “Fuck,” he said.

I squinted to try to see across the spine. Through the pagefog I could sort of make out — something. Was it a tree? A person?

My Dad stood up.

“It’s probably bullshit anyway,” Joump said quietly.

Dad started walking back the way we came. We all turned around and followed. The four of us trudged silently back down the mountain, retracing our sentences toward the base.

At the halfway point I kept an eye out for myself. I hadn’t had a chance to really talk to my draft. My thoughts wondered: How did it spend its days now? Did it go to an old version of school? Could it pedal a bike? Maybe the old me and the new me could be friends!

Then we rounded a paragraph and I saw good old Appleseed — all of the stories I knew: Appleseed High; the Big Why; the Mental Hospital; the sad gray patches of deadgroves.

Lumbering toward the car, my Dad’s face was as dark as I’d ever seen it. At one point, the Memory put a hand on his shoulder and said, “It’s going to be OK, Ralph. I won’t stop planting seeds until the apples return to Appleseed.”

“That doesn’t fucking solve my problem,” said my Dad. “I need meaning now. Today. Yesterday.”

My Dad dropped the Memory off at the Why and drove Joump to his house, and then we turned toward home. When we pulled into our driveway, though, two banks were sitting on the front stoop. “Christ,” my Dad said under his breath. He got out of the truck and the banks stood up — they were big and square and terrifying. “Look, Jimmy,” said one to the other. “It’s our buddy Ralph.”

“Hey buddy,” said the other bank.

“Let’s take a walk, buddy,” said the first bank. They put their cement hands on my Dad’s shoulders and walked across the street to the worryfields.

I don’t know what they said? But the next day, my Dad went to Muir Drop Forge and filled out an application. They hired him on the spot. He came home that night with his hands and arms covered in the soot of toil.

FATHERS IN THE FIELD

MARGIL

Soon, my sister’s auctions became unwieldy. There were two hundred people at our house every day; the traffic got so bad that my Dad had to park his truck across the street in the worryfields. Word of my sister’s talents traveled. She was a celebrity — there were articles every week about her in the gossip page of The Daily Core.

One afternoon that fall, I was watching the auction from the roof with Sentence by my side when I noticed a hooded figure in the back of the crowd. I couldn’t see his face — I’m still not sure that he had a face — nor did I see him arrive. He was just suddenly there, in a dark orange velvet cape, standing silently. When the auction was over, he waited until the crowd dispersed and then stepped forward to the pulpit to speak with my sister. I couldn’t hear what he said, but after a few minutes my sister brought the man into the house to see my Dad. I climbed back inside and ran down the stairs to see the three of them — my Dad, my sister, and the hooded man — sitting at the dining-room table. “Go to your room, ,” my Dad said.

“Who’s that?” I said.

“Go,” my Dad said.

I went down into the basement, but I sent two of my thoughts reconning to record the conversation. The hooded man’s voice was like a bubbly stream — his words all ran together. He said that he was from a famed auction school somewhere far beyond the margin — some place called Pilgrim Auctions — and that he was here because he’d heard the stories about my sister. He wanted my father’s permission for my sister to attend his school for auctioneers. “She’sgifted,” said the hooded man, “butwhatyouseehereisjustthebeginning.”

“She’s doing just fine right here in Appleseed,” said my Dad.

“I-could-do-better,” my sister said.

“Shecould,” said the hooded man.

“She’s just started,” my Dad said.

“Nottrue — shesalwaysbeenanauctioneer,” said the man.

“She has?” my Dad said.

“AndshecouldbethebesttheverybestauctioneerthatAppleseedhaseverseen,” he told my father.

“We’re very flattered,” said my father. “But Briana has a bright future—”

“My-name-is-the-Auctioneer,” said the Auctioneer.

“—college,” my Dad said. “A meaningful career.”

“You’re-not-being-fair!” my sister shouted.

“Auctioning here at home is one thing,” my Dad said to her. “Leaving home at sixteen years old is another.”

“Mom-left!” she said. “Why-can’t-I?”

“Mom didn’t leave,” said my Dad. “She’s helping protect Appleseed.”

“This-is-my-dream!” shouted the Auctioneer.

“The answer is no,” my Dad said.

At that point, my thought said, the hooded man stood up and walked out of the house. When I looked out my bedroom window I saw him floating down Converse Street.

My sister was hysterical. She ran to her room and slammed the door. “What-about-what-I-want!” she hollered from behind the door. “I-hate-it-here! I-hate-this-house!”

“What did I do?” the house said.

I knocked on her door. “Bri,” I said. “Can I come in?”

“No!” she said. “Go away!”

The house began to cry a little. “All I’ve ever been is nice to you.”

I went back to my sister’s room an hour later and knocked again. “Bri?” I said. “Auctioneer?” This time she didn’t answer at all.

“You asleep?” I asked.

I stood there for a minute and then went back down to the basement.

The next morning I walked upstairs and saw the door to the Auctioneer’s room ajar. I went in. The drawers in her dresser were open and there were clothes everywhere. I opened her closet door; her suitcase wasn’t there.

I ran downstairs and looked in every room. I sprinted out to the backyard and then into the front yard and looked up and down our street. “I am.” followed me, whimpering. I stood there for a few minutes, staring one way and the other. My sister wasn’t anywhere. The Auctioneer was gone.

WORCESTER PEARMAIN

The following summer — the summer before my junior year at Appleseed High — I began dating the Appleseed Community Theater. I met her by accident, when I was walking Sentence one day in downtown Appleseed. All of a sudden he started pulling me toward an unfamiliar building. Sentence had very good hearing, though, and he often got excited when he heard other sentences — even if I, myself, couldn’t hear them. When he started sniffing the steps of the small wooden building, I heard talking inside.

“Cute clause,” said the building. “What’s his name?”

“Sentence,” I said. “He heard people talking, and—”

“Yeah. We’re putting on a trueplay,” said the building.

I looked up at her. The sign above the door read APPLESEED COMMUNITY THEATER. “A true what?” I said.

“Play. Theater,” said the theater.

I’d seen theater productions in my high school. I said, “I didn’t know there was any theater in Appleseed.”

“Yeah — just moved here from Cambridge,” said the theater.

Sentence lunged at the leash.

“They’re rehearsing — you can watch if you want,” she said.

We stepped inside and saw rows of empty seats and a bright stage full of people and sentences. A man dressed like a sea captain was having a conversation with an old boat. The boat was storming back and forth across the stage, shouting out a plot for revenge. “Let’s say that buoy disappears somewhere.”

“But where?” the captain said.

“Doesn’t matter where,” said the boat. “Just so long as it’s kept quiet.”

We stepped outside after a few minutes, and I thanked the theater. “I’ll come back and see the show,” I said.

“And we’re looking for help if you know anyone. We still need a props master.”

“A what?” I said.

That was a great time for me — a season of promise and discovery. I did the props for every show that season—Dandelion Braise, Stormnote, and Too Many Bagels—and grew to really love working in the theater. It was located in a bad neighborhood, full of meaninglessers — two times I had the seats of my Bicycle Built for Two stolen — but I didn’t care. I liked having somewhere to go in the afternoons after school, and I could usually find most of the props that I needed at the flea bee.

Plus, you weren’t ever alone when you worked on a show — every cast and crew was like a family. I saw the director, Eric Wig, and his wife Ellen, who often played the leads, every day, while I hardly saw my own family at all. It didn’t seem to matter to anyone there that I was ugly and unremarkable — I was willing to work, and everyone seemed to appreciate that. My thoughts were always buoyant when a new show began. When one ended, I couldn’t get those thoughts off the couch if their lives depended on it.

Three weeks into rehearsals for Stormnote, though, the old trombone who was cast as the Old Man had an aneurysm on stage and died. I was right there when it happened. He was supposed to say his lines—“Are those vultures?”—and then shake his fist. At that moment he stepped forward and said, “Are those — whose vultures are those?”

“That’s not the line, Terry,” said Eric, looking down at his script.

“Reset the vultures!” shouted the stage manager, an easychair named Carol.

The trombone stood up, stumbled, made a terrible honking sound, and fell down on the boat.

“Whoa!” shouted a sandbag from the wings.

The trombone was shaking on the floor of the theater.

“Terry?” shouted the Community Theater.

We all ran out on stage. The Community Theater called the ParamediCones, but by the time they got there the old trombone was gone.

I went to the trombone’s funeral along with other people from the cast and crew. It was really sad. “You probably think you know everything about my father,” said Terry’s daughter at the pulpit. “But he was more than just a successful actor. Do you know, for example, that he was an inventor?”

Some people smiled through tears; others looked miffed.

“That he invented the Morp, for example?”

And there, in the corner, was a morp — one of the original prototypes.

The Mothers did a formation flyover and the bessoffs led the procession into the graveyard. “Let his body bring apples,” said the bessoffs in unison, and they lowered his body into the ground.

Rehearsals resumed two days later. That afternoon, I was in the vom fixing one of the scrolls when Eric called me over to the orchestra pit. He looked at me cemeterily and then leaned forward and said, “We need an Old Man.”

My eyebrows wormed.

“Any interest?”

“Me?” I said.

“You’re the oldest one here,” he said.

“No, I’m not,” I said. “Almost everyone here is older than me.”

“How old are you?” said the wig.

“I’m sixteen,” I said.

Wig stood up. “Haw,” he said.

I stared at him.

His head haunted forward. “You’re sixteen?” he whispered.

“My birthday was in April,” I said.

“Jesus, ,” he said. “I thought you were fifty. At least! Sixty, maybe.”

“No,” I said. “I’m a junior at Appleseed High.”

“But — because you’re — wow.” Wig put his hands on his hips. “Well,” he said, “Do you want to be the Old Man?”

“You mean act?” one of my thoughts said.

“On the stage?” another thought said.

My face must have changed because the wig said, “It’s a very minor role.”

So I took the part, wore the dead man’s clothes, stood on the deck of the falseboat, and looked out into the sea. “Fish?” I shouted. “In space?” Then I cast my fake fishing rod out into the real water. On cue, the lead fish down below looked at the hook and primrosed to the crowd.

It was my first taste of performance, of standing in front of people as someone not myself, of playing a role. I loved it. I thought maybe I could do this, make a career out of it — be a minor character: the ugly one in the background; the non-hero, the shithead — one of those corner-warts that make the beautiful look more beautiful!

I was so proud of my performance, of the fact that I — me! Not the Auctioneer, but me! — had an actual role in a play, that I asked my Dad if he’d come see the last show. He said he would if he could get off work, but he didn’t make it. By then he was working at Muir Drop and in meaning-debt to some pretty imposing banks. He prayed to me that he was sorry, and I prayed back that I understood.

That night after the show there was a party at the deadgroves. I didn’t plan on going — I’d never been invited to a party before, and I didn’t know exactly how they worked. I was unlocking my bike from the rack, though, when the theater pulled up beside me in a night-blue Jeep.

Scene: Bike racks. A Jeep drives up. The window rolls down to reveal the COMMUNITY THEATER driving and the CHORUS in the backseat.

COMMUNITY THEATER

Hey, !

continues unlocking his bike.

COMMUNITY THEATER

You need a ride?

Me?

COMMUNITY THEATER

You’re going to the party, aren’t you?

(Turning to face her.) I was just going to head home.

COMMUNITY THEATER

You should go!

CHORUS (from the backseat of the Jeep)

Come on, !

I’ve got my bike, though.

COMMUNITY THEATER

No problem. Get in and I’ll drop you back here afterward.

gets in the Jeep. The Jeep drives off the pagestage.

We drove out to the deadgroves, me in the passenger seat and the Chorus — a singular mass with twelve sets of torsos, arms, shoulders, necks, and heads — in the backseat. The Community Theater lit a cigarette and blew smoke out the window. The Chorus tapped me on the shoulder and I turned around. “Really great job, . You were awesome as the Old Man.”

“Thanks,” I said. I remember that moment — the thrill in my chest. On my way to an actual party! And then, to make things even better, the UCs’ “Paying Customers” came on the radio. After my sister left for auction school, I raided her tape collection. Whenever I missed her or felt lonely, I’d pick out one of her tapes — the UCs, usually — and listen to it on my orange headphones.

“Nice,” I said now. “I love this song.”

The Community Theater looked over at me and smirked. “You don’t know this song,” she said.

“ ’Course I do,” I said. “This is my favorite band.”

“Who is it?” asked the Chorus.

“I want to see if knows,” said the Community Theater.

“It’s the Ulcerative Colitises,” I said. “The album Tenesmus.”

“What’s the name of the song?”

“ ‘The Bathroom Is for Paying Customers Only,’ ” I said. “Fourth song on side A.”

The theater looked at me. “Wow,” she said. “I’m impressed.”

When we reached the deadgroves, the theater parked and we stepped out into the night. Most of the cast and crew was there, standing around a bonfire, and someone had brought a keg.

The wig’s wife, Ellen, gave me a hug — it had been so long since I’d hugged anyone — and told me that she hoped I’d work with them again in the future. Then the theater walked up to me and handed me a red plastic cup.

