A half of an apple lies on the snow.
Its crisp, alabaster flesh faces the sun, stray juice solidifying into crystals beneath a ghastly whisper of ice that swirls about. The crimson membrane coating the flesh reciprocates the sunlight’s beaming headlights, with awry snowflakes melting as they clung onto the fruit’s skin. Slowly, agonizingly, the snowflakes shrivel away into beads of water that slip into the snowbank beneath.
A girl approaches, feet soft as they trot across the layer of snow. She breathes in the melancholy whispers of frigid wind, murmuring in unheard voices that twist the air into knots before softly landing on the soft white floors. The sky, a stone cold harbor gray, spreads its wings above her head like a dove, frozen in mid-flight, as it exhales bitter smoke with a touch reminiscent of ice. Patches of snow pool into water that sinks beneath the soft flakes, running down a hidden stream that empties into a forlorn creek.
An embankment, topped with snow powder and dots of dirt protruding from where earlier snow had melted, emerges into her vision, gliding into view like a pair of velvet curtains, throats yanked to reveal a stage. Through the creek runs water, yielding a soft noise of aqua rushing impatiently as they sail in a linear horizontal path downstream. The body of water snakes and bounces between two high walls of the embankment, allowing dirt to crumble and pour snow into the creek.
Strands of ebony hair stick against the girl’s red cheeks as she gently bends down to reach the apple, trembling frostbitten fingers wrapping around the cold body as it weighs heavily in her palms like a cadaver, drained of life, drained of joy. She lifts the apple and touches its face to her chapped lips, pondering its origins briefly before straightening her legs to properly gaze at the cold creek below her feet. Her hands are cold, like the boulders of glaciers that sink beneath the snowbank, upholding her body as she gently, slowly, gingerly descends toward the water.
She stands on the embankment, adjacent to the creek, filled with arctic tears that wail in burbled humming cadence. Erratics peek from the surface of the water, and in the distance lies a stray branch, fallen and abandoned as its rotting wood deteriorates. The hum-buzz of the stream crashing into itself, splashing against moss-ridden erratics, and twirling around in an off-beat rhythm which fills the starved winter air.
The girl bites into the apple, sinking her chattering teeth into the flesh, holding high expectations of cloying forbidden fruit that the world would die just to hold a taste for.
She hopes for the fruit to be candy so that she can drown her sorrow in cavities. She hopes for the fruit to be euphoria bottled into a single fruit: a drug that injects copious amounts of serotonin in a loose attempt to free her from her own suffering. She hopes for the apple to be sweet: a luscious round ruby fuji nestled in a wooden box at a local grocery store, promising high quality products with lulling temptation.
Yet she is met with bitterness, an acidic and acerbic tang that reciprocates a sharp bite. It is unforgivingly bitter, like ground coffee beans and grains of black sand resting atop tender taste buds. It is an unripe pomegranate, a shrunken blueberry, a poisoned tangerine that trembles and falls, splattering on cement floors.
She stiffens, involuntarily dropping the apple, and feels the hot sting of emotion ache beside her tear ducts. Tears well into transparent beads as her vision clouds around the sight of a bitten apple, sliced in half, a quarter of its body buried beneath the snow, cradled in the soft cold flakes as it stares back. It blinks, breathes, but does not lift its body from above the snowbank, resigned at its stance.
How bitter it was: how bitter something so exuberant and beautiful tasted beneath a coat of polished ruby pulled over pale fruit. How misleading the apple was, holding her hand down an abandoned roller coaster that feeds into a vortex of inevitable misery. How bitter, how unexpected, how damaging it truly was, and she berates herself for her unbridled, curious and expectant idiocy.
How was she so able to fall victim into the same wretched sorrow? Again and again, her gullible being wounds up manipulated by lies, yet she never learns from her mistakes. She will keep on walking down a path with a sign painted in falsity: a naive girl who will always be misled down the wrong walkway.
How many more times would she be tricked by the world, her own credulous heart taking the fall?
She drops to her knees, kneeling beside the edge of the embankment, watching the creek hurry along with its gentle waters, and weeps.
She cries, and her tears are waterfalls of sorrow that empty into the murky waves below.
Her tears are sweet, like syrup pouring from her eyes, falling into the creek and leaking into the water, where the sounds of her cold sorrow are drowned by the mellifluous sound of gentle waves crashing amongst each other.
Such stark contrast, between the sweet image of a lie and its bitter truth.
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