Christopher Boucher - Golden Delicious

I looked around and tried to get my bearings. I was on a strange page outside Appleseed. I started walking in the direction of the Fart. I walked past houses separated by vast white space. Then I passed a prayer center, an office park, and another prayer center. In twenty minutes or so, I saw the margin for Appleseed. I crossed the thick, smudgy space; soon I was at the edge of the paragraphs describing southeast Appleseed.

As I walked down Williams Street, I heard a rush overhead. I looked up to see a woman — a Mother — twenty feet above me, her green skirt flaring and her long gray hair whipping in the wind. She landed in front of me and lifted up her goggles. “Afternoon,” she said. She smelled like clouds and she had tattoos all up and down her arm. Her skirt was dirty from flight. As it settled, I saw blades and weapons in the folds of the fabric.

I just stood there.

“Saw you walking across the margin,” she said. “Where are you coming from?”

“East Appleseed,” I said. “My Mom took us to the Big When, but she got — angry — and made me walk home.”

“Where’s home?” she said.

I told her my address. “577 Converse Street, Appleseed.”

“What’s your name?” the Mother asked.

“ ,” I said.

The Mother’s eyes narrowed. “Do you have any words on you, ?”

“Just these,” I said. I held out the broken question.

The Mother took the question, read it, and handed it back to me. “ Living language, I mean,” she said. “Did you see any sentences moving through here?”

I shook my head. “Am I in trouble?”

“You’re sure?” said the Mother. “We’ve seen worries crossing through here. Threats. Doubts trying to sneak into Appleseed.”

I was scared. “I swear to the Core,” I said, “I didn’t see any.”

“Stand there and don’t move,” the Mother said. Then she prayed to my Mom, who confirmed that I was who I said I was. The Mother prayed that she’d get me home safe. Then she closed the prayer, turned to me, and said, “Need a lift home?”

“That would be awesome,” I said.

The Mother took me in her arms and rose up into the sky. We ascended high over the margin, and soon I saw the edge of town: the shrug of Appleseed Mountain and the distant lights of the Big Why and Cordial Carl’s. Something was happening in the Amphitheatre. Then I could see Van Tassel’s Groves, and rows and rows of spidery tree-shadows. Somewhere over town I dropped my question, but I didn’t even care.

“Is it difficult to learn how to fly?” I shouted.

The Mother smiled but didn’t answer. When we got to my house, she landed in the driveway and knelt down until my feet were touching the ground. But I didn’t let go — I held on to her shoulders. “Let go,” said the Mother finally.

I hugged her tightly.

“Let go of me,” she said again, and pulled me off of her. Then she stood up. “No more wandering in the margins,” she said.

“OK,” I said.

“I mean it,” she said. “It’s dangerous.”

“I promise,” I said.

She lifted up into the sky and was gone.

The story of the founding of Appleseed — the one that the Reader and I pulled from the page — was about how Johnny Appleseed, moving to a barren town of stone in the mid-1700s, heard a strange prayer and followed it, as if driven by something beyond himself, high up Appleseed Mountain (which was known as Geryk Mountain then). It was there, in a clearing in the clouds, that he found a lone crooked tree holding a single alien fruit. At that point, no one in America had ever seen an apple — they wouldn’t have even known about them unless they’d read about them in ancient European planting brochures. Pioneers and pilgrims had tried to grow apples on American soil, but to no avail; it was believed that something in American soil kept apple trees from taking root.

The old prayers say that when Johnny Appleseed approached the tree, a bookworm — a slithery sentence — rilled forth from a hole in the page and warned him not to pick the fruit, that it was meaningless and would only make him ill. When Johnny tried to push past him, the worm stood at full height to frighten him away. But Johnny had heard the fruit praying to him and believed it to be meaningful, so he drew the word “sword” from his satchel and told the worm to stand down. When the worm didn’t, Johnny slew him with the word. Then he picked the fruit, ate it, and planted the seeds. The seeds grew more trees. The trees grew more seeds. Appleseed collected those seeds in his holy satchel and started planting groves all over Appleseed.

A few weeks after the Memory of Johnny Appleseed told me and the Reader that story, though, the Memory of Johnny Appleseed and I were arranging those paragraphs on the pagefield when two Mothers landed in the fresh soil. One of the Mothers held a giant pencil; another was wearing headphones on her ears and a giant tape machine strapped to her chest. The first Mother told the Memory of Johnny Appleseed to put down his hoe, and he complied. “What’s this all about?” he said.

“Are these your words?” said the taller Mother.

“Yes,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

“You grew them?”

“With ,” he said.

“Who?” said the taller Mother.

“Me,” I said, raising my hand.

“We’re picking up some anomalies here,” said the headphoned Mother.

Then the other Mother picked up the word “sword” and studied it. As she held it, the “s” in “sword” shivered. “Shit,” said the Mother, and she dropped the word. The “s” detached from the “word” and slithered into the grass.

“What was that?” asked the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

“Bookworm,” said the first Mother.

“A what?” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

“We’re going to need to confiscate these,” said the headphoned Mother.

“Confiscate — the words? Which ones?”

“These,” said the first Mother, pointing to the paragraph. “All of them.” They prayed for backup, and soon other Mothers arrived and began lifting words—“bookworm,” “sword,” “American”—right off the page, leaving a blank space where they’d been.

The Memory watched from the margin, repeatedly taking off his hat, rubbing his hands through his hair, and pulling his hat back on tighter. “Oh,” he whined at one point. “Do you really have to take ‘American’?”

No one answered him—“American” was already gone. Now they were pulling up “soil” and “the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.”

“My name ?” shouted the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. “Not my name!”

“Settle down,” a Mother told him. “We’ll just run some tests on it and then we’ll bring it back to you.”

“And what am I supposed to do in the meantime?”

“Make up another name,” suggested the headphoned Mother.

So he did — for a week his name was Martha D. Anger. During that time, it was Martha Anger who found the apple tree — Anger who plucked the apple, planted the seeds, grew more apples, planted more groves.

At the end of that week, Martha received a prayer from the Mothers saying that his name had been tested and cleared and was ready for pickup. I went with Martha to pick up the name — we rode the two-person bicycle over to the Word Pen, a temporary testing site in South Appleseed. We gave our names to the attendant and then waited in the mud for Martha’s name to be released. Behind high fences covered in barbed wire, two wildwords—“humble” and “negotiate”—fought with each other. Other words howled or paced in place.