May 2023

May 2023

A hundred years ago in North Carolina nothing was happening except the debutantes, or so the debutantes believed. They were two hundred miles away in white dresses, holding balls for Greek Gods they weren’t allowed to study.

Since then, the trees grew apples that grew trees that grew apples again. They’re flowering now, and the woodpecker’s nest is holed up inside a branch that the girl visits every odd day to check on the children.

Today the girl caught a hornet under a glass. She’s gone up to bed. It’s just the hornet and I now, waiting for her to wake up with mercy or not.

She’ll wake. She’ll choose.

She’ll visit the nest. Empty. The trees, empty. The sky, empty.

The girl doesn’t say much these manyfew weeks. She’s been trying to fold her laundry for the whole of them. But in her stomping quiet she stops one day, over the short ledge of the stairs, wrestling down the window sash, and she finds the thought she put there for safekeeping, If I were alive a hundred years ago, I wouldn’t believe the earth was flat, but I would, without a doubt, believe the world was no bigger than 30 miles in any direction, and I lived at the bottom of a great bowl of it.

And certainly. Certainly. We’re as close to the Raleigh debutantes alive today as we are to those planning the ball the summer after the radio started broadcasting. They only had a few seasons to practice their dances.

We don’t practice, the girl and I.

There’s no audience.

We’re in the bowl of the world. The bottom of it, only 30 miles of mountains and the centuries reaching back in every direction.

She thinks about dancing. Arms out, hands cupped. Like this?

And certainly, certainly, we’re as close to yesterday as we are to tomorrow. The nest, still full. The glass, still full. The girl, still sleeping.

Tomorrow she’ll fold laundry and live quickly. Tomorrow I’ll still be taking a slow, single step—practicing for the debutante ball.

Mercy,

the apple house