the end is nigh!
Red Apple Falls
one. a tale of apples : a memory of the fall (twilight)
This is a story you’ve heard before, but not.
Boy and girl in garden. Boy gives girl apple. Boy says, The day you eat of this, your eyes will be opened, and you will be as a god, knowing good and evil. You will be gifted, you will be cursed, you will witness the deaths of everyone you love. You will never sleep, you will never change, you will never die.
There’s a snake in the girl’s heart, like a worm buried in an apple.
The snake whispers, But it will taste so sweet.
two. water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink (post-eclipse)
Her skills as a chef excel when she no longer has any need for human food.
In the next few day following the ceremony (which she skips; it’d be a little strange to be a guest at her own funeral… The story is that her body is never found), kind neighbours leave casserole dishes of potato salad and spaghetti and shepherd’s pie on Charlie’s doorstep. They don’t talk to him or leave a note when they do this, preferring to speak in silence, with sympathy and food.
Edward comes up behind her when she is making stroganoff in the kitchen that they never use. Grandma Swan’s recipe. Charlie’s favourite.
“It will only hurt you, Bella,” he says, softly.
She doesn’t turn towards him, but instead concentrates on measuring the sherry to the exact millimeter that the recipe calls for.
“Let me be human, for just a minute,” she says, just as softly.
He never could say no to her.
That evening, when Charlie puts the first bite of the stroganoff in his mouth, there is one moment when he swears that Bella is alive.
three. apocalypse now (twilight)
She is nobody special, really.
Before that fatal day in January, you are reasonably content. You patiently bear the numbing anesthesia of high school. You have your family and your music and your books and your own strength of will and the pure glow that comes from thwarting nature and destiny and knowing that you’re not a complete monster.
She is nobody special. She’s the most tired of novelties, new girl in a small town, something of a prodigal. Her name is a ringing in your head all day : Bella, Bella, Bella.
She hides so much of herself. She gives diplomatic answers, her hair falls across her face, she cuts off the first three letters of her name, and you can’t help but think that all of this has some grave significance. She’s a hieroglyphic, she’s the pattern of veins in a leaf.
Everything is a sign, but it’s impossible to say of what. The Apocalypse, for all you know.
four. another tale of apples : blood on the snow
It’s no jealous old stepmother crone-queen with a death head’s gleaming in her eyes. Instead, it’’s a beautiful young man with a basket of apples. It is twilight, and in the dusky shadows, and the girl thinks she can see the faint shadows of wings feathering from his back.
He’ll reach out with one cool hand and say, You won’t have to be so alone, anymore.
Her fingers will caress the silky red apples, thinking, thinking.
Your skin is so pale, so clear. Your skin is white as snow. Your lips are red…
A long, long sigh, a breath that’s let out, so slowly.
… As blood.
A girl : snow skin, blood lips. An apple : blood skin, snow flesh.
Inversions, reversions, there is no reversing this.
Her kiss is as sudden and sharp as a bite.
five. saints that don’t want to be found (new moon)
There are always girls with old-young faces and faded, half-open dresses lingering at the street corners and the windows of crumbling apartments in the slum outside Rio de Janeiro known ironically as Cidade de Deus : the City of God.
There is one girl in particular that he notices. Her skin is darker, berry brown rather than pure ivory, but her shoulders hunch in like a sparrow’s, and in the dying sunlight, her mahogany hair reveals strands of deep, deep red. Her scent is more like hibiscus than freesia, but she is close, she is close enough.
He watches her for hours, and he doesn’t know whether to kiss her or to kill her.
In the end, he does neither. When all the men have finally left, he simply leans against her window, and watches her as she sleeps.
He pretends that he doesn’t see the graying tear tracks on her pillow, doesn’t see the old wedding ring she wears on a thin chain around her neck, doesn’t see her medicine cabinet stockpiled with amber glass bottles that promise sweet emptiness.
It is easy for him to lie to himself, these days.
Instead, he listens to her breathe. To the miracle of her breath. Just an ordinary woman, breathing.
six. time changes and intervals (twilight)
“I don’t understand it, Edward.” Where the rest of them no longer bother to speak their thoughts to Edward, knowing that he can simply hear them in his mind, Rosalie clings to the habit of talking out loud, as if to pretend that they are simply having a normal conversation. It’s a very Rosalie-like thing to do; she outdoes Cleopatra as the queen of denial.
“I just don’t understand your… fascination with that Swan girl,” she continues to grumble. “I know you’ve always wanted a pet, but this is going too far. One day you’re going to slaughter her, the next day you’re her slave!”
Edwards plays a few stray bars on the piano, which is enough to make Rosalie snap to attention; Edward’s compositions are perfect, controlled. He never meanders, he never drifts off. He is far too careful.
I can’t make sense of it at all, Rosalie thinks.
“No,” Edward says, gently. He thinks of Debussy, a navy blue hood pushed away from a pale face, brown hair curling slightly in the rain. If you’ve seen the things I have seen. “You wouldn’t.”
seven. mixing memory and desire (post-eclipse)
Sorrow, sharp and bright, rings through her body when she is turned, stirring echoes and stopping time. It is joy and it is loss, it is the memory of everything she might’ve been and the desire for everything that will be. At the moment she is turned, she is frozen precisely between the two halves of her self, between two lives, as a mortal and immortal. It takes her a long time to realise that she will be frozen between them forever.
Time passes. She begins to light candles once a year, on the day she is turned. The number of candles grows, as the years go by. Charlie. Renee. Phil. Jacob. Billy. Angela. Sam. Emily. The candles are tongues of rose and gold that flicker and almost seem to bring her pale, pale skin to life and sometimes (only sometimes), she envies them the luxury of dying.
Her body is a mausoleum of exquisitely cool marble, haunted by the scent of funeral flowers: stargazer lilies. She carries the ghosts of her loved ones inside of her like the children she’ll never have.
Without a word, Edward lays flowers at the foot of the burning candles. And she remembers what she chose, and why. And the envy and the regret flows out of her, like warm wax melting away to nothing.
end.