The Harvest of Bitter Rinds

Fiction

The valley operates on a closed loop. The dead are interred in the loam, and the heirloom apple trees are grafted directly above the chest cavities. The fruit serves as a chemical record. It does not provide a biography; it provides a state of being. If a man dies in a fit of rage, his apples taste of capsaicin and copper. If he dies in peace, they taste of honey and rain. I returned to the valley in October. The air was thin, smelling of wet slate and decaying leaves. My father, Silas, had been dead for three years. He had spent those years in the ground, feeding the roots of a stunted Northern Spy. He had been a man of silence, a man who treated conversation as a finite resource to be rationed. He had left me with nothing but a series of cold letters and a void where a father should be. I walked to the north quadrant of the orchard. The soil here is heavy; it clings to the boots in thick, grey clumps. I found his tree. It was smaller than the others, its branches twisting in tight, neurotic spirals. A single fruit remained on the lowest limb. It was a bruised, ochre sphere, the skin waxy and tight. I did not use a knife. I plucked it with my fingers. The stem snapped with a dry, clinical sound. I took the first bite. The flavor was immediate and violent. It was not the bitterness of hate or the salt of grief. It tasted of oxidized silver and cold ash. There was a metallic tang that coated the tongue, reminiscent of a nosebleed in a winter wind. It was a sharp, sterile taste: the flavor of absolute, calculated avoidance. I chewed slowly. As the juice reached the back of my throat, the profile shifted. The metal vanished, replaced by a cloying, suffocating sweetness. It tasted of overripe peaches left to rot in a closed room. It was the taste of a longing so intense it had become a physical sickness. It was the taste of a man who had wanted to speak, but had found the words too heavy to lift. I sat beneath the tree and ate the rest of the fruit. The aftertaste lingered for hours. It was a thick, greasy film of regret that stained the palate. He had not left me because of a lack of love. He had left because he was terrified of the version of himself I would see. He had died wanting to tell me, but the silence had finally become his primary characteristic. I spat the seeds into the dirt. The flavor remained: cold silver and rotting fruit. I walked out of the valley, the taste of his cowardice still clinging to my teeth.