Scene: The deadgroves

COMMUNITY THEATER

Here.

looks into the cup, then takes a sip.

COMMUNITY THEATER

So how do you know the UCs?

Best band in Appleseed! Their zitherer, Oppenhowser? Is — like — the shit.

COMMUNITY THEATER

How about Yosa Ron?

She’s good.

COMMUNITY THEATER

Good? She’s the best hurdy-gurdy player in the history of—

Not as good as Ross Nary.

COMMUNITY THEATER

Who?

Gurdyer for the Porches.

COMMUNITY THEATER

I don’t know them.

Check out the album Overanda.

COMMUNITY THEATER

I don’t know a single other person who likes the UCs. My friend-theaters are mostly into show tunes.

I’ve got every tape they’ve recorded.

COMMUNITY THEATER

You know they’re coming to Appleseed.

No, they are not.

COMMUNITY THEATER

Appleseed Amphitheatre.

Holy crap.

COMMUNITY THEATER

You ever seen them?

Live? No.

COMMUNITY THEATER

(Pauses.) We should go.

(Looks into his cup.) Yeah. (Drinks.) That would be—

CHORUS wanders over, cups in every hand.

CHORUS

We are, like, so wasted.

(to COMMUNITY THEATER)

We should go. That’d be really fun.

COMMUNITY THEATER

Great.

CHORUS

Go where?

COMMUNITY THEATER

Nowhere.

We went to the show the following week. I wasn’t sure whether it was a date or not, but when the theater picked me up in her Jeep she smelled like a garden and her hair was contorted into this strange shape above her roof.

We got there in the middle of the opening set, by this new band called the OCDs. I might have heard one of their songs on WAPL—“Check, Check Again”—but I didn’t realize that it was them. The song had a catchy chorus, though:

Check the SINK

Check the SINK

Check the SINK

Check the SINK

Check the STOVE

Check the STOVE

Check the STOVE

Check the STOVE

Check the DOOR

Check the DOOR

Check the DOOR

Check the DOOR

Check it again

Check it again

Check it AGAIN

CHECK IT AGAIN

“They’re pretty good!” shouted the Community Theater.

Then the Colitises took the stage. The Community Theater screamed in a high voice, and I jumped up and down in my chair. “Good evening, Appleseed!” shouted Yosa Ron. Then she hit the tympani and rocked into “Urgency.”

I sang every word of every song; so did the Community Theater. Halfway through “Ultimate Flora,” she put her brick hand in mine. “Holy shit!” said one of my thoughts, and two other thoughts started jumping up and down manically on the carpeted floor of my mind.

The next song, “You’ll Have This Disease for the Rest of Your Life,” was a dirge. Halfway through it, the Community Theater put her head on my shoulder. When I turned to her, she leaned up and kissed me. Her mouth tasted like smoke and audience.

Pages flipped forward in my mind. When I looked back at the stage, the UCs were playing their biggest hit, “Bathroom.”

I can’t go to the movies

Cuz I have to go to the BATHROOM!

I can’t go to the bar

Cuz I have to go to the BATHROOM!

I can’t go in to work today

Cuz I have to go to the BATHROOM!

Where Oh where is the BATHROOM!

I need one right now

“BathROOM!” shouted the crowd. “BathROOM!”

When the concert was over, the theater led me through the parking lot to her Jeep and we drove back to my house. When we pulled into the driveway, she kissed me and said, “I’ll call you, OK?”

“OK,” I said.

My thoughts were dizzy as I walked inside. No one else was home, but that night I didn’t even care. I went down to the basement, found my clipboard, and wrote, “That night was one of the best nights of his life.”

The theater and I dated all fall, through four more shows. I was a walk-on ugly in each one: a strug in Tunic, a worryfielder in Mrs. Rain and Mr. Rain, a spinning in Quagmire! Every night after rehearsal, the Community Theater and I would go somewhere — the Big Why, the deadgroves, the Hu Ke Lau — to hang out and talk. Like me, the Community Theater didn’t have much of a home life. Her father was in New York City, her mother hooked on Kaddish. I told the theater I hadn’t seen my Mom since she’d left to Mother—“Not that I’m not proud of her,” I said. “I mean, she’s probably protecting the story right now.”—and that my father had started taking twenty-four-hour shifts at Muir.

“That sounds like workhosis,” she said.

I shrugged.

Looking back, I think that’s what the theater and I shared: we both knew the echoes of an empty house. So we never made out there — instead, we’d drive into the Dunes and lie down in the backseat of the Jeep. She’d kiss me, dangle her theater hair over my face. We’d take off our shirts and pull a blanket over us.

One night, she reached for the button on my pants. “Is this OK?” she said.

I nodded.

“You sure?”

“Yes,” I said.

The scene happened so quickly; soon it was one spotlight, and then several, and then all the light, bright hot white, and then curtains, and applause, and darkness. Outside, prayers bounced off the roof of the Jeep; memories sang songs in the distance.

Shortly after the closing of Quagmire!, though, something shifted in me. I was sad to see that cast go, and I wasn’t excited for Holiday Nightmare, the play that Eric had chosen for December. I lost heart, got tired of the whole production — the blocking, the run-throughs, the pressure to bring in an audience. All of that scrimming just to tell a truestory? A thought said, “I could tell a better story with a clipboard and a yellow sheet of paper.”

I said as much to the theater one night while we were parking in the Dunes. “We could just quit the show,” I said. “Tell our own story instead.”

Scene: Theater, post-rehearsal

COMMUNITY THEATER

Why would we do that?

I just don’t think we need an audience to be together.

COMMUNITY THEATER

Of course we do. We’re all in this together — don’t you get that?

But I didn’t get it. “Can we speak in prose?” I said.

COMMUNITY THEATER

How can you even ask me that?

“I’m just saying maybe I want to tell a different story — or this story in a different way,” I said.

COMMUNITY THEATER

Are you breaking up with me? Is that what this is?

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said.

There wasn’t any big dramatic scene; the Community Theater and I went a day or two without talking, and then I prayed and apologized and we made plans for a date. We went to a movie the following Friday, but the whole night was awkward. It was like, we didn’t know how to talk anymore. When she dropped me off, we didn’t even kiss goodnight.

At rehearsal the next day, the Community Theater wouldn’t look at me. The tension between us was so distracting that I went out to the lobby during break to talk with her. When I asked her if she was OK, she didn’t respond. “Are you not even going to acknowledge me?” I said.

The building didn’t say anything.

“Are we not talking now?”

Then Eric shouted for everyone to get back to work. Right before my scene, though, the wig stopped me in the vom and said that Banda was going to do my lines instead.

“How come?” I said.

Eric pursed his lips.

“Do I still do the lines in Act Three?” I asked.

COMMUNITY THEATER (shouting)

I’ll tell you your line. Your line is, “I’m sorry, Community Theater. I’m an asshole, Community Theater. I never should have said that stuff about theater.”

ERIC WIG

Wait — what stuff about theater?

COMMUNITY THEATER

Or asked you to speak in prose.

ERIC WIG

You asked her to speak in prose?

COMMUNITY THEATER

Your line is, “Now I’m leaving to live a sad, lonely life.”

I stood there.

ERIC WIG

Why would you ask her to speak in prose?

I didn’t mean anything by it. I—

ERIC WIG

Maybe you should go, .

COMMUNITY THEATER

No — say your line first, asshole!

I’d never seen the Community Theater like this: so—irate. My thoughts were frightened.

COMMUNITY THEATER

(her voice booming, Mother-like)

Say. Your. Lines.

“I’m leaving,” I said, “to live my sad life.”

COMMUNITY THEATER

My sad, lonely life.

“My sad, lonely life,” I said.

Then I walked out of the theater. And I never went back.

IDARED

All of a sudden, it seemed, my family was broken — my sister in the auctionwind, my Mom up in a Nest somewhere, and my father basically living at the forge. During her first few weeks as a Mother, my Mom kept promising a visit: “Next Tuesday,” she prayed. “The Thursday after this one. I’ll stay overnight.” But two months after her recruitment, we still hadn’t seen her once since she’d left — there was always some excuse, some secret emergency.

We never were told what her mission was, either — whether she was in combat, or renovation, or semiotics, or reconnaissance, or some other secret sect we hadn’t heard about. I always looked for my Mom’s name in the Core—which ran two or three stories a day about the Mothers — but I never once saw it there. Even so, though, I imagined that she was part of those stories: defending bessoffs against a pair of parentheses down by the Quarry; hunting down the sentences that had ripped through a page by Kirkpatrick Circle, or maybe helping to repair the tear itself.

In that story? The newspaper said that the Mothers had flown in a giant piece of masking tape — one as big as a worryfield! I imagined my Mom lifting a whole corner of the tape onto her shoulders, struggling with dozens of other Mothers to move it, slowly lowering it onto the paper.

It was OK that we didn’t see my Mom, my thoughts told me sometimes: she was helping to protect us; she was keeping us safe. But it never met my missing.

I missed my father, too. Once he started working at Muir Drop he didn’t stop — not even when his skin took on a gray tinge and his ears became gears. The Community Theater was right about him; these were sure signs of workhosis, caused by an addiction to work. I hoped he might scale back his hours after he caught up on his meaning payments, but by then it was too late: he ate, breathed, and slept work. The only time I saw him the entire month of March, in fact, was “Bring Your Son to Work Day.” That morning, he marched me through the compound, pointing out complicated machines that took raw need and forged it for demand. “That’s the separator,” he said.

“What does it do?” I said.

“Separates,” he said.

“Separates what?”

“The self from others,” he said, as if I should have known. Then he pointed to a black tube that ran off the machine. “See that vacuum hose? It adds tasks. But it needs negative pressure, and the gaskets always give us trouble.”

I was confused. “Oh,” I said.

At the end of the day, he led me out to the Bicycle Built for Two and shook my hand mechanically. “Are you coming home?” I asked.

I could see him scanning the inquiry. “I’m in the middle of my shift, ,” he said.

I said goodbye to him, got on my bike and rode home. But I didn’t go inside — instead I went over to the worryfields, got down on my knees, and folded my hands. “Mom?” I prayed.

It was quiet for a while.

“Mom?” I prayed. “It’s .”

After ten or fifteen minutes I heard the scratching of an arriving prayer. “Hey,” my Mom prayed. She was out of breath.

I stood up.

“What is it, ?” she prayed.

I didn’t know what to pray. “I’m—” I started. “I—”

“What? Spit it out!”

“I’m hungry,” I blurtprayed.

“So eat,” she prayed. “Have some chips.”

“We don’t have any,” I prayed.

“You ate them all, you mean.”

“Plus I can’t eat chips for dinner again,” I prayed.

“Why don’t you ask your father to make you something?”

“He’s at work.”

No response.

“I’m pretty sure he’s got workhosis, Mom,” I prayed.

My Mom grunted.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

She didn’t answer. Then she prayed, “There should be some futurebeans in the pantry.”

“When are you coming home?” I prayed.

“After this tour,” she prayed.

“Do you miss us?”

Someone behind her was screaming — howling. “Of course I do,” she said.

“Where are you right now?” I prayed.

“Right above you,” she prayed.

I looked up.

“Right over the house?”

“Yes, but high,” she prayed. “Look up.”

“I am looking up,” I said.

“We’re right above the clouds.”

“I can’t—” I said. “Where?”

“Hold on a second.” I heard the rush of wind. “See us now?”

“No,” I prayed. “I don’t see you.”

“See a peach-colored cloud?”

“Yeah,” I prayed.

“Look to the—” she prayed. Then there was quiet.

“Mom?” I prayed.

But the prayer had gone dark.

“Mom?” I prayed.

“Mom?”

I found the futurebeans in the pantry, poured them into a pot, and heated them up. But they tasted like shit — they were spoiled, or maybe just too old. They were the worst beans that I’d had — that I would have — in my whole entire life.

A few days later a prayer came in from my Mom. “?” it said.

I didn’t answer.

“Sorry our prayer got disconnected the other day,” she prayed.

I didn’t answer.

The next day she tried again. “?” she prayed. “Are you there?”

“Fuck you,” I prayed back.

“Excuse me?” she prayed.

“Fuck,” I prayed, “you.”

FATHERS IN THE FIELD

Eventually, people began to doubt there ever were such things as apples. Our neighbor, Bob Lonely? He started saying that those early chapters of Appleseed were imagined — that they were fictions. “Apples were just an idea,” he told me once, “Nice to think about, but not real.” After a while I had my doubts, too. I couldn’t remember what apples smelled like, what they tasted like. Were they heavy or light? Green or red? Bitter or sweet? Then I heard a rumor in school one day about a group of aardvark importers selling apples for high meaning off the back of a truck in the west margin. Some Cones must have heard the same rumor, though, because those aardvarks were apprehended later the same day. As it turned out they were just selling counterfeits — pears painted red.

