four stories not about fruit: apple

I wrote this in spring 2019, because a friend and I had made a deal that I would upload four stories and she would upload four songs by April 23rd. It's unedited, and I do know which parts of it are clunky. I pasted together all four stories and put it on Kindle Direct Publishing, where it made about £4.50.

In March 2025 I'm off Amazon, so here you go.

I realise, watching her slacken, that the dead girl at my kitchen table chose the chair with arms so her corpse would not fall to the floor. When she sat down, back straight, and placed her skinny wrists so carefully on its rests, I thought she was simply being dramatic.

Of course she was.

She has - had - always been dramatic. No, she is still warm, the present tense still applies.

She was the first birth in the village after the outbreak, and the last for the fourteen years since. My advice to the women and various distillations and concoctions prevented any other children - nobody wanted to risk it. I am still thanked, but it does mean that the flouncing little bitch has been the youngest of a family of four hundred all her life.

Her jaw is loosening - I have never seen her look less confrontational. She always has the intent expression of a woman opening a jar while being watched by someone who doesn't believe she can do it. Goodness knows I've felt the same expression on my own face often enough.

We are really very alike, except that she is at the head of the table cooling and I am sitting at the foot of the table drinking tea. In the minute after she died I brewed a fresh pot from the very last vacuum sealed pouch of black tea I saved from before the outbreak.

My palate is not used to real black tea anymore, but I am savouring these few minutes anyway. Depending on how things turn out when her father and the constable arrive at my house, I may never drink tea again.

I add another spoon of honey to my cup and turn it clockwise between my hands.

It's not that none of this was my fault, but it's not that all of it was my fault either.

I hadn't trained as a teacher before everything fell apart, but I was a single woman with three degrees and it seemed obvious to everyone. I already had this long table, shipped in from an antique dealer who I had sent the dimensions of my kitchen. The chairs arrived gradually, one for each student, as people cleared out their houses of extra things that didn’t serve how we live now.

The dead girl at my table first became my student - the only one that nobody else had ever taught, and the only one who had never known a world with plastics - when she was three. I'd only met her as a background infant before then, at village plays, at committee meetings, at the church. I'd refused having her in my classroom before she was three because it seemed to mark a line between educating and childcare, and I have a dearly-held snobbery about that line.

She said, "I know what you are."

I stole three horses in our first year. I learned to weld and braze. I am a chemist, before everything, and that's an engineer as much as it's a herbalist and a pharmacologist. I taught myself how to keep an ugly forge at a constant temperature.

She thought I was a collaborator! I'm just now letting that sink in. As if the stupid militia could pay me in anything I can't make! As if every stupid risk I've taken, every burn on my hands, every plant in my garden wasn't for the benefit of her village.

She said, "You've been shaping this community too long, you've gone mad."

That first summer I rode the stolen horse beside the bird-silent road from the village into town, hooded and armed with knives and a pry bar, to steal from the library and the bookshops. The glue in the books had been eaten away by the outbreak and I loaded my packs carefully, each book just a folder of loose paper in card, spine-down.

It's been a fight against simplicity, honestly. The surrounding woods want to grow into the mortar of our houses, the winters want our hearts to stop and the summers want our food to poison us. The rain wants to wash away our roads down the hill and the wind wants to blow the glass from our houses.

She said, "You prefer being the witch of this little world! It must have delighted you when the old world rotted!"

Flamboyant little bitch.

I pour another cup of tea from the pot, watching my hand not shake.

The year she began school was, broadly, the year people stopped mentioning how life used to be. As though they were watching her learn to speak and wanted her only to speak about her reality. Perhaps I'm giving her too much weight, perhaps three years was enough grieving for cars and disposable pens and phones. Perhaps that was the year all the adults came to terms with how things are.

In the fifth and sixth years, the teacher in the next village east of here used to ride over to visit me every few weeks. She had been a journalist and was more emotional than I am, but we had things in common. She said the third year was when the church changed, in their village. They forbade her teaching mythology. She was angry.

