Honeycrisp
I swallow an apple seed in the hopes that it will take root, feel its sharp edges all the way down and the tiny impact as it comes to rest somewhere in my abdomen.
If I am very quiet, I can hear the cracking shell and the dainty, searching tendrils as they emerge from one darkness into another. As I’d hoped, it’s just enough to drown out the creaking of the hollow tree already rooted inside my head.
I swallow a second seed so it will keep the other company and set about tending my newfound garden: gulp down the glass of water prepared for the occasion; walk outside, leave the door unlocked behind me; lie in the grass and lift up my shirt just enough for the sun to shine on my belly; close my eyes. Let the sunlight filter through my ribs to hit the little seeds and coax them to life.
I have it all planned out. The roots will be trapped in my stomach, but the stem and the leaves and the rosy apple blossoms will grow out through my mouth and ears. If I’m lucky, a branch will even spring up through the top of my head, bringing new growth to the cobwebs that linger beneath. The sweet newness will soak up the despair, will calm the buzzing nerves that run like taut wires beneath my skin.
I wait patiently there, grass tickling the backs of my legs, until I feel the first stirrings. Yes! That must be the root system spreading. And there, that probing touch must be the stem! I leap to my feet and smile my thanks to the sun.
I am halfway back to the door when I realize something is not quite right. The stem feels wrong, too far to one side, and its climbing steals too much of my breath.
Oh. Oh, no. The seeds have not found their way to my stomach.
They’re in my lungs.
I can feel them there—one on the left side, one on the right. As if on cue, the second seed bursts open within my other lung, as though my understanding has given it the last nutrients it needed to begin its new life.
I stumble inside and rush to the bathroom, ready to cough up the roots and the stems and the leaves, but it is too late. I feel the roots wrapping around my airways, the stems pushing into my windpipe, the leaves scraping along my voice box. Two apple trees crawling toward one another within my heaving chest.
The drowning is familiar, though it’s usually the burnt-out husks of ancient worries and sharp-edged doubt that catches in my throat. Dead things, old things, gravel and mulch and the words I can never quite bring myself to say. Never like this, never green. The newness, my remedy that took a wrong turn, simply replaces the fear with an expansive force.
No air can enter past the growth, no breath remains to me. I grip the sides of the bathroom sink as reality sets in. My face grows red in the mirror while green pops out beneath the skin at my throat. Some part of me knows I should panic, should claw at my neck and rip out the young saplings by the roots, expel the seeds from where they lie in my lungs. I should have fainted by now, right? After this long with foliage where my breath should be?
But I realize, then, that the greenery within my airways—the leaves and the stems and the tangled roots—are breathing for me. A simple exchange, like we learn in school. Carbon dioxide for oxygen. A spool unraveled, a bottleneck breaking apart into free-flowing atoms. Photosynthesis in its purest form.
I no longer need to fear the drowning.
A bead of sweat trickles down from my top lip to slip between my clenched teeth, just as the twin saplings push their way up the back of my throat.
The salinity must have some effect, for there is a quivering behind my teeth. Something pushes gently against my tongue before forcing its way out of my mouth. A flower bud, closed against the moisture of my saliva. With a twisting motion, it severs itself from its branch. I catch it in my hands. It is a perfect, pointed oval.
The bud opens in my palms. I blink down at the crown of pale, dusty pink that darkens at the center. I lift it to my lips and taste its sweet pollen, so unlike the sour fruit it will become. My eyes flutter close for the briefest of moments as I let my fingers experience the silken outer petals and the rough pad of green holding them in place.
The absence takes me almost by surprise. When I open my eyes, my hands are empty. My lungs, too, have found their way back to an aerated vacuum chamber. The apple seeds have used themselves up.
And I am left with no other way to justify the squeeze in my chest or the shaking of my hands when my mind is too full of neon blossoms to pluck even a single thought from a laden branch.
Maddox Emory Arnold (he/they) is a writer and translator based in Southeast Michigan. In his spare time, he is also a graduate student and Spanish teacher. His work has appeared in The Viridian Door, en*gendered, and Worm Moon Archive. You can find him on X/Twitter @maddox_emory