The only one who didn’t lose faith in the promise of apples and trees was the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. He tilled every deadgrove in town. When he showed up in the groves across the street with his hoe and satchel of seeds, I walked over to see what he was planting. He opened the bag and I saw seeds of all different shapes and colors; some of them were as big as hearts. “What are they for?”

He shrugged. “I can’t keep track. I’ve been trading for as many different types and versions as I can.”

For two months or so, I worked in the fields across the street from my house as the Memory of Johnny Appleseed’s assistant. We pulled up old crops, turned the soil, and planted the seeds. I’d also accompany him on his trades. He met with some real characters! Once, we took the Bicycle Built for Two to Small Pear to meet a marginalia-man called Eyes. Eyes had a line of eyes that ran all around his head, and he had his seeds collected in tiny plastic bags. “These,” said Eyes, “are pumpkin seeds.” He handed them to the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. “Thunderseeds,” he said. Then he found another bag. “These are motherseeds,” said the Memory.

“Motherseeds?” I said.

I looked at Johnny. Motherseeds! “How much for those?” I asked the seer.

“What about apple seeds?” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

“Here,” said the marginalia, and he held up another bag. “Finest apples this side of East Appleseed.”

“How much?” said the Memory.

“Five truths,” he said.

The Memory of Johnny Appleseed’s eyes narrowed. “Give you four,” he said.

“Fuck you,” said the marginal. He closed his knapsack and turned to walk away.

“OK,” the Memory said, grabbing the sleeve of Eyes’ coat. “Four truths, one theory.”

“What about for the motherseeds?” I said.

“Two ideas,” he said.

I handed him the ideas and he gave me the packet of seeds.

When we got back to the deadgroves we went right to work. We were running out of space in the deadgroves, so Johnny directed me to a patch of nothings and told me to pull them out.

“Really?” I said. “They’re almost ripe.” They looked like this:

“We can either grow nothings here,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed, “or we can pull the nothings and plant mothers and apples.”

I stepped into the field and began pulling up the nothings by the roots. Then I turned the soil and planted the seeds we’d traded for. After half an hour or so, Bob Lonely came walking across the street. “Afternoon,” he said.

The Memory of Johnny Appleseed nodded to him.

Mr. Lonely looked at the pile of nothings. “Those nothings ripe?”

“Ripe as they’re going to get,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

The pulled nothings were screaming, and dying, in the sun.

“Are they — screaming?” Bob said.

“They’re singing,” said Appleseed.

Bob nodded and turned back toward his house.

The sun roiled overhead. The next morning, the deadgrove struck up a conversation with the sun, and the soil asked the sun out for chai, and then, out for a formal dinner date. Soon the sun and soil were spending a lot of time together. And then, lo and tone, I walked out into the fields with the Memory of Johnny Appleseed one morning and we saw stalks starting to sprout.

“Isn’t it amazing?” said the proud page.

Appleseed put his hands on his hips. “It’s a fucking miracle,” he said.

I started planning for a new life: life with a Mom. Two Moms, even! On my clipboard, I made a list of places we could go: to the Big Why, the Library, on a hike up Appleseed Mountain, to see a matinee at the Bing. Would this Mom like music? Would she appreciate the Ulcerative Colitises?

The rows of apple seeds didn’t sprout; neither did the pumpkin seeds. But two days after we planted the motherseeds the stalks were eye-high. I stepped up to the first row of plants and I could see, between the sheaths, human faces. When I looked closer, though, I saw a beard and an Adam’s apple. My thoughts swore in disappointment. These weren’t the faces of mothers after all; they were the faces of fathers, their eyes closed and their lips pursed.

When I showed the Memory of Johnny Appleseed the father faces he put his hands on his hips and spit into the soil. “Shit,” he said. “That damn omniscient — he sold us Dads instead of Moms.” I could tell he was embarrassed.

“What are we supposed to do with these?” I asked.

“We could just turn them over, bury them,” the Memory of Johnny Appleseed suggested.

I thought about that. “And grow what?” I said.

“Corn?” he suggested.

In the end, though, we decided to reap the crop — to let the fathers grow, pull them when they were ready, and then bring them down to the flea bee and see what we could get for them. This was during the blight, after all; everyone was down on meaning and we thought there still might be a good local market for Dads. Everyone needed a father — villains needed them, nomads needed them, even those with fathers needed fathers.

Another few days passed by — I spent them by myself, alone in the house. That weekend, though, the Memory of Johnny Appleseed prayed to me from across the street and told me that the sheaths were uncurling, that I needed to get over to the deadgroves right away. When I got there I saw: some of the fathers were waking up, rubbing their eyes and stretching their arms and stepping out of their stalks. Most of them were dressed in work suits and carrying briefcases. Each ripe father dutifully placed one foot on the field and then the other. Then they all checked their watches and straightened their ties.

One father approached me. “Dad?” I said, but he walked right past me and bolted across the grove.

Then another father stepped out of its stalk. “Dad,” I said, but that one walked right by, too.

Soon, a steady stream of fathers was storming across the street. In the groves, meanwhile, more fathers were waking up. One of them stepped out into the deadsoil and smiled at me. “Name’s Jim,” he said.

“,” I said.

We shook hands. “Very good to be here,” he said, looking around at the fields. “You’ve done a great job here. I’m really proud of you, Son.”

I hadn’t heard words like those in I don’t know how long — maybe never. “It was nothings,” I said.

“But now it’s somethings, and that’s because of you, because of what you did. Show me around?”

Jim and I walked past the rows of dead trees. I introduced him to the Memory of Johnny Appleseed, who was helping other fathers out of their stalks. “I’m Jim,” he said to the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. “And you are?”

“The Memory of Johnny Appleseed,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

“Great to meet you,” said Jim.

Just then, I saw my father’s truck pull into our driveway. He got out of the cab and watched a school of fathers pass him. I saw him look across the street. Then he began marching mechanically toward us. “What—” he said, his silver skin shining in the sun. “Who are these people?”

Jim extended his hand. “Name’s Jim,” he said.

“They’re fathers,” I said.

My Dad tried to compute this. “What are they doing here?”

“Dads are really popular right now,” I said quietly.

“But you have a Dad,” said my father. “Me.”

“I know,” I said. “I thought — if we brought them to the flea bee—”

“OK, but you should have asked me about this first,” he said, rubbing the soot of toil off his forehead. “This is a really meaningful risk.”

“The seeds were only—”

“Fathers have huge appetites,” my Dad said. I could smell the work on his breath. “What do you plan to feed them?”

Across the street, fathers were looking for tasks. Two had opened the hood of my father’s truck and one was fixing the steel banister on the front step.

Jim looked at his watch. “Gosh darnit, I’m late,” he said.

“Late for what?” said my father.

“I’ve got a meeting at the office,” he said, straightening his tie.

“Will you be coming back?” I said.

Jim winced. “Probably not,” he said.

“Not ever?” I said.

“I’ve got a lot of work to catch up on,” Jim said. “, you take care of yourself, all right, Son? You have a good life now, you hear?” Then he chucked me on the shoulder and charged toward the street.

“Jim,” I said, weakly.

“Forget that one,” said my father. There was sudden meaning in his eyes. “Go back out to the fields. Keep them in their stalks until we figure out how to store them.”

I was dizzy. “How do I keep them there?”

My father ran his hands through his tired hair. “Do whatever it takes,” he said. “Try to reason with them. Tell them a story.”

My Dad ran toward the house and I went back into the groves. By then it was almost dusk, and more difficult to see — the running fathers made shadows on the white page.

When I reached the fatherfields, though, all was quiet. The only fathers left in those fields were not yet ripe, still sleeping in their stalks. I went from stalk to stalk, looking at their sleeping faces. Some fathers were mumbling to themselves; others were wheezing and snoring.

I won’t ever forget that chorus of snores. It sounded like family.

WORRYFIELDS

PRAYER PIANO II

We left that piano out in the worryfields for anyone to play, but most people seemed to ignore it. Once I saw a Canada out there, sitting at the bench and staring at the keys, but I didn’t hear any music or changing points of view.

For a while, I didn’t think about the piano too much — it just sat there in the fields, switching points of view every now and again. That spring, though, I started spending a lot more time in those fields. By then, I think I was just craving company. I liked to watch the worriers pacing back and forth in the high grass, wringing their hands, hugging themselves or praying. I’d started praying again, too — not to my Mom, who I still hated for leaving, but directly to the Core. “How can you leave me here?” I prayed to it, my knees sinking into the page.

As usual, there was no response.

“Isn’t every single person holy? Even me?” I prayed.

A hole appeared in my palm.

“Not holey,” I prayed. “Holy! Like, sacred!”

Nothing.

Walking back from the worryfields one day, I passed by the piano and, on a whim, sat down on the stool. By that point the keys were warped and weather-stained. I pressed a note and heard the point of view of close worriers.

But mostly I was concerned about Bob. What would I tell him?

I pressed another note and the POV switched to a chorus pacing the edge of the field.

How are we supposed to live knowing that we may or may not have cancer somewhere in our body?

Another key called the point of view of the page.

Why is everyone looking at me so strangely? Do I have something on my face?

All that shifting point of view made me hungry. I stood up, walked home, and had a potato chip sandwich.

The next day, though, I went back to the piano. When I sat down at the keys this time, I tried two notes simultaneously. I heard whispers from the trees, the whining of a cloud, the gruff of a shingle.

Soon I was making chords, just like I’d seen the Possum do: three notes, and points of view, at once: my father’s point of view at the labor factory, fixing the Supply-Demander/the Memory of Johnny Appleseed, trading for seeds/a bird in the trees. I heard “… bad gasket?/trustworthy/shee-twee-bee!” simultaneously.

As I was leaning into the chord, though, my foot happened to push the foremost left pedal on the bottom of the piano. “Bee-twee-shee!” said the bird.

I stopped and looked down at the pedal. Then I pushed the right pedal. “Shee-twee-bee!” said the bird.

I played a different note and pushed the left pedal with my foot.

“Morning, Ralph,” said the Forebarrel.

“Morning,” I said. “What’s on tap for today?”

“Need you to take a look at the Demander in Building Six,” the Forebarrel said.

“Will do,” I said.

At first I didn’t understand what was happening; it took me a few minutes to recognize that the right pedal was moving the story forward in time and the left pedal reversing it. Every day that week, though, I went back to the piano and practiced. Soon, I was a good enough point-of-view piano player that I could shift the POV to a nearby tree in the margin, and then to the Memory of Johnny Appleseed in the deadgroves, and then to my house, at any time in their history. I saw my house as a young cabin, hiking a strange mountain with his fathershack. When I melodied further back, I saw Johnny Appleseed — the real Johnny Appleseed — stopping to tie the leather laces on his boots.

I practiced melody after melody — varying pedals, notes, and speeds — until I located, somewhere in the past pages, my mother praying to my father. I picked up the story midverse:

“I can’t, Ralphie,” she prayed.

“Why not?” he prayed.

“Because I have work to do still. We’re repairing holes day and night.”

“But why do you have to fix it?” prayed my father. “Why you?”

“ is our son! We should be the first ones on line to help Appleseed.”

There was silence.

“I miss you,” prayed my Dad. “We all do.”

“Any word from Bri?” my Mom prayed.

My Dad prayed that there wasn’t. “You?”

“We’re looking,” my Mom prayed. “We’ll find her.”

“You’ve checked all the auction schools?”

“Of course we have,” my Mom said. “And I’ve put out a national call to the Mothers’ Network.”

“I’m just praying that she’s OK,” my Dad said.

“Me, too — twice a day,” my Mom prayed. “What about ?”

“He’s fine. The same.”

“He won’t answer my prayers,” my Mom prayed.

“He says he’s angry at you,” my Dad prayed.

“I’m worryfields about him.”

“You should tell him that,” my Dad prayed. “You should visit.”

“I will,” she prayed. “Soon as I can get away.”

“He would love to see you,” prayed my Dad. “We all would.”

A few days later, I played the song of Mothers’ Day — the national recruiting day for the Mothers of America. That was the day my Mom left us — remember? I saw that sequence again, my Mom walking out into the backyard with hardly a goodbye and lifting up into the air. We ran out after her and Bri shouted up into the sky. She wasn’t the Auctioneer that day — she was just Briana, my freaked-out sister.

Playing this song now, from third person, I could see my own face, still and dumb and silent. Why wasn’t I crying, or shouting, or saying anything at all? I should have protested more, or at least told my Mom that I loved her.

I played a pausechord, found the first-person harmony, and resumed the scene from my own eyes again. Inside my head my thoughts were howling. “Find the words,” one commanded me.

“What words?” said a second.

“The words to make her stay!” said the first.

Then I heard a noise overhead and saw something looming over the roof: a giant, dark shape. I put my hand over my forehead to shield the afternoon sun. “What is that?” said the Reader.

It was like nothing I’d ever seen before. When I looked closer at it, though, I realized what I was seeing: those were skirts—thousands and thousands of warskirts. As the school of Mothers oomed forward in recruit formation, my mother floated toward them and joined the giant mass; soon I couldn’t distinguish her shape from anyone else’s. I understood then why she’d left so quickly; she was rushing to stay on schedule.