"If you don't teach farmers why they're farming, they'll kill themselves the first bad season," she said. "They have to know that humanity is something beyond the practical, don't they?"

I didn't think that was the worst part of the changes, but of course it was the aspect she was closest to. Their community fell prey to a theological oversimplification and we watched, from here, discussing it in threes and fours but never in committee.

The dead girl was nearly named Eve, but someone must have found a polite way of telling the vastly pregnant Deborah how that would have seemed, and they named her Mary. Her older sister is Lynn, which means a lake.

I am Miriam, which means the same as Mary, and I never had a sister.

Mary said, "You would have enjoyed teaching my niece. She would have been like Lynn, all polite and accepting. It would have done you good in your old age."

"I've learned more from you than any of the rest of them, you silly little cow. When have I ever said I didn't want my students to question me?"

It didn't fit her tantrum, so she ignored it.

"Lynn is a liar," I said, my voice calm again, trying to get through to her. "She acts as though she's going along with the things we think are important but she's on her own path. She's not under anyone's spell."

I have stayed quiet too many times when families believe the best about each other. I prescribe for the aftermath and stay quiet, but Mary was angry at me at my table and I couldn't this time. And I don't know why Lynn involved me in her abortion, even though she’s my apprentice. She's known how to make the tea since she was eleven. Did she want to direct Mary’s anger out of their house?

"Why do you think she told you about it?’ I ask, in the voice of a teacher. “You know it was too early for symptoms. She could have kept it to herself."

"Don't try to distract me with all that. That's between us."

"It's not." I said, leaning forward. "She wants you angry at me instead of her. She wants you to see this nonsense as my business instead of her consequence. She wants you too busy hating me to ask who else's daughter it would have been."

This is too far.

Lynn is eighteen, which means the same now as it meant when I was eighteen. She's clever about her work, she has a precise and note-taking mind, but when her mind is on men and the summer she becomes silly, a lake-swimming romantic. She is a fine apprentice when she can concentrate, and she may be a fine pharmacologist after I'm done.

Even if they find me guilty of poisoning this girl at my kitchen table, they would be mad to send me away. Or worse. The sentence, officially, on the books, is worse, but we've never had to take that step. The one thing we knew when we wrote that part of the new law is that there would never be enough resources to keep prisoners.

The militia arrived in the sixth year and I thought how nice it would be to feel organised again. How calm things would become with a bigger structure around us. I nearly fell for it! The Major was neat. I had forgotten how men could look. There were folders of policies, flow charts to aid with decision making. They said there would be supply lines, that coffee and tea were still being produced and that wooden and metal boats were crossing the seas again.

Gawain is the other smith of the village. He and I cut silently into the administration tent at the back while the front was guarded, and read the policies.

The village did not comply with the militia, and we do not have coffee or tea.

They return quarterly, to see if we are starved or weakened into needing them yet, and we are not. The tenth winter - but even then we managed. Each five households chose which house they would move into, so we could close up four empty houses for the winter and only heat one. It worked. The militia came back in spring and we asked them, straight-faced, for varnish for the thawing floors.

They're not bad men, and I don't judge Lynn for choosing one.

It shouldn't have surprised me that Mary thought I didn't like her. I stopped teaching when she became my only student. For a few months there was only her and Liam studying at my table, and then Liam turned seventeen and was allowed to choose whether or not to continue. He'd been working with Len the machinist for four years so naturally he stopped book-learning with me. Mary, a year and a half younger, was already more educated than he would have been if he'd stayed at the table four more years. She and I would have been sitting at my table alone, reading and talking in loops, with nobody else there to pad out our sharp edges.

Oh, surely this isn't about rejection! No girl I've taught could poison herself over being turned away!

Her hands are curled loosely on the chair's arms, like the hands of a sleeping child. The undersides will be darkening where the blood stops. I won't move her. They'll find her as she wanted them to.

