Christopher Boucher - Golden Delicious

“Shit!” said Chad. “Dude, stop!”

I ran up into Chad’s brain: springs and wires and coils. When I looked behind the meaning-changer I found data storage: stacks of memories, some piles of ideas, a few emotions. I took ten years of memories and his love for Laura. I left him blank. Then I ran through a vent in the back of his mind and down his power cord, and through a tiny crack in the mortar and out into the fields behind the hospital. Chad wept and Laura hollered, but I left them behind and ran as fast as I could toward my Bicycle Built for Two, resizing with every step, the love and memories clanking together in my arms, my eyes full of tears.

See? I told you that there’d be a story about the Appleseed Free Library, where my Mom and I used to go every Wednesday. This is that story! Like I said, that library — which, like most libraries, doubled as a disco — was more or less the heart of Appleseed. Located in the direct center of town, you could still see all of the bloodlines running just under the surface of the grass, through the walls of the foundation, and into the Library’s basement. Someone once told me that there was a machine in that room that pumped actual blood —hundreds of gallons of bookblood a minute.

I used to look forward to those Wednesday nights, to farting with my Mom down Longfellow Drive, onto Highway Five, and into the parking lot of the AFL. It was always just me and her — my sister and my Dad weren’t really that into reading. My Mom, though? She read as if her books might disappear when she took her eyes off them; she probably read two or three books a week.

Anyway, we’d return our books to the desk and split up to wander through the shelves. The AFL didn’t have the best books, or the newest books, or the rarest books, or the nicest books (a lot of the language was rusted or bent, in fact, destroyed from so much reading), or the tallest books, or the loudest books, or the orangest books, but it had the strangest books I’d ever seen. They had books with naked words; books with hooks — literal hooks; books that, when you opened them up, spat at you. They had books made of dust and books made of cheese, books shaped like chairs and books as soft and furry as a winter coat. Some of those books were visible — i.e., you could see them — and others were beyond vision. With those books, you didn’t even know you were reading until all of a sudden you sensed the words on your eyes, heard the pages turning, felt the warmth of the book on your shoulders.

Sometimes I’d fall asleep and wrap the books over me. I’d make myself a small house of books and fall asleep in it. It felt like being back in the womb — it was that warm, that safe.

Reader: As you imagine it, at least.

Sorry?

Reader: Not like you remember the womb.

Of course I do. You don’t?

The Reader furrowed her brow.

I remember every moment of it! There were words in that womb with me, I’m sure of it. The Library was like those pre-page days — warm and verbal. Everything you could ever want or need was right there with you. You never had to worry about being alone — you were never alone! If you ever got scared or depressed — when your mind spun with worry, or you lost all faith — you could just listen for that heartbeat right next to your ear, all around you, actually, and you’d feel safe again.

Even though my Mom stopped going to the Library with me (“All you had to do was keep your mouth shut and read the words,” she’d shouted at me when I asked her to go. “But you couldn’t just let sleeping words lie!”), I continued to go by myself. I liked to open up the books and see the sentences move. I also went back there, though, because I missed her — the old her, the happier Mom. I missed going there with her; I felt closer to her there.

Another reason that I liked the Library? It was good exercise for my thoughts. Don’t tell them that I said this, but some of my thoughts were kind of losers . Not like, in thoughtgangs or anything like that; they were just lazy. Most of them lounged around on a couch in my skull, playing video games. Either that or they were troublemakers, wanderthoughts, renegades too dumb to know which parts of Appleseed to avoid. If a thought of mine went missing, I’d inevitably find it in one of the seediest parts of Appleseed: down in the Quarry, out at the Meadows, or sitting on a stool at Appleseed’s only bar for thoughts, the Think Tank.

Hey, look at that. My shoelace is untied. Do you know where I found this shoelace? It was crawling in the sand by Kellogg River, burrowing. Me and my uncle went out there specifically for shoelaces, and we’d searched all morning. I remember that day specifically, because—

Anyhoo.

And I wasn’t the only one in Appleseed with wandering thoughts — thoughts with minds of their own. Some thoughts lived on the streets: they were orphans, nomads, wanderers with no mind to go back to — just the thought of a shelter or a bench in McShane Park. It was important, I thought, to try to keep my thoughts together. The Library was one of the few places where I could open my skull, lean down and let my thoughts scatter and roam. They could go to their sections, my Mom to hers, me to mine.

Usually I’d read books about Johnny Appleseed. One of my favorites, The Book of Apples , was shelved in the Reference section — it told the story of how Johnny, born in the Massachusetts town of Lemontown, moved to Appleseed intrigued by the blank pages and the rich soil. The middle of the book was devoted to Appleseed’s philosophy — how he believed that apples held all the knowledge we needed; that they held our oldest stories; that they were, in essence, brains. There were also drawings based on one of Appleseed’s stories — one showed a naked vending machine in a secret Appleseed mountain garden, evil earthworms all around her; another showed historical applenuns and bessoffs praying on the Town Green. Plus, there was a whole section in the book devoted to apple fads and fashions, like that very short time when apples were worn as hats. Did you know that the apple-hat fad contributed to the First Apple War? A conservative appler named Jed Berson was so offended by Lox Homicki’s apple hat that he shot it right off his head with his revolver. Homicki wasn’t injured, but he demanded that Berson replace the hat. Berson refused, and both summoned backup. There was a standoff, and the war began soon afterward.

The Book of Apples also showed dozens of pictures of Johnny Appleseed: Appleseed walking with his holy satchel, Appleseed digging with his spade, Appleseed kneeling among the saplings. Because the Memory of Johnny Appleseed was old — white beard, vagabondy clothes — that’s how my thoughts thought of him. But the book showed Johnny Appleseed as a young hipster, with a top hat and an ambitious beard.

Like a lot of the books in the Library, this one was too old and too rare to circulate. So I read it right there at one of the tables, over three or four weeks’ time. I learned all about the different kinds of apples — Champion, Yellow Transparent, Hambledon Deux Ans — and about the last years of Johnny Appleseed in Appleseed, before he followed the smell of apples south and never returned.

One week, I beelined over to the Reference section and saw that The Book of Apples wasn’t on the shelf where I’d left it. I looked through the entire Appleseed section, but to no avail. When I went over to the study desks, though, I saw the Memory of Johnny Appleseed turning the pages of an oversize book. I approached his table and stood over him — he was reading the section about military technologies in the Fifth Apple War. “I was looking for that,” I said.