My sister turned to me. “Nice job, assface.”

“What did I do?” I said.

But I knew: these were my stories — every one of them.

Bri stormed inside. The Reader and I stood in the yard, watching other recruits — some of them lugging suitcases or duffel bags as they flew — join the formation. As the fleet hovered, I said a prayer. “Mom?” I prayed.

“What?” she whisperprayed back.

“Be careful,” I prayed.

“Of course,” she prayed. “Don’t worry, OK?”

Then the entire fleet began floating forward. They tightened formation, banked left, flew behind a cloud and disappeared.

The last song I ever played on that point of view piano was a third-person from our very first days in Appleseed, after I’d just begun to speak. I didn’t yet have a room — we were all still figuring out how we’d live in Appleseed. When I released my foot from the pedal, I saw my Mom and Dad standing in the basement. “It’s too cold down here for him,” my Dad said.

“But it’s spacious. It will give him room for his art,” my Mom said.

“What art?” my Dad said.

“He can draw if he wants to,” she said. “Or write.”

“Write what?” my Dad said.

“Whatever he wants,” my Mom said.

BASTILLE SQUARE

By the fall of my senior year Appleseed was riddled with bookwormholes. It wasn’t strange to see holes in the middle of fields, human-sized holes on the sidewalk, car-sized holes in the road. There were accidents all over town: people twisting their ankles or tripping on new holes; veggiecars, swerving to miss a hole, crying right into other veggiecars.

As the bookworms took over, characters disappeared. Take my cousin Patrick — one day he was here, the next day gone. The same with the Memory of Johnny Appleseed; all of a sudden he couldn’t be found. After enough of these disappearances, the Building Cones started covering up the holes with steel plates to curb injuries.

Reader: You mean like manhole covers?

What’s a manhole?

There were all sorts of rumors about where these holes led. Some people thought they led to the Core; others, to a world of Memories. Large Odor said he didn’t think they led anywhere. But that fall, Orange Traffic Cone Scientists sent two dogs down a bookwormhole and said the dogs came back smelling of prayers.

Then, one afternoon that November, I was walking with Sentence in the worryfields and he pulled me right to one of the holes. “Come on, ‘I am.’,” I said.

He wouldn’t budge — he was fixed on the bookwormhole. It was starting to drizzle, so I tugged on his leash. “ ‘I am.’,” I said.

But the words didn’t move. By then, “I am.” was strong — three times the size he’d been when I found him.

The rain started falling harder. I picked “I am.” up and ran across the street as the sky opened its mouth and bared its sharp teeth.

Two days later, I realized that I was out of music pills and rode my bike to the pharmacy for a refill. I asked you to come along and help me pedal, but—

Reader: We’d been jumping over bookwormholes that whole week prior. I was exhausted!

So I took Sentence instead; he rode both ways perched on the handlebars, and held the bag of music pills in the teeth of his “i” on the way home.

As we were riding down Converse Street, just a few hundred feet from our driveway, Sentence suddenly looked out at the worryfields and capitalized.

“ ‘I am.’? You OK?” I said.

But “I AM.” was already moving, leaping off the Bicycle Built for Two and bolting across the street. Blue music pills spilled everywhere; I almost crashed! By the time I stopped and skimmed the page, Sentence had already reached the worryfields — he startled a couple of pacers as he shot past them.

“ ‘I am.’!” I shouted.

I waited for traffic to pass, rolled my Bicycle Built for Two across the street, dropped the tandem by the roadside, and ran through the tall white grass, calling out for Sentence. “ ‘I am.’!” I shouted. About fifty yards into the fields, I came to a hole in the page — the same bookwormhole that Sentence had been fixated on a few days before. I looked around. “ ‘I am.’!” I shouted.

“Are what?” said a worrier. I looked over at her. She was clearly a professional fretter; she was wringing her hands expertly, and her long gray hair was all thin and patchy.

“Did you see any language run through here?” I said.

“Language?” Her face lost color.

“A sentence called—”

“Why? Is that a possibility? Are you telling me there’s — wild language on these pages?”

“He’s my pet,” I said.

The worrier held up her hands. “You are totally freaking me out,” she said.

I leaned over the hole and looked down into it. I saw nothing but darkness. “ ‘I am.’!” I shouted, stupidly. My voice just bounced back at me: “I am.! I am.! I am.!”

Inside my mind my thoughts bumped into each other, fell down, stood up, and ran in circles. “Who can help?” one shouted.

“My Mom!” another shouted.

“She won’t answer your prayers!” shouted the first thought.

“Dad?” shouted a third thought.

“Too busy,” I told the third.

“What about the Reader!” shouted the first thought. “Where’s the Reader?”

I straightened up, ran across the street and burst into the house. “Reader!” I called.

You weren’t in the living room or the kitchen. I ran out to the backyard. “Reader?” I shouted.

I found you in the basement, sitting at my desk and writing in one of my yellow pads. “Hey!” I said.

You looked up from the desk.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“No — nothing,” she said, and quickly turned the pad over.

“I need your help,” I said. I told her what had happened to Sentence. “I think he went down one of the bookwormholes.”

“You’re kidding,” you said.

I shook my head.

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure,” I said.

You stood up, found your shoes, and followed me back up the stairs and across the street. When we reached the fields I led you over to the hole in the page closest to where Sentence had disappeared.

“You sure he went this way?” you said.

“No,” I said. “But this is where I lost sight of him.”

“What was he doing off the leash in the first place?”

“We were riding on the Bicycle Built for Two — he leapt off the handlebars,” I said.

The Reader squinted and looked around.

“Should we go after him?” I said.

“What do you mean?” The Reader looked into the hole. “Down there?”

I shrugged.

“Absolutely not!” the Reader said. “We don’t have any idea—”

“ ‘I am.’ is down there,” I said.

“We don’t even know that for sure,” the Reader said.

“He could be hurt! Or killed!”

The Reader pointed out to the treeline. “What if he went into the margin?”

“He didn’t — he made a beeline right for this hole.”

You lay down on your belly and tried to see into the hole. Then you stood up and brushed the page off your hands. “It’s completely dark down there,” you said.

“He’s getting farther away every second,” I said.

“For the record, I think this is a terrible idea.”

“Noted,” I said, and gestured to the hole. “Go for it.”

You held up your hands. “Age before beauty,” the Reader said.

“Aren’t you older than me?” I asked.

“There’s no way I’m going first,” you said.

I walked over to the bookwormhole, sat down on the page, and put my feet into the hole. Then I slowly lowered myself down. My thoughts were yelping, but when I stretched my body out my feet touched a fiber floor. I stood up and helped the Reader down.

We looked into the tunnel. I saw dim light ahead.

We stooped and trotted through the dark channel. “It stinks in here,” the Reader said.

“That’s the rot,” I said.

After twenty feet or so, the chute widened; we stood up straight and walked side by side. A string of bare lightbulbs now ran overhead. For the first few hundred yards, I could see the underside of the page above us — the roots and tendrils of printed words. Directly above me was the d in “killed,” and, later, the re of “amphitheatre.” Then the print grew higher and fainter, though, and soon I couldn’t see it at all anymore.

“ ‘I am.’!” I shouted, but my words just boomeranged back to me.

We walked for a while in silence. Then the Reader said, “Think we’re still on the same page?”

“This has to be a different one,” I said. “Doesn’t it?”

You shook your head.

“ ‘I am.’!” I shouted again.

“Please stop that,” said the Reader.

Soon we saw some light up ahead and an intersection in the channel. It was a crosshole — another pathway burrowing to our left and right. “Should we take one of these?” I said.

The Reader grimaced. “I say we keep reading forward,” she said.

We trudged on for another few minutes, until our surroundings changed; the walls became gluey, and we hopped over a synapse and passed what appeared to be giant white ropes.

Finally we reached the end of the channel, and daylight. When we were almost under the opening, I stopped and knelt down to see what was up there.

“Well?” whispered the Reader.

I shook my head. “I see — sky,” I said. “Clouds.”

A cough of wind passed over the surface and sand scratched our faces. The Reader nodded upward and laced her hands together; I stepped into them and she hoisted me up out of the channel — then I pulled her up behind me. There wasn’t much on this page; just a few rickety wooden buildings and a single donkey tied to a post.

A gun rode by on a horse. Two more guns sat in wicker chairs on the porch of a shabby building.

I looked at the Reader. She walked up to the gun. “Excuse me,” she said. “Have you seen a sentence walking through here?”

“What sentence?” said the gun.

“ ‘I am.’,” I said.

“You’re—what?” said the gun.

“That’s the sentence,” I said.

“ ‘I am.’?” said the gun.

“Not much of a sentence,” said the second gun.

“You haven’t seen it, then?” the Reader said.

The gun shook its head.

“What’s the story here?” asked the Reader.

“No story at all today,” said the gun. “Story here yesterday. Two guns met their makers.”

The Reader thanked the guns and we walked back toward the hole. The Reader’s eyes were bright. “You realize what’s happening here,” she said.

I stared at her.

“,” she said. “We’re in a different story.”

I climbed down into the hole.

“Get it?” said the Reader.

“No,” I said.

“The bookwormholes?” said the Reader. “The worms? Go from novel to novel.”

I still didn’t understand. “We just need to find Sentence,” I said.

“Are you hearing what I’m saying? All of literature is at our disposal!”

“Because he can’t have gone that far,” I said.

The Reader put her hands on my shoulders. “He could be anywhere, —in any one of these books.”

“I just want to find him and go home,” I said.

We walked past the gluey walls and toward the crosshole. This time we took a left. Soon I heard a giant pounding: bm-bm; mb-bm; rm-tm; vm-bm.

“What is that?” I said.

dm-vm; mb-zm; bm-dm.

“Whatever it is, it’s big,” the Reader said.

When we pushed open the next bookwormhole cover we were on a strange page. All we saw were lines of words — row after row of them. None of the words were moving or making any sound.

“They’re all dead,” I said.

“Of course they are — it’s a graveyard,” said the Reader.

I looked around. I’d heard about these places — fields where people buried their deadwords — but I’d never actually seen one. I studied the words. “What language is this?” I said.

A wind blew across the page.

“It’s so sad,” I said. “All these words, with so much potential.”

“What do you mean? These words probably lived good lives.”

“They died too young,” I said.

“You didn’t even know them,” said the Reader.

“They could have been so much more,” I said. Then I lowered myself down into the bookwormhole. The Reader followed and closed the cover above us.

The Reader and I walked from story to story: into dramas, romances, science fictions, detective stories. Sometimes we were in a quiet scene — a praying river, a prison cell — but other times we climbed up right into the thick of the action. In one novel, I found myself sitting in a steel boat full of soldiers under fire. In another, I crawled into the story between two lovers in a steamy romantic scene. “I want you so badly,” said a gruffy man, and he pressed against me.

“Me?” I said.

He opened his eyes. “No,” he said. “Her.”

Somewhere in a story about 1930s France, though, I lost the Reader. One minute she was there with me, marching through a crowded city square, and the next minute she wasn’t. I thought she was following me, but when I turned around she was gone. I waited for the crowd to disperse and then retraced my steps, but she wasn’t anywhere. I looked for her all day; I prayed to her but received no response. Finally, I turned around and went back to the bookwormhole we’d come in from, on the altar of an old church in the corner of the city. When we’d arrived, we’d crawled out of the hole in the middle of a service; everyone had stood up, shocked. “ ‘I am.’?” I asked the parishioners. Then the Reader led me through a side exit and out onto the street.

As I was walking into the church, though, I saw a sentence hiding in the doorway. At first I thought it was just a nomadic phrase seeking alms. But no — that word wasn’t “alms”—it was “am.” “ ‘I am.’!” I said. He ran into my arms. Core he was so thin! But I was so happy to see him. I carried him into the dim sanctuary, through the empty pews and toward the dark altar.

I didn’t have any idea how to get home, but Sentence had a nose for pages; when we came to our first rotary-hole — five or six channels converging — he said, “I am left.”

“Left, you think?” I said.

“Left,” said “I am.”.

A few minutes later we hit a fork in the page. “I am right,” said the sentence.

I went right.

Soon I saw familiar textures, and then, two sets of footprints in the fiber. “I am.” must have been able to smell Appleseed, or hear it or something. “Thataboy,” I said. “Good sentence.”

After another ten pages or so, I saw the underside of words — words about the outskirts of town, sentences about Appleseed Mountain — and then, a bookwormhole. I shuffled to it, pushed Sentence out to the surface, and climbed up after him.

It was dark. A few hundred feet away, a wolf sat writing at a rolltop desk.

“I am Wolf Swamp,” said “I am.”. He looked up at me.

I took a breath of blighty air. “We’re home,” I said.

But something was different; I knew it from our very first moments back in Appleseed. There was a problem with the sky. It was dark out, but not night-dark. The sky was — how do I say this? Closed. Shut. It was like a lid had fallen over Appleseed.