She said, "The tincture is yours, the apple is yours, even the needle I used is yours. The dose calculation is yours. Once I bite, this is just another death on your hands."

She rolled the apple across the table from her right hand into her left.

"Just a slightly bigger death than most."

I said, "I helped deliver you. From diagrams in books. Nothing I've helped out of women since has been a baby. If you'd ever seen a baby you'd know the difference."

"Sophistry!" she spat.

"Nothing like it. You were the most alive thing I'd ever seen." I couldn't look at her. I stood up and went to boil water. "Mint or hibiscus?"

"No."

"I'll make mint."

"I haven't eaten since yesterday morning, a cup of tea won't slow it down."

"Oh, I know that feeling." I said into the kettle. "I know. You feel clearer, more right. Aligned."

"I don't need a cup of tea!" Her voice rose but didn't crack.

"Well, I do."

I watched the water reaching a boil, afraid to turn around to see her glaring at me. I could hear finches in the young orchard outside.

She said, "I've left a long note. You poisoned me because I came to confront you. I can't prove you're destroying us any other way, you've made yourself so necessary nobody would even look at it if I were alive."

I poured boiled water onto mint leaves in two cups. My hand did not shake. I watched the beautiful serrated leaves float and sink, swirl and soften, release their oils.

"My note says that if I don't come back, you killed me." She sounded delighted.

"What if you do?" I asked, very quietly, setting a cup of tea down next to her and returning to my chair with mine.

She blinked.

"What if I say all right, little one, I'll go. You can be the magistrate and Lynn can be the herbalist and I'll be gone. I'll take Charity and find somewhere else." I could see it as I said it. I'd have my cloak on again, riding the mare Charity north towards the hills, a bag of seeds and tools. Our village would be kindling into chaos behind me.

"Liar."

"Do you live, that way? Is that how I keep you alive?" I didn’t sound like a teacher any more. I sounded pleading. “Everyone will get over losing me sooner than - wait.”

I watched her realise, a moment after I did. I turned the teacup round between my hands but didn't look down into it.

She hadn't known. All that time raging in her own pretty head and telling nobody, and she thought she was giving up something she wanted to keep.

"You chose a good poison," I said, more gently than I could remember ever speaking to her. She had never taken kindness well. "It won't hurt. It won't make you twist. If you just want peace, this is how."

"I want justice."

"Justice will happen. Your life won't speed it or stop it. Lynn will marry her soldier boy and become the herbalist after me and perhaps they will be the ones to have a baby. They'll name it Mary if you eat that apple."

Suddenly, tears.

"You're too far ahead of me." Mary looked down, breathed out hard, trying to regain control of her voice. She stretched both her arms out long on the table in front of her, left hand clutching the hot teacup, right hand clutching the apple she brought with her. "They say I've got an answer for everything."

"They used to say that about me. I only remember ever having questions."

She laughed, briefly.

Then she sat back in the chair that has arms, and bit into the apple.

I look down into my cup of fine honeyed black tea and see only disarray. I can still hear finches in the orchard, north of the cottage. When her father and the constable come here it will be from the east. They'll disturb the ducks and I'll be ready, and they won't know how I knew to open the door. That's how you get called a witch.

Their father is an economist by training and now he's a pretty good farmer. He stacks Charity's hay for me neatly when he delivers it. He's always had good health so I only see him as a parent - and I expect he only sees me as his daughters' teacher.

The constable came to school at my kitchen table for the first five years before going to train with Mel the kohler. Jake must be twelve years older than Mary. I think he's seen fewer bodies than I have, and I don't think he's seen a suicide. I'm glad for him that she chose such a good poison.

I go to rinse out my teacup and look out of the kitchen window. My good ash-handled iron fork is upright, kicked down into the earth at the edge of my calendula bed. I wonder who will bring it indoors before rain if I can't.

I probably don't have time to drink another cup, but I pour it anyway and sit down again.

The ducks complain.

I go to the door and open it as the men cross my garden.

