Bee-Loud Glade by Himmer Steve

Author:Himmer, Steve [Himmer, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781566892728
Publisher: Atticus Books
Published: 2011-02-23T13:00:00+00:00

16

This part of the world isn't known for its seasons, but one afternoon not long after Jerome's arrival, as I walked back to my cave from the river, there was as much a suggestion of autumn as I'd ever seen. It was nothing as grand or as grounding as leaves going orange or falling from trees into piles, or frosted pumpkins marching through yellow-grassed fields, none of what catalogs sell as the autumnal mystique of New England. But the air changed that day. It was a little bit sharper drawn into my lungs, a coarse touch in the back of my throat. Maybe those hills were so high even the climate was different, with those down below accepting a world without seasons, one endless summer in which some days were slightly cooler than others and never knowing that up in the hills seasons came and went in ways unimagined. Maybe, like sunsets, the seasons were buried under pollution. The only leaves I'd ever seen change in the valley had been those on rare tree-lined stretches of highway, where exhaust fumes painted brown stripes every fall.

The air in the garden was crisp, and the apples in Mr. Crane's orchard to the east of my glade were red and ripe and pulling their branches so close to the ground that whether I was meant to or not I reached up and plucked one to taste. The apple was dull, even drab, without the shine I'd come to expect, and it took me a moment to realize this was the first apple my mouth ever met without the mask of wax and chemicals, the first apple I'd eaten that was only and wholly an apple. That apple started my apple-eating life over, and I silently thanked Johnny Appleseed for his scattershot planting, for founding a nation on forbidden fruit.

Second Nature had experimented with an indoor orchard once; it was expensive, but the price included a service in which Orch-ease crop technicians (Orch-ease was a word I'd invented myself, though I'd never intended for it to be used; it was a daydreaming doodle seen by the wrong eyes) would come to the client's chosen location throughout the seasons to hang plastic leaves and then blossoms, returning to replace them with plastic apples in advancing stages of color, then to pick the whole yield and haul them to storage along with the leaves until the next year's cycle of seasons began.

Orch-ease hadn't taken off, and no wonder. Who wants to stare at apples all day knowing they can't be eaten, or to be reminded that the apples they are eating, the waxy, too-shiny supermarket produce they've purchased, is as far from the real thing as those plastic imposters? And Orch-ease had been costly, requiring all those site visits, so while only a man like Mr. Crane could afford a fake orchard, he could also afford the real thing.

As I walked home from the river, crunching my apple, I spotted a crew of men in orange vests and hard hats.

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