Sentence saw it, too. He pointed up and said, “We’re confused.”

Everyone else seemed to be, too. On Wenonah, we passed a camel in a white T-shirt sitting on a five-gallon bucket and staring at the sky. He looked over at us as we passed. “What the fuck,” he said.

On the next street over, a hairperson was shouting to anyone who would listen. “Can you see?” she asked us. “Because I can’t even read the page!”

As we were walking up Ellipsis, though, I realized what was happening. It wasn’t as if the sky was closed. The sky was closed: you can’t have a book without a Reader.

“Oh. Shit,” I said.

“I am what,” shivered Sentence.

I didn’t answer him; I didn’t want to frighten him. Inside my brain, though, my thoughts were understanding: that wasn’t a lid over the sky, but a cover — the inside cover of the book itself.

Just then a prayer came in for me. “?” It was my mother.

I didn’t answer.

“Honey,” she prayed again.

I closed the prayer — I wanted nothing to do with her.

On Converse Street, all of the traffic had stopped behind an accident by Redfern. Some people stood outside their cars, talking to other drivers; others just stared up at the darkness and the inside cover. In the opposite lane, passing cars were switching on their headlights.

Another prayer came in — this one from my Dad at Muir Drop. “Hey, ,” he prayed. “Look at the sky, buddy. Something’s going on.”

In the margins, wild language began howling. I looked across the street in time to see two lunging, drooling sentences—“This is your fault, you piece of shit,” and “These are your sentences!”—step brazenly out of the treeline.

I picked up “I am.”, ran inside, and locked the door behind us.

EDWARD VII

The darkness was complete; it covered Appleseed like silence. For the first few days I just stayed inside, living off chips and melancholy, feeding Sentence scraps of time. Every half hour or so I heard sirens: people prayed about visibility problems, freak accidents, injuries or death. The TV told me that the hospital was full, that there were fires on far pages. “But no one knows where the fire trucks are,” said the TV. “The pages are burning out of control.”

Soon I lost track of time — it was difficult to know if it was day or night, when one day passed and the next day began. My Mom prayed to me frequently—“I’m concerned about you!” “Just let me know that you’re OK!” “You answer me this instant young man!”—but I shut down every one of her prayers. I didn’t want her help — she was someone else’s Mother now. I was almost eighteen by then, and old enough to know how to take care of myself — I knew all I needed to: where to buy the chips, what kinds of chips to buy, and in what order to eat them.

Once or twice, my father came by to check on me and drop off some meaning. The first time he didn’t even come inside — we just stood in the driveway talking for a few minutes. At one point he said, “This will all get better soon.”

“How do you figure?” I said.

He pointed up to the dark sky. “The Mothers are working on a way to lift up that cover,” he said. “Speaking of which — pray back to Mom, will you?”

“I don’t want to talk to her,” I mumbled.

“She’s worried about you,” my Dad said. “And she has some business to discuss with you too. Regarding your friend.”

“Who?”

“The Reader,” my Dad said. “Everyone’s looking for her.”

“I don’t know where she is,” I said.

My Dad checked his watch. “Shoot,” he said. “I’ve got to get back.” Then he punched me softly on the shoulder, got back in his truck, and drove away. Just out of the driveway, his truck stopped short to let a wild sentence pass — I saw the sentence’s eyes flash in the headlights and scoot off.

Soon, meaning lost all value in Appleseed. The Big Why sold out of most of its questions and couldn’t get more from the distributor; the Big When followed suit. Phrases smashed the window of Small Pear and looted the shelves; a frightened Cordial Carl stood guard outside his restaurant, barking angrily at everyone who approached. A few weeks after the cover closed, a crew of puns walked into Appleseed First National, held up the word “gun” and said, “Give me all your meaning.”

“I can’t read the word you’re holding,” said the bank teller.

“It says ‘gun,’ ” said the first pun.

“It looks like ‘fun,’ ” said the teller.

“It says ‘gun,’ motherfucker,” said the second pun, “and it’s going to say ‘killed’ if you don’t open the vault.”

They ran the security-camera footage of the stick-up on the news, and you could see one of the puns suddenly put down the word as if he forgot what it — the meaning, the guns, the heist, any of it — meant. “I’m hungry,” the second pun said to the first pun. By the time the teller opened the vault, the puns were gone.

People still prayed, but for what? To whom? The Core? I sent some psalms to my sister—“Where are you?” “It sucks here!”—and I watched the words sail high. Like most darkness-era prayers, though, mine bounced off the inside cover of the book and back into Appleseed. I saw them fall somewhere to the west and disappear from view. The next day, The Ear showed up and pulled a prayer out of the back of the truck. “This yours?” he said.

It was my prayer to the Auctioneer. “Yes,” I said, embarrassed.

“Landed on my property. Put a nice fucking dent in my shed,” he said.

I’d either forgotten those words—“dent,” “shed”—or else they’d been removed from the language. “Your what?” I said.

“Shed,” he said.

I shook my head.

“Small house-type thing,” said The Ear.

A few days later I got tired of eating chips — either that, or the chips themselves got tired of being eaten — so I got on my Bicycle Built for Two and rode through the dark streets toward Gus & Paul’s. Pedaling down Converse, you could see how hungry people were for answers: every person’s spine was a question mark; their eyes whatted or whyed. And there were bookwormholes everywhere now: in the street, on the lawns, in the cars, in the clouds — in some of the people, even. On Burbank, a meaninglesser held out his hand to ask me for a spare theory and I saw a hole in his wrist. “A hypothesis?” he said. “A theory, even — anything.”

“Sorry,” I said.

When I got to Gus & Paul’s I found the place empty — it was just me and the deflated hat behind the counter. I walked up to the register and held up my hand in the shape of a “one.”

“One what?” said the hat.

I looked at the menu.

“One what?” he said.

I studied the choices, written in chalk. What did they mean? I couldn’t remember. Then, someone walked by with a square white box. “One of those,” I said. The hat handed me the empty box and I walked out.

Within weeks, those holes took their toll on the town. Houses collapsed; whole fields fell in. It didn’t take a bessoff to see what was happening: Appleseed was rotting.

A lot of families I knew left town. The Lonelies drove to a relative’s home in the western margin, and I heard that the Blueberry River packed a watery suitcase and hitchhiked down Five, vowing never to return.

Like everyone else who stayed, I adapted as best I could. Eventually my eyes adjusted; I learned to read in the dark. Without apples or bagels, some people survived by eating worries grown in the fields; others ate ink right off the page. One day my house went into the margin and killed a poem. He brought it back slung over his shoulder, laid the verse on the grass, removed its skin and vital organs, and handed me an iamb. “Eat,” my house said.

I tried — I smelled the words, put one on my tongue. It tasted rhymey. “I’m not sure I can eat this,” I said.

“Dip it in some melancholy,” he said, and pushed a saucer full of gritty liquid toward me. I dipped the stanza and bit into it. Word juice ran down my chin. “Not bad,” I said.

Every few days, I packed up some poem jerky and went out looking for the Reader. I’d put on my headphones, climb down a bookwormhole, walk to a new novel, and wander that novel until I found a character who seemed reliable. I’d ask them if they’d seen the Reader, if they’d heard of Appleseed, if they knew anything about a blight. I found myself in every setting imaginable — running from a giant golden machine; strapped down to an operating table in a room lit by candles; in a marketplace where people sold organs and teeth — but it was never the right story. One day, I saw someone I thought was you fixing a car in a 1930s service station. I couldn’t see the mechanic’s face, but she had your same build and she was wearing the same combat boots you used to wear — the ones with the flames on the side. I went right up to the car. “Reader?” I said.

A woman shimmied out from behind the front tire. “Help you?” she said.

Her face was a straight line, her eyebrows two exclamation points — it wasn’t you.

In another novel, I found myself in a medieval army, wearing chainmail and carrying a bow, and I thought I saw you sitting on a horse two rows over. I leaned over to the maybe-you. “Psst — hey,” I said.

“Get back in line, McRoy!” shouted the lieutenant.

Then someone yelled “Charge!” and the war began — we all stormed forward across the field, and I lost maybe-you in the fray.

Most of the time, though, I couldn’t even find the story itself — it was somewhere else in the setting, far away from where I’d arrived. And no one I met took any interest in me, or made an effort to help me find the plot. All my life, I’d read stories about people being kind, helping other people. But did anyone, in any one of those worlds, ever try to help me? Take me in? Try to get to know me? No — not one character, ever.

If I’d found you, if I could have talked to you for just a minute or two, I would have apologized. I would have told you how sorry I was that you never had a story — no physical description, no face, not even a—

Not even a name. That wasn’t fair of me. Everyone deserves their own story. If I could have brought you back to Appleseed — if you would have let the light back in — I would have given you a whole history. I would have made you anyone you wanted to be: Johnny Appleseed, a Select Cone, a Mother, even.

Back in Appleseed, meanwhile, the sentences were going absolutely wild. Lavished in darkness, the bookworms no longer needed to hide in the margins: they strutted up and down the dark streets like they owned the place, chalking and sturming, with skomals and fortuous vays, periodical magnavoxing, lopal rikes, uring and salmoning, exclamation. What could the Mothers do against words that could change, and change again, right under your feet?

Not that they rolled over. Spondee told me that the Mothers conducted nighttime paragraph raids; I heard rumors, too, of secret underground laboratories where Mothers cultivated new word viruses and experimented on language to make it talk.

That November, though, the Mothers suffered major losses when jargons organized a simultaneous attack on every Nest in Appleseed, destroying five Nests in a single afternoon. More than a thousand Mothers were killed that day. I heard the ambulances from the basement and stepped outside to see the dark sky filled with smoke.

“Mom?” said one of my thoughts.

As I was standing there a prayer came in from my Dad. “?”

“What,” I said.

“Mom’s OK,” he said. “She was out on assignment. She’s at an undisclosed Nest.”

The Mothers mourned and regrouped; they held a press conference a few days later to denounce the attacks and to promise more security. Every day that winter, you’d see fleets of Mothers trying to repair the town: boarding up broken storefront windows; covering open bookwormholes; transporting people with holes in them to Appleseed Hospital. Orange Traffic Cones, meanwhile, maintained status quo as best they could: they tried to keep the roads open, to protect as many stories as possible from looting or meaningloss, to deliver food to shut-ins and get people to and from work and school. When some hoodlum phrases knocked out the streetlights on Converse early that spring, a Cone even showed up at my door to drive me to school in a Cone-shaped squad car.

By that point, though, school wasn’t really school—it was mostly cages and dark, empty classrooms. Teachers were rare, and if they showed up at all they usually just stood in front of the room, staring back at the students. In Depression IV, the broom teaching the class just posed whats. “What’s the education?” he asked.

Large Odor raised his hand. “The past?” he said.

The broom shrugged. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Maybe, maybe not.”

Then Chamblis raised her hand. “What’s our homework?” she said.

“That’s a great question,” the broom said. “What is your home work?”

“The work we do at home?” said Spondee.

I left that room and went to Advanced What to Be Most Frightened Of. But the teacher in that room didn’t say anything at all — she just kept drawing sad faces on the chalkboard.

A few days later I showed up to that classroom and found it empty. I sat there for a few hours, and then I stood up and left. By then the place was a mess — the hallways were filled with garbage and torn-up books, and everything smelled like old ham and mayonnaise. On the way out the door that day — my very last day of high school ever — my sneaker kicked through a stack of papers near the art room and the pages went flying. I picked up a handful of the scattered pages; there was an old school newspaper, plus two blank diplomas and a hall pass. I kept the hall pass and one of the diplomas and threw the rest of it back on the ground. Then I walked out the heavy front doors.

A FAT, SNORING COMMA

MONARCH

Two years after my mother left us, my childhood home hanged itself from a tree in the yard of our Appleseed home.

This was in the dark summer. My father had full-blown workhosis by then, and I was spending most of my free time tilling in the deadgroves with the Memory of Johnny Appleseed; he’d recently returned to town, his face and clothes smudged with ink, refusing to discuss where he’d been. The schools were closed; so were most of the stores — there was no fresh food anymore. I ate mostly chips: plain chips for breakfast, salt and vinegar for lunch, barbecue for dinner. Then I’d open a bag of sour cream and onion and fall asleep watching the house’s memories — memories of me, sleeping in the Vox or running around in the backyard; of the rows of parked cars during my sister’s auctions; of my mother watering her plants while smoking a six-foot cigarette; of the four of us, being watched by the television — rerun over and over on the walls of the living room.

Watching those memories, I should have known that 577 was in crisis. Plus, the house leaned dangerously to one side; every wall curved with sorrow. Not to mention the house’s dreams, which I can see now were honest-to-lou night terrors: dreams of falling, of being shot, of being chased through dark tunnels. Once I woke up in the middle of a housedream of being buried alive: the building screamed as the dirt was piled onto the house-sized coffin, blocking the last slivers of light through pine boards.