They both look at me as if they're begging me to say that what they read in her note was a joke. I can't say anything, I'm picturing her handwriting. Did she use lined paper? Did she date the top right-hand corner?

Jake has been barbered this morning, I notice. There are still flecks of trimmed brown hair stuck to his neck, and he looks pink and clean around the face.

Frank says, "Is she here?"

I say, "I'm afraid she is." and I let them in.

Frank staggers as he sees her, so I put my hands on his upper arms to support him. He leans back against me for a moment and then straightens.

The constable's reaction is surprisingly controlled. Perhaps he's been visualising the scene all the way here. He says coldly, "She described in a note why she was visiting you. Would you like to tell us why you think she was here?"

I say to Frank, "She said she believed I was manipulating everyone who lived here so that I had more control than I deserved. She thought I was working with the militia to weaken us."

Frank has not looked away from his daughter's face, smooth and successfully at rest.

"Please," I say, "please sit down."

Jake says, "Perhaps that would be best, Frank." and he goes to the table and pulls out a chair that's on the near long side, next to my chair.

The girls' father sits down, still staring. My second cup of black tea is next to his elbow, steam spiralling from it.

I say, "Would either of you like a-"

Jake, standing squarely behind Frank, cuts me off. "I'm sure you understand why we won't."

"Mary brought poison with her. I didn't touch her. I have been nothing but honest with her." I am trying not to sound pleading, but I think I'm using a tone that's too far the other way. I think I sound like an educator. "I'm terribly sorry. She wanted to die and this was a mechanism."

Frank looks up at me, hollowness behind his eyes.

"My girl wanted what?"

"She is very intelligent. She's always felt limited here. We all know she could have been a council leader or magistrate before long, but it must have seemed too long." I look at her curled hands. "Or perhaps not worth the wait."

"Her note said if she died today you killed her."

"Yes," I say, suddenly bone-tired. "She told me she wrote that. It's clever. Jake, I need to sit down too." and I walk around behind him to my chair, next to Frank across the corner of the table. There's a moment he and I look at each other and everything Mary has ever done is here, between us. We hear finches outside the window and the ducks settling down, and Jake's canvas shirt rasping against itself as he shifts his weight.

"Miriam, Mary has accused you of conspiracy and murder. I will take you into custody to the hall."

"Yes, you would. Frank, do you believe her?"

"Don't answer that, Frank," Jake says. I have no idea why.

"Where is Lynn?" I ask.

"She went to study at the church. She said you gave her an essay to write."

So I did. "I remember now, I thought something academic would take her mind off the - oh. Do you know she was pregnant?"

Frank jolts so hard his chair scrapes on my tiled floor. "Mary?"

"No! No, Lynn." I reach out to put my hand on his arm again. "Lynn was pregnant until five days ago. She and I ended it, although she didn't need my help. Mary found out. She was angry with me."

"It has been quiet," Frank says, clearly reviewing the last few days of his household. "No. I didn't know."

Jake shifts again and I look up at him. His shirt is missing two buttons, at the top and at the bottom. This is his official shirt, the shirt in which he arrests a murderess. Its pocket is frayed and I can see the corner of his notepad.

I would very much rather he wasn't here. I have the feeling Mary's family and I could have talked this out. I look down away from him and draw my cup of tea towards me again. I will finish it before we go.

Jake says, "Frank, you should go to find Lynn and bring her here, and someone you'd like to help move Mary."

"Where would I move her to?"

I say, "She needs to be lying flat. Things become more difficult later if she isn't. I'm sorry." I really am. Frank looks so empty, so confused.

"We have used the cold storage here for previous bodies, or there's the church cellar. Frank, it's up to you."

"Lynn will help you decide," I say, and drink more of my tea.

"In fact, Miriam, you need to stop making suggestions now. You're in custody." Jake shivers his shoulders as though he's breaking through cobwebs and puts his hand flat on my shoulder. "We'll be going to the hall now."

So we will.

I do not lock the door behind us, but I dawdle enough to make sure Frank is heading up the road to the church instead of turning to go back inside. We're watched by a little cluster of four people who have no reason to be standing around on the other side of the road holding their own elbows. I give them a small wave and a chin-nod, but only Mel and Gawain nod back.

So people saw Frank and Jake rushing from Mary’s house - Frank’s house - to mine. So things have been mentioned. Conclusions, I may assume, have been reached. I can rely on Gawain to put out the worst of the flaming torches. And Lynn, to be fair. Gawain taught himself smithing the second year and turned out better at the fine work than I was, so we worked together until he crocked his wrist and I couldn't make it right again. He's a good teacher, too, for practical things.

Sophie might believe me capable of murder. She's got the absurd fertility of those women in ancient times who dropped a child every ten months from puberty to death, and her skinniness is spiteful on her wide bones. She wishes she didn't have to see me for treatment so often, and she's perfectly capable of making that my fault.

Well, whatever happens to me, Lynn can see her from now on.

Mel, the charcoal burner, is less predictable. We're reliable traders with each other, but nothing more. He doesn't chat, but he is close with Jake. Is the age gap enough that he can influence the constable, rather than the other way round?

And Cara didn't nod at me either, but we’ve only ever had a practical relationship. I’ve helped with lambing, I rode with her to the coast to collect salt most years, gave her antibacterial washes for the goats, and garden odds and ends for fodder. I set her shoulder once after she'd come off her horse, but anyone can do that.

A hundred yards on towards the village we approach more of my neighbours standing in their front garden, Judith dressed like she's been baking and Carl holding a book. I like them. He reads to her while she's up to her elbows in dough. They keep a lot of cats, but I haven't lost a bird to them since the fourth year. I see them make eye contact with Jake but turn too slowly to see if he mouths or signs anything to them. Perhaps his expression is enough.

They follow us, Carl still holding his book. The other four are also following.

Surely only Jake can really believe Mary's note over me. If her family accepts that she poisoned herself, how can the village be angry instead of sad?

I nearly trip over a stone in the road as I hear myself think that. It's always been easier to be angry than sad. Oh, of course.

There are garden benches outside the hall, where we widened the road into a square wide enough for everyone to gather. On sunny days, people bring their lunches down and eat where they can catch up with friends. We dragged the benches from the three pubs, the first spring. The white lines that used to mark car spaces have weathered away.

Today the only people seated are Rob and Olive. I like Rob too - I treat him for psoriasis and arthritis, and he visits to collect the ducks' dirt for manure. His tomatoes have been richer and longer-lasting every year since even before things changed. He looks up from his bread and soup and whatever he sees on our faces makes him lurch half-up from his seat, but then his hip catches and he has to steady himself again. I put my hand out to say everything is alright. Olive also has her hands out to catch him. She rode out with me in the second year to loot all the nearby garden centres for seeds and the addresses of their seed suppliers. She gardens for fragrances and condiments, mainly, so I share glassware with her for distilling.

Olive says, "What's going on?" and I'm pathetically pleased she directs it at me, even though it's very clear I'm the one being escorted.

"Young Mary died at my house. I'm accused." I say it shortly so that I don't hear my own voice crack.

Olive says, "By who? That's ridiculous!"

At the same time, Rob says, "Oh, you poor thing!"

Everything blurs and it's suddenly terribly hard to look at anyone, or the sun on the square.

Jake says, not knowing he's being kind, "Nonetheless, Miriam will stay in the cell until we've all established what happened."

The cell used to be the back room of the post office, and it's normally used to store fireworks. It occurs to me briefly for the first time that putting any suspected criminal in with the explosives is really daft, but I don't mention it. I've always rather liked the smell, and someone has covered the containers with brightly coloured pictures of fireworks that I remember the children drawing.

I sit on a steel chair and look at the pictures and I don't cry. They look more like chrysanthemums and dahlias to me. Perhaps I should have kept more of the children's drawings. I always assumed their parents would.