I didn’t just sit by and watch the house suffer, though. I went out to Gilbert’s Bookstore and bought some self-help books: A Room with a View, ReHouse, others. I brought them home and put them on the coffee table.

“What are these?” said the house.

“I really think you should read them,” I said.

“What good are books in a situation like this?”

“These ones have some good ideas,” I said.

“I don’t want good ideas,” said the house. “I just want everything, and everyone, to be quiet.”

A week or two later, I was making a chiplunch when the house asked me if I wanted its collection of old 45s: Gordo and Gordo, The Rabbit, vintage OCDs, The Redirected Flights — some great stuff. “You really don’t want these anymore?” I said.

“I want you to have them,” said 577. “Think of me when you play them.”

I didn’t even own a record player. “OK,” I said.

Right as I started eating my lunch, though, a prayer came in from the Memory of Johnny Appleseed: he’d just traded for some new lightseeds and needed help at the Colton Groves. “I’ll be right there,” I said, and I shoveled some chips into my mouth and ran out the door.

A few minutes later, I was riding over there on my Bicycle Built for Two when I saw the Memory of Johnny Appleseed walking down Inherited Wealth Boulevard. “Where are you going?” I said.

“False alarm,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Deadseeds,” he said.

I leaned over the handlebars. “Shit.”

“Got a surprise for you, though,” he said. He held up a soda bottle filled with blue liquid.

“What’s that?” I said.

“Kaddish Cider,” he said.

“Absolutely,” I said.

So we sat in the fields and got kaddished. Cidered out, I lay on my back and looked up at the inside cover. The day-night passed and soon it was dusknight. By then I was sober enough to pick up my bike and ride home.

When I got there, though, the house was gone.

Memory of the Reader: Gone?

It wasn’t there. Which wasn’t so strange on its own — my house, like most houses, took occasional strolls or daytrips. 577 was always sure to tell me where it was going, though, and to return to Converse Street by early evening. But when eight o’clock that night approached, waved, and drove off with no house in sight, I started to worry. I prayed to the house’s friends and family — his mother, his condo brother. His brother didn’t reply; his mother hadn’t seen him.

An hour later, though, I received a prayer from an Or that used to trade with my father. They’d had a falling out over a demo job in Appleseed City — my father said that the Or stole some railroad ties from him — and it would be years more before they coffeed. But the Or prayed that he was down at the Glenwood — a whatif in the downtown — and that my house was sitting right across from him. I rode the Bicycle Built for Two over to the bar. When I walked in, the Or was lounging at the video game table in the front. Or nodded to me. “There’s your domicile,” he said. Then he stood up, gave me a friendly shove, and walked out.

The house was sitting on a stool at the bar. I walked up beside him. “And in walks ,” said the house.

I sat down next to him.

“You stink of moon,” he said.

“Why do you think that might be?”

The house shrugged.

“You didn’t tell anyone where you were going.”

“Didn’t want to be found,” said the drunkhouse. “Who told you where I was? The Lamp?”

I shook my head.

“Or?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“It was Or,” said the house. “That fucking option.”

“You have a job to do,” I said. “You can’t just vanish like that.”

The house belched.

“Nice,” I said.

“Bombs away,” said the house.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” I said. “You’re a home.”

“Home is where the heart is,” said the house.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The past is gone, ,” said the house. “And it’s not coming back.”

“I’m not talking about the past — I’m talking about right now. I need a place to stay tonight.”

“Good for you,” said the house.

“And you,” I said, “have an obligation.”

“Obligation?” said the house. His eyes were watery. “Obligation.”

“Yeah,” I said.

He spun in his stool to face me. “We were a family,” he said.

What was I supposed to say to that? “I’m going back to Converse Street now. Are you coming or not?”

The house slugged its beer, put on its coat, and walked out with me. I unlocked the Bicycle Built for Two and hopped onto the front seat. The house sat down on the back and we pedaled home.

And I guess I thought that was it — that the house’s runaway had changed something, solved whatever problem it was having. In retrospect, of course, that was naïve of me — especially since the memories and bad dreams persisted.

A few weeks after the house’s return, the Memory of Johnny Appleseed asked me to help him plant some apologies in the deadgroves on Old Mill Road; I worked all day with him and then rode the Bicycle Built for Two back to Converse Street. I was really looking forward to getting home and ripping open a bag of rippled barbecue DeathChips.

When I turned my bike onto our street, though, I saw a strange sight at the tree belt: something was attached to the tree. At first I couldn’t see what — it was dark, and my vision isn’t so good. I figured it was some sort of tree-based installation art. Our trees, like most trees, were very creative, always painting and sculpting, and sometimes they chose to work big, beuysing or serraing.

When I got closer, though, I recognized the shape. It wasn’t art—it was my house, 577, hanging by a noose from a tree in the yard.

“Oh. Oh Core,” said the Bicycle Built for Two.

I raced into the yard and dropped the bike. The house was swaying in the wind. Its eyes were closed, its face ghost-white, its roof gray and crushed; houseblood ran down the beige siding and onto the sidewalk.

Then I heard a soft rush of air — a gasp, maybe. Was the house still alive?

I heard the thin wind again — it wasn’t yet dead.

I got down on my knees in the wet earth and I said an emergency prayer. I got an automated response: “Welcome to Appleseed. All Emergency Cones are busy right now. If you pray your name, and the time of your prayer—”

I closed the prayer and stood up. The house was still breathing. I ran through my options in my mind. Could I climb the tree, cut the noose?

There was no way. I was too small.

Could the stars help?

No — they weren’t smart enough.

Then I looked up — way up, past the moon. At your Memory.

Memory of the Reader: Who? Me?

Yes. This house is dying. It’s dying!

Memory of the Reader: I can’t — what can I do?

You need to reach down into the page and lift up the house, loosen the tension on that noose.

“I’m just a Memory,” you said.

Just lift up the page — shift the gravity!

“I’m not the Reader,” said the Memory of the Reader. “I can’t lift anything.”

Where is the Reader?

Memory of the Reader: Reading another book.

Another novel?

Memory of the Reader: Does it matter?

It didn’t — within a few minutes, everything was dead: the house, the words about the house, the noose and the words about the noose. I knelt down on the page and the black houseblood soaked the knees of my white pants.

Shortly after the house took its last breath, Orange Traffic Cones arrived and the hospital followed. The Cones put on crash helmets, climbed ladders, and cut the house down; he landed on the lawn with the terrible sounds of wood splintering and glass smashing. The hospital tried to resuscitate him, but he was dead as a word.

Eventually, the Cones started collecting their tools and talking about where to go for dinner. As I stood in the blood-sopped grass, the hospital approached me wearing a house-sized stethoscope around his neck. The hospital lit a four-foot cigarette and said, “There wasn’t anything I could do, .”

“I know,” I said.

“You can’t blame yourself.”

“Who else is there to blame?” I said.

The hospital took a drag. “That’s a good question,” he said.

A few minutes later, the Cones’ and hospital’s walkie-talkies started trilling and squawking, and they all left for another call. I stood alone with the dead house, its blood blackening the page. The end.

— Fini ~

Memory of the Reader: Wait.

What.

Memory of the Reader: What happened next? What’s the rest of the story?

That’s the end of it.

Memory of the Reader: But where did you go?

I didn’t go anywhere. It was late. I went inside and fell asleep.

Memory of the Reader: You slept in the corpse of the house?

Sure. What was I supposed to do?

Memory of the Reader: Sleep on the page?

And get carried off by a wild sentence, pulled into another bookwormhole? No, thank you.

Memory of the Reader: I’ve never heard of anyone doing that — sleeping in a deadhouse.

People do it all the time. My father was born in a deadhouse.

Memory of the Reader: What was that like?

Shrug. The rooms had gone gray, the house’s dreams silence and soil. New questions roamed from room to room.

Memory of the Reader: Such as?

Yeah, among others.

For a while I just lay there, listening. Then I prayed to the Memory of Johnny Appleseed and told him I needed help.

With what? he prayed back.

Digging a hole, I prayed.

A hole? he prayed. I should borrow some shovels, then?

Yes, I prayed. The biggest you can find.

CHIVER’S DELIGHT

That was in 1993, when language in Appleseed berserked, flabbergasted, broke free of its shackles for good. It began mutating, for one thing. All of a sudden — how do I say this? — the language got bigger.

No, not bolder, per se. Literally, bigger.

I think it started when the Daily Core printed a story about wild sentences troughing on the shore of the Kellogg River. That wouldn’t have been news normally, but these sentences were big—six feet high, one source told the Core; ten, another said. Creepy, right? But hey, odd shit happened all the time in Appleseed. Clouds wore hats. Every so often your shoes died on your feet. Sometimes you were attacked by the glasses on your face. And once or twice a year we felt a great shadow overhead, and looked up into the sky to see a page turning.

Soon, giant language started appearing everywhere. I was riding the Bicycle Built for Two one day, me on the front seat, Sentence on the backseat, when — plak! I hit—something—and I flew over the handlebars and landed on my side.

“I am.” came crashing down on me. “ ‘My tooth!’ he shouted, painfully,” said Sentence.

I looked at “I am.” There was blood dribbling from his m.

I lumbered back up the road to see what I’d hit. There, in the middle of the street, was a giant black comma. It was about three feet high, and it was—

Was it — snoring?

Yes! It was so fat that it had gotten tired crossing the street — it was taking a nap right there in the road.

“What the—” said “I am.”.

Soon, you could see these gigantic characters everywhere in Appleseed: ten-foot-high exclamation points loitering at the intersection of Colton and Shay; a 7 and a lowercase e ripping Harleys down Grassy Gutter; errant periods frowning all through town, stopping Appleseedians in their tracks.

Not long afterward, phrases and sentences began camouflaging into the page. You’d be   right along, just like always, when   and   . And even though most Appleseedians looked at language as a threat, and no one particularly minded the   , it was still odd that   . And that, on a warm summer day, there was no   at your feet or   whimpering outside your window.

We were all miffled. Miffed. Hiffled. We weren’t sure what we could say, or what it meant. What if the meaning changed after we said it? We’d lost control of the story. The Orange Traffic Cones didn’t have any choice, I guess, but to allow the Mothers to increase their monitoring of language. First, they tried restraining the words physically — using parentheses, and when that didn’t work, brackets of various styles — but to no avail.

So the Mothers ordered the Orange Traffic Cones to close the borders: no language was to leave or enter Appleseed. To better regulate our words and their uses, Cones built checkpoints all around town: on Highway Five, at Samsa Avenue, near the worryfields. Everywhere you went you had to wait in line to show a Cone your words. New bans were issued every day: exclamation points were cut, then metaphors, then commands. For a while, periods were banned and every sentence had to end with a question mark. I remember once going to Bagel Beagle during the period ban and trying to order a sandwich. When I placed the order, though, I had to do so in a question: “I’d like a turkey sandwich?”

“Would you?” said the beagle behind the counter.

“On a bagel?” I said.

“Yes?” said the beagle.

“Yes?” I said.

“You would?” said the beagle.

“Yes I said?” I said.

“Are you asking me if you said that?” said the beagle.

“No?” I said.

“You’re not sure?”

“No I am?” I said.

“You’re asking me what you are?” the beagle inquired.

As a temporary fix, people stopped talking and suspended all prayers. Some people used sign language or Morse code; others invented complicated gestures. If you couldn’t find a way to express yourself, you just stored the question in your cheeks or swallowed it down.

We could only go so long without speaking, though; soon people were praying again, and then whispering, and then talking at full volume. Then a rally for words was held on the Town Green. “Go words!” chanted the hundreds in attendance. “Words rock!”

Select Cone Johnson took the podium and promised that he and the Board would find a way to “take back our words.” Starting tomorrow, he announced, Cones would start searching every home in Appleseed. “We’ll omit these words and phrases from every page,” he shouted, and the crowd applauded.

And I remember seeing the story about it in the next day’s Core—the pictures of Cones kicking in doors, carrying out armfuls of expressions, handcuffing those sentences and stuffing them into the backs of cone-shaped cars. Words that tried to hide, the article said, would be immediately demeaned. When one expression tried to run? A Mother killed that sentence on sight.

When I read that story, I knew what I had to do. How long would it be before the Cones came knocking on our door? I didn’t have a choice — there was only one option. The very next morning, I woke at first light and lifted the sheet off of “I am.” ’s cage. He was curled up in the corner, snoring. I unhooked the latch, opened the door, and lifted the words out. I wrapped Sentence in my coat and carried him upstairs and outside. We crossed the street and walked through the worryfield, then into the trees and toward the Appleseed border. There were deadwords — I remember “candelabra,” “phosphate,” others — here and there, and sentence-trails criss-crossing through the brush. As we ran along the path I scanned the trees for any sign of a sentry or guardcone — anything bright orange or cone-shaped — but I didn’t see any; the woods looked clear.

A few hundred feet from the border I stopped, knelt down in the darkness, put Sentence on the wet earth, and unhooked his leash. “ ‘I am.’?” I said.

He blinked his eyes in the pink light.