It's probably half an hour before Frank and Lynn arrive. I hear them outside saying "Yes. No. Yes. We need to get inside." over what must be a crowd of half the village by now, and I wonder if Jake is standing at the door, square-shouldered, stopping people getting in to me.

As they enter, Lynn looks wretched but deliberately straight-backed. Frank is worse.

Lynn says, "We moved her to your cold storage. I wrapped her in the blue single sheets, over her clothes, and I took her jewellery and her shoes and socks home. Nothing else was constricting."

I nod. It's all I can do.

"I saw what she wrote. I'm sorry."

Everything blurs again. I put my elbows on my knees and lean downwards, breathing deeply, trying to get control.

"I was hoping you'd believe me," I say, eventually. "It means a lot that you do."

Frank says, "We lived with her, you see. I'm afraid it wasn't without warning."

"It was to me," I say. "I thought she would see the century out. Could I have helped?"

"No." They both say it at once, and firmly.

"I offered to leave. I thought it was about me."

"I shouldn't have told her I was pregnant, that's what started this."

Frank says, "No, it isn't, but you should've told all of us. Did you tell him?"

"No, and I won't. For one thing, I'm not seeing him again. I talked to one of their nurses when I was visiting base. Their maternal mortality is a fifth and they teach their girls the rhythm method."

Frank actually yelps with horrified laughter. I think my reaction was exactly the same when Lynn told me. I say, "I'd been thinking about that, until today. I wondered if you or I should spend a few weeks there to see if anyone ought to be taught. Quietly."

"Is that where you were going? If Mary said yes?"

I blink. "No, it had completely gone from my mind today. I was going to go further out. Exile myself. Town wouldn't have been far enough for her if I was the problem."

Frank says slowly, "But a fifth? They're losing more young women to one thing than we're losing across all ages? How can they bear it?"

Lynn and I shrug. I say, "Imagine it here. When Deb and I first went out to collect birth control pills from the pharmacies, before they got properly looted, we had a hundred and three women who needed them. Or wanted them, let's say."

And a hundred and four women who trusted my herbal replacement preparations in the years since that pail of pills expired.

"Twenty of us dead?"

"Twenty in the first pregnancy." Lynn corrects him. "Second pregnancy, another fifth. Third pregnancy, another fifth."

Frank rubs his hand across his eyes. He says, still slowly, "Miriam, if you go I'll go with you. We'll be shields for each other."

"I can't go after this. People here will think I'm a killer."

"Absolute rubbish!" says Lynn, sounding exactly like me. "Nonsense. Everyone here knew Mary better than - better than you think. Dad, it's a great idea. The men will talk to you."

Frank and I look at each other again and the grief in his eyes is already mixed with plans. He says, "Look, after Deb died I could only do things that were for the girls. I only bathed because Mary stamped and said it wasn’t fair, if I didn't have to she wasn’t going to."

"I don't remember that!" Lynn sounds fond.

"Well, you were ten and coping with it your own way. She did. And that first year of the outbreak, Deb got me through with projects. The hay shed... I need something else to focus on, you see. I can't go on if it's the same routine just without Mary. I can't just farm and come in for supper."

It hits him again, I see. His silent house. I put my hand on his arm, and reach out for Lynn's hand too.

He breathes out, once, hard. "We'll go to the town. You get to know the women. I'll meet the men and not throttle anyone for letting their girls die for years."

Lynn coughs. "Not their girls, dad. Not owned."

"You're my girls! And I'm your dad, until we're all buried. We're each other's. I'm not talking about owning."

I say, "You were my girls too. While I'm your teacher."

"You're our witch." Frank says, straight out.

We fall silent.

I think about riding the mare Charity along the broken roads towards town, the way I haven't been in eight years. I think about seeing the library again. Setting up a lodging with Frank, just for a while, in an empty house.

I'll find a shop with a long table and set it out with tea. The right girls will turn up.