“You can’t stay in Appleseed anymore. You have to go.” I pointed to the town line about a hundred feet away. “That way,” I said.

“I am,” said Sentence, “still sleepy-eyed, he blinked his eyes and—”

“I know, it’s early and this is probably confusing,” I said. “But you just have to listen to what I’m saying to you.”

“Apprehensive,” said Sentence, “I am wished for home.”

“Do you know what they’re doing to language, ‘I am.’? What will happen to you if they find you?”

“Quiet,” said Sentence, “I am can be very hiding and quiet.”

“I’ll see you again — I promise,” I said, choosing my words carefully; any misuse would bring Cones right to us. “But I can’t take care of you anymore. You’re free now. OK? You’re free.”

There were tears in the sentence’s eyes. “Wishing for home,” he said, “I am sorrowly hoped to convey—”

Then I heard a sound in the trees: the snap of a twig. I searched the path behind me, but I didn’t see anyone.

“Appreciative,” said the sentence, “—I am would think back on that time, and their friendships—”

Another twig snapped — this one from somewhere high up. I looked into the trees. I heard a shuffling, and then a leaf fell away from a branch and I saw—

Was it?

Shit: A flare of orange plastic between the leaves.

I turned to “I am.”. “Run. Now. Fast as you can.”

Sentence flashed me a final look and took off, sprinting toward the town line. Its cover blown, the Cone shimmied down the bark and vaulted past me and after “I am.” Sentence looked back, saw the Cone behind him, and sped up, revising as he ran: “I am running run fast.”; “I am sprinting with the wind through my face!” And then, it was like he shifted into high gear or something — I’d never seen language move so fast. His letters italicized and he kicked up leaves behind him. “The sounds are in my hear-and-now: Flams! Sizzion! Toreabloo!”; “I am this word and that word!”

“Run on, ‘I am.’!” I shouted.

Sentence crossed the town line; the Cone stopped at the border and doubled over, his shoulders heaving. But “I am.” didn’t slow down — he kept moving, kept getting louder, truer. “Newchording, Me-oh-mying, transmuliterating!”

I hooted to the sentence. “Keep going, ‘I am.’!”

“Anything and everything! Holy shouts and bouts and rambles! Cries and thanks and bellows, now and forever amen! To on and on and never—”

CHAMPION

That was the end for me, though — without “I am.” I lost myself. I forgot to live and died. I had no friends or family to remind me who I was, or why I was here. You really can’t live that way for very long.

One morning, I was cleaning up dead letters in the worryfields and listening to the remnants of music on my headphones when a bookworm — the sentence “You should just go ahead and die.”—emerged from a bookwormhole. The sentence was wearing a blue concert T-shirt advertising a band I didn’t recognize, and he seemed to be lost. “Excuse me,” said “You should just go ahead and die.”. “Can you tell me how to get back to Fialky’s Fields?”

I couldn’t answer him — I was struck by the words of his face. “I should?” I said.

“I thought I knew the way, but I kind of got turned around,” said “You should just go ahead and die.”.

“And if I did,” said a thought. “Would this all go away? The blight? The darkness?”

“Everything would go away,” the sentence said.

I still had the shovel I’d used to bury my house. I picked it up, put it to the page, and began to dig.

“Good,” said the sentence. “Yup, you got it.”

Soon I’d made a hole in the page about the size of my body. When I was finished, I tossed aside my headphones and lay down. “Could I ask you — if you wouldn’t mind — to bury me?”

“You should just go ahead and die.” looked at his watch. “I’m supposed to get back to my novel by noon.”

“Just a few shovelfuls, maybe.”

The sentence smiled curtly. “Sure,” he said, and he picked up the shovel and started pitching page over me. As he was working, a prayer came in from overhead. “?” It was my Mom. I didn’t answer.

“You should just go ahead and die.” filled the page in around me, leaving only my face exposed. “How’s that?” he said.

“Good,” I said. “Nice and warm.”

“!” prayed my Mom.

“What now?” I shouted to the sentence.

“Now nothing,” he said.

“For how long?” I said.

“Forever, probably,” said “You should go ahead and die.”. Then he picked up a shovelful of page and threw it over my face. I felt the weight of that page — of all of the pages — in my eyes and in my mouth; I choked on it; it filled my throat and my lungs. Then I wasn’t; I let out my breath and died.

When you die, your parents hear it. They know your death in their ears and their hearts and their bones. My Mom was welding a footbridge out past Wolf Swamp when she heard the notes of my death knell. “No,” she said into her welder’s mask. “?” she prayed.

Somewhere off the margin, “I am.” howled.

Six feet above me, the bookworm who’d buried me started coughing. Suddenly all of my sentences started coughing — those in the trees, in the fields, in the fibers. Every word I’d brought into Appleseed, every sentence I’d invented, started spitting up black blood; line by line they squawked, shriveled up, and went silent.

My Dad, working at Muir Drop, saw a sentence fall on the factory floor and stood up from his workbench. He put down his tools and prayed. “? Buddy?”

Just at that moment, down in the page, I had what they call an—

What do they call it?

A realizing. An eponymous? New information in my almost-dead mind.

“Wait a second,” said a thought. “Maybe I don’t need to die. Maybe—”

But it was too late — I was already dead. I had one prayer, maybe less, left in my skull. I prayed it out as far as I could. “Mom! Dad! I’m so sorry. I—” I prayed to anyone who would listen. “All of this was my fault,” I prayed. The prayer — the sentences — wormed out through my skull and toward the surface. But I don’t know if it ever reached anyone. My mind went quiet, and dark, and still.

WESTFIELD SEEK-NO-FURTHER

Diane threw off her welding mask and flew up off the bridge, over the Connecticut River and the western Margin, past the deadgroves and the Prayer Centers and toward home. For the first time, she saw how many stories she’d missed: “Monarch,” “Bastille Square,” “Fathers in the Field,” and so many others. When had all those stories been written? And what were they about?

She landed near the pair of headphones, the corpse of the sentence and the lumpy page. “?” she prayed. She surveyed the site. Then she dropped down to her knees and ran her hands over the freshly turned page. She prayed her son’s name, over and over. On the third prayer, she received an automatic prayer from Appleseed. “I’m sorry, but no party is listed under that prayer name. Please check the name and try praying again.”

Across the street, her husband’s truck pulled into the driveway. Ralph leapt out of the cab and charged across the street. “Di!” he hollered. “Why isn’t answering my prayers?”

Diane’s mind raced. She ran through one idea after the next.

Then Ralph saw the lump. “What’s—” He looked at Diane — her face was a monsoon — and then back at the soil. “No,” he shouted. He dove at the page and started digging with his bare hands. “Wasn’t anyone with him?” he grunted. “That fucking Memory he always hangs out with? Or the Reader — where’s the Reader?”

Diane looked up into the darkness, then down at the page. “Wait a second,” said one of Diane’s thoughts to another.

“What?” said the second thought.

The first thought said, “What if we—”

“Dig, Di. Dig!” Ralph tossed clumpfuls of page over his shoulder.

Diane lifted off the ground, flew a hundred feet off the page—

“Diane!” shouted Ralph.

— hovered there for a moment, and then shot straight down, gaining speed and dropping through an open bookwormhole and down into the page.

APPLECORE

PICK-YOUR-OWN

Even traveling as fast as she did — scorching through the paper from story to story — it took Diane a long time (hours, days, or years, depending on the novel) to find you. For a while the search seemed never-ending. How many novels were there? More than once, she found a Reader who looked like you — sitting in a noiry diner, rifling through a used bookstore in a bodice-ripper — only to find out when she approached you that it was someone else.

When she finally did track you down, you were living twenty miles away and two years later and working as a newspaper reporter. You weren’t making much meaning at the job, but you were gaining experience and collecting stories. That day, you were covering an event called the Marginalia Arts Festival. You were on deadline — your story was due in less than two hours. One of the organizing tents had agreed to speak with you about the festival’s mission, and you were interviewing them by the entrance. Diane spotted you and the festival tent and dropped down behind a row of Port-a-Potties.

“It’s a great opportunity for artists to make a name for themselves,” the tent told you. “And tents as well.”

You wrote down those quotes. “And where do you see the Marginalia Festival in, say, five years?” you said.

The tent’s brow furrowed. “I’d like people to look forward to Marginalia the same way they do—”

Just then you saw the flash of a warskirt between a row of toilets. You immediately closed your notebook, spun around, and started walking.

“Hello?” said the tent.

You brisked away from her and bolded across Pulaski Park and back toward Main Street.

“Miss!” shouted the tent.

You looked for a place to hide: JavaNet? The Haymarket?

It was too late: Diane landed in front of you. Before she even had a chance to speak, though, you stuck your finger in her face. “Leave me alone,” you spat, and you stormed past her. “I don’t want anything to do with you.”

Diane flew over you and landed inches from your face. “Just wait a second,” she said.

“No,” you said. You changed direction and stormed the other way.

“Stop right there,” boomed Diane. “I am a recognized Mother of—”

“But you’re not my mother,” you said over your shoulder. “You’re not anyone to me—”

“I’ve been looking for you for years,” Diane said, her voice breaking. “Will you at least listen to what I have to say?”

You stopped and turned around.

“Absolutely not,” said the Reader. “I have a good life here. A full life. I’m somebody. I have a boyfriend. A good job. I never had any of that in Appleseed. I didn’t even have thoughts of my own! All I was to was just words on a—”

“ is dead,” said Diane. “Those sentences he imagined—”

“Bookworms he called them,” said the Reader. “Fucking figments.”

“—rotted out the whole town. And then one of them killed him.”

“He killed himself, you mean,” the Reader said.

All the air left Diane’s body.

“Because you weren’t there to save him,” said the Reader.

“OK,” Diane said.

“Everyone abandoned him,” the Reader said.

“All right — we could have”—her voice shook—“been there more. You’re right. OK?” Diane held out her hands. “But we can still save him. You — you can still save him.”

“Me save him? You save him.”

“I can’t on my own. You have to come back. Appleseed needs a Reader.”

“I never had any sentences of my own,” you said. “Now I finally do and you want me to leave them all behind?”

“For a few days — just to help us finish the story,” Diane said.

You crossed your arms.

“Please,” said Diane. “Please.”

“And then what?”

“What do you mean?”

“If I go back to Appleshit,” said the Reader. “What happens when I finish reading?” said the Reader. “Am I stuck in—”

“No — of course not. The book will end.”

The Reader crossed her arms. “And I can leave.”

“Sure.”

“And I can come back here?”

“Of course,” my Mom said. “When you’re finished reading Appleseed, you can read anything you want.”

“Even if I do go with you, there’s nothing I can do to help.”

“Just try,” said the Mother.

“Shit,” said the Reader. She looked around — at the festival behind her, and then at the slow traffic on Main Street. “If I’m going, I have to make a pitstop first.”

“Absolutely not,” the Mother said. “There’s no time for that.”

“Forget it, then — find yourself another reader,” said the Reader.

The mother threw her hands. “Every second that passes—”

“Trust me, OK?” the Reader said. “It’s important.”

“Even with my son in the ground?”

“Yes,” said the Reader. “Yes.”

Diane stepped forward and put her arm around the Reader. “Grab on to my waist.”

The Reader wrapped her arms around Diane.

“Hold on tight,” Diane said. Then she pushed with her feet and lifted the Reader off the page. They rose over Northampton; the Reader hooted as she saw the words get smaller beneath her. When they reached skimming height, Diane shouted “Where’m I going?”

The Reader pointed toward Route Nine. “Over the bridge and into Amherst.”

“East?”

The Reader nodded. “We’re looking for a place called Atkin’s.”

They flew over green rolling hadleypages of farms and houses and then into stories of Amherst: pages covered with cows, silos, and wide-open spaces. The Reader pointed to the corner up ahead. “There it is,” she hollered. Diane saw a large farmstand, a half-filled parking lot, and rolling pages of green to the right. When she looked past the farmstand, she understood: the adjacent fields were covered with trees—apple trees, their branches shouting in green and red. The grove stretched back to the edge of the page, spilled off it, and continued on.

Diane dropped into the grove and set the Reader down onto the page. “Didn’t I tell you?” the Reader said.

Diane spit. “Get what you need and let’s go.”

The Reader approached a tree, grabbed an apple, and pulled it off the branch. “These are apple trees,” she said.

“I know they are,” Diane said.

“And it’s pick-your-own!” the Reader said. She took a bite of the apple and then held it out to Diane. “Don’t you want one?”

“Not right now I don’t,” said Diane. She took the bitten-into apple and put it in a drawer in her skirt. “ needs us. Now point me to the closest bookwormhole.”

The Reader nodded toward Route 116. “Belchertown — a few miles that way,” she said.

Diane lifted them up. High over the page, the Reader looked down and shouted, “You have to admit — that grove is a beautiful sight, isn’t it?”

But Diane didn’t answer her; she tightened her grip on the Reader and skimmed forward, faster and faster, as fast as any Mother ever had.

GRENADIER

The Reader and the Mother volted through the bookwormhole. As they did, light flooded the town, painting the buildings and the fields, swarming the Amphitheatre and the hospital and drenching Appleseed Mountain.

Diane didn’t stop; she carried the Reader high up over the buildings and trees and then banked left and bulleted forward. “Welcome home!” Diane shouted.

The Reader tried to get her bearings. Were they on Guerry Street? No — that was Jonquil, just past the Green, not far from Colton’s deadgroves.

Something was happening on the ground below. Up and down the street, people were stepping out of their houses. Fifty feet away to their right, a woman wearing a bathrobe stood in the middle of the road, stretching out her arms. When she looked up at you, you saw that she had a hole in her face. “Halleluiah!” she shouted at you.

“Thanks be to the Core!” shouted someone down the road.

“Mothers did it! They did it!”

The bookwormholes, you saw now, were everywhere: in the people, in the trees, punching through the lawns and roads every ten or twenty feet. “What happened here?” you shouted.

“You did,” Diane said.

“What do you mean?”

Not a street or page, it seemed, had been spared. Whole houses were burned to the page; some streets were completely gone. The center of town was leveled. Zooming over the high school, you could see the Small Pear up ahead — all of the windows had been smashed; Gilbert’s was covered with plywood; so was the Beagle. You looked to your right. “Look at the Hu Ke Lau!” you hollered. It was just a charred corpse of a restaurant. And many of the pages on the North Side were nearly empty — burned out, and rotted completely through in some places.

“Where are the Mothers?” you shouted.

“Most of them were KIA, some of them maybe captured,” Diane shouted. “The rest are in hiding.”

The mood on the street below, though, was jubilant: people were clapping or hooting, shaking hands, high-fiving, and hugging. Passing over Coventry, a long-haired man shouted up at them. “Beautiful!” He took off his shirt and slammed it to the page. “It’s fucking beautiful!”

Diane turned onto Converse Street. Soon you could see the edge of the worryfields. Even there, though, people were happy: you saw two worriers dancing, another just lying on her back and staring up at the bright sky.

As you approached the fields, you saw a big lump in the far corner of the page. “What’s that?” one of your thoughts said, pointing. Something was moving next to the lump. Was it a machine? No, it was a man in a gray jumpsuit, hunched over the page. He was digging. “Is that Ralph?” you shouted. But you knew it was.

Diane dipped, grazed the surface, and lowered you onto the white soil. Ralph didn’t even look up. Dirt flew over his shoulder.

“Ralph,” Diane lyled.

You were in awe — you’d never seen anyone work so hard. Ralph didn’t even have a shovel — he was scooping the pagesoil with his bare hands.

“Ralph!” Diane shouted again.

Ralph looked up, surprised. “Wha,” he said.

“I need you to stop digging—”

He shook his head. “The page is tough,” he said, “but I’m making progress—”

“I need you to stop that right now and go find someone for me.”

Ralph’s straightened up. “Who?” he said.

The Reader watched Ralph’s truck drive off; then she turned to Diane. “Walk around the page,” the Reader told her. “Start collecting words.”

“What for?”

“As many as you can find.”

“They’re all dead,” said Diane.

“That’s OK,” the Reader said.

Diane went to work on this page and the next, gathering as many words as she could. When her arms were full, she stacked the words next to her son’s grave. Soon, she saw Ralph’s truck drive into the worryfields — he hadn’t been gone long. The passenger’s-side door opened and the Memory of Johnny Appleseed stepped out.

“Oh my Core!” shouted the Memory, hobbling toward you. He held out his ethereal arms. “You came back!”

“Took some convincing,” Diane said.

“Did you hear what happened to ?” the Memory of Johnny Appleseed asked her.

“Of course she heard,” Diane said.

“I brought something for you,” the Reader told the Memory. She gestured to Diane, who opened the drawer in her skirt.

Ralph studied a pile of words next to the lump. “What are these?” he said.

Diane fished into her skirt, found the bitten-into apple, and held it out to the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

The Memory’s face bloomed. “What — where did you—” He pointed at the Reader. “Where did you get this?” He took the apple with both hands and held it like an egg.

“Holy shit,” said Ralph. “Is that what I think it is?”

The Reader turned to him. “Let the Memory deal with the story of Appleseed,” she said. “I need you to help Diane pick up as many words as you can find.”

Ralph looked confused. “Why?” he said. “They’re all—”

“She knows that, honey,” said Diane. “Just do what she says.” She led Ralph to an adjacent field to look for sentences. He soon caught on and understood what they were looking for. When he couldn’t find the exact right words, though, he decided to improvise. He selected three words from the page—“junction,” “author,” and “veneer”—and dragged them over to Diane. “Do me a favor and cut these, will you?” he said.

The Mother flipped on her skirtsaw and it whirred to life. “Where?” she said. Ralph pointed, and Diane pulled the blade through the words and gave Ralph the wordparts he needed: the “au,” the “ction” and the “eer.”

Then Diane went back to what she was doing: dislodging a top layer of words—“nuisance,” “selfish,” “brat”—and digging deep. Finally, she found the words that she was looking for — that she’d been trying to find for years: “I was just so scared.” And, “I was angry.” And, “And sad. I didn’t know what to do with it all.”

And then, “You were wonderful the way you were. You didn’t need to be anything, or do anything, or be anyone.”

Ralph and Diane carried their words across the fields and lay them on the ground by the Reader. The Memory of Johnny Appleseed stood by, watching them arrange the words. They didn’t all fit together — some letters were rotted beyond recognition; other phrases were irrelevant or heavy with sorrow — but they did their best to order them so they made new sense. “Put that one there, how about,” said Diane at one point. After watching the Reader work for a few minutes, Ralph knelt next to her and sunk his hands into the page.

“What’s she doing?” the Memory of Johnny Appleseed asked Diane.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Diane said. “She’s revising.”

HONEYCRISP

I. YELLOW TRANSPARENT II

That spring, the Auctioneer reappeared in Appleseed. Her arrival was completely unannounced — one day she was spotted walking over the margin, her arms full of meaningless words and throwaways. She didn’t even go home to Converse Street — instead, she walked directly to the empty Amphitheatre. Then she stepped up onto the bare cement stage, held up an item at random — a jar of hearsay — and began to shout.

“Ourfirstitemladiesandgentsishearsayfineappleseedhearsayyourenotgoingtofindanyrumorsbetterthantheserumorsrightherethishearsayisholyitholdsthebonesoftruthandmemoryletsstartthebiddingathalfaconcept.”

Soon, a numb passerby humbled to the edge of the Amphitheatre. Lulled by the Auctioneer’s call, he blurted out a meaning-bid without even really thinking about it. Just then, a wandering thayer appeared in the opposite corner of the Amphitheatre and shouted out a higher amount. The numb countered; the thayer did, too.

News of the auction rilled through town — it wasn’t long before a crowd had assembled. Someone lent a table; a Cone delivered a pulpit. Appleseedians brought meaningless items to the stage and the Auctioneer held them up, sang of their potential, and made them meaningful. That auction ran for ten hours straight. Looking out at the jam-packed house, the Auctioneer could see off-duty Cones, former Mothers, Muir Drop Forgers. She wondered if Uncle Joump was out there. And how about her father? Or her brother — where was her brother?

II: A GRAFTING

Two pages over, the Memory of Johnny Appleseed drove his shovel into the fibers. When the hole he’d dug was deep enough, he pulled a single seed from the Reader’s apple and dropped it into the soil.

As the Memory was covering up the seed, Ralph drifted over to check on him. When he saw what the Memory was doing, he told him to wait right there — that he’d be right back. Ralph ran out to his truck for an emotional wrench and a bucket and carried them to the happiness hydrant on the corner of Apple Hill and Converse. When he turned the bolt on the hydrant, happiness flooded the street. Ralph filled the bucket and left the faucet running; then he carried the bucket of happiness out to the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. The Memory took it from him and carefully poured the happiness on the apple seed.

Within paragraphs, the first saplings of happiness-fueled stories began to peek through the pages. The stories were restorative: soon, the holes in the pages and people started closing. In the center of town, the windows grew back at Small Pear and the Bagel Beagle opened for business. Someone turned on the lights at the Big Why, and a truck arrived with a new batch of questions. Cordial Carl did some deep breathing and fired up his grill.

Heartened by the sounds of the auction, people started pulling off of the highway and into Appleseed; soon they were arriving in droves. And all of them needed food and housing. With two new apple orchards up and running, Ralph reopened Belmont and Woodside and shifted to part-time at Muir Drop; then he quit altogether.

III. JUPITER

In the new stories, wasn’t so alone. He was still bald and overweight, but he had a good strong heart, a zell imagination, a tough soul. His house was still alive and everyone inside it safe and sound. He didn’t always see I to I with his mother, a nurse at Appleseed Hospital, but they got along OK — sometimes they’d go to Appleseed Library together and then talk about what they were reading. He was closer with his father, Ralph, who he worked with at the apartment buildings. had a pet sentence, a few good friends, and even a girlfriend or two. In high school he worked at a community theater and started writing stories in his spare time. He stopped eating so many chips, and learned when to stay quiet and when to speak. When he was eighteen, he graduated from Appleseed High and went on to college.

At the end of the story, the Reader finished reading. Not great, you decided, but not bad, either.

MOTHER (AMERICAN)

The Reader straightened up and wiped her brow.

“Well?” Diane asked her.

The Reader looked down at the silent page and shook her head. “I don’t know. I thought — if we put these together — he’d come back, but—”

They all stared at the lump.

“Maybe he was dead too long,” the Memory of Johnny Appleseed said.

“My poor boy,” said Ralph.

“Ormaybewejusthaventfoundtherightwordsyet,” said the Auctioneer.

Diane leaned down to the page. She made a few more sentences — the simplest, truest ones she could:

“You are good.”

“You are loved.”

“I have always loved you. I always will.” She planted them and pushed page over them.

Suddenly, I was pulled through the words without warning: back through letters and pages, back to the body of —I found my fat stomach, my still feet, my cold brain, my dead thoughts, my closed eyes.

I heard my family’s words. “My poor boy.” and “You were wonderful the way you were.” And, “I have always loved you. I always will.”

The words were breath in my lungs; I heard the story directly above me. I blinked. Where was the surface — the light and the air? Was I still ? Was I at all?

MCINTOSH

Standing over the pagegrave, ’s parents hear a sound — a flicker in the margin woods. They turn to see words, sprinting through the trees, across the worryfields, at breakneck speed: “I am sorry!” becomes “I am running and running!” and then “I am saving you!”

On the page above you, you hear the language, “I am.” hooing: “I am missed you!” “I am here now!”

You blink and cough page out of your mouth. You see a flash of light above and you claw for the surface.

“I am wanting you to breathe and live!” says the sentence. “I am you will live!”

Then Sentence breaks through the page, grabs hold of you with the teeth of his “I,” and pulls you up out of the page. “I am you will!” he says. “I am you will!”

The light fills your eyes. The sentence licks the page off your face. You squint in the sun. When you’re able to focus, you see them all: the Auctioneer speed-praying, the tears falling into your father’s glasses, the weary smile on your mother’s face. You are. You are home.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHRISTOPHER BOUCHER teaches writing and literature at Boston College, and is the managing editor of Post Road magazine. His debut novel, How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (Melville House), was widely praised. Golden Delicious is his second novel. He lives with his wife and two children in Newton, Massachusetts.

Content

Christopher Boucher
Golden Delicious

VOX

ROYAL JUBILEE

GOLDEN NOBLE

FIESTA

NORTHERN SPY

SENTENCE THE SENTENCE

GLOCKENAPFEL

NEWTON WONDER

THE APPLESEED FLEA MARKET

SENTENCE THE SENTENCE

THE MARGINALS

HOWGATE WONDER

YOU CAN’T DO THAT ON TELEVISION

THE BICYCLE BUILT FOR TWO

THE BOOKWORMS

THE BOOKWORMS

PRAYER PIANO

STARK’S EARLIEST

THE BIG WHY

WHITE TRANSPARENT

TOPAZ

RIVAL

ROSEMARY RUSSET

THE AUCTIONEER

LIBERTY

CORNISH AROMATIC

D’ARCY SPICE

YELLOW TRANSPARENT

THE MOTHERS OF APPLESEED

SENTENCE THE SENTENCE II

LADY SUDDELEY

MOTHERS’ DAY

AUXERRE

FATHERS IN THE FIELD

MARGIL

WORCESTER PEARMAIN

IDARED

FATHERS IN THE FIELD

WORRYFIELDS

PRAYER PIANO II

BASTILLE SQUARE

EDWARD VII

A FAT, SNORING COMMA

MONARCH

CHIVER’S DELIGHT

CHAMPION

WESTFIELD SEEK-NO-FURTHER

APPLECORE

PICK-YOUR-OWN

GRENADIER

HONEYCRISP

MOTHER (AMERICAN)

MCINTOSH

ABOUT THE AUTHOR