Christopher Boucher - Golden Delicious

As I was walking into the church, though, I saw a sentence hiding in the doorway. At first I thought it was just a nomadic phrase seeking alms. But no — that word wasn’t “alms”—it was “am.” “ ‘I am.’!” I said. He ran into my arms. Core he was so thin! But I was so happy to see him. I carried him into the dim sanctuary, through the empty pews and toward the dark altar.

I didn’t have any idea how to get home, but Sentence had a nose for pages; when we came to our first rotary-hole — five or six channels converging — he said, “I am left.”

“Left, you think?” I said.

“Left,” said “I am.”.

A few minutes later we hit a fork in the page. “I am right,” said the sentence.

I went right.

Soon I saw familiar textures, and then, two sets of footprints in the fiber. “I am.” must have been able to smell Appleseed, or hear it or something. “Thataboy,” I said. “Good sentence.”

After another ten pages or so, I saw the underside of words — words about the outskirts of town, sentences about Appleseed Mountain — and then, a bookwormhole. I shuffled to it, pushed Sentence out to the surface, and climbed up after him.

It was dark. A few hundred feet away, a wolf sat writing at a rolltop desk.

“I am Wolf Swamp,” said “I am.”. He looked up at me.

I took a breath of blighty air. “We’re home,” I said.

But something was different; I knew it from our very first moments back in Appleseed. There was a problem with the sky. It was dark out, but not night -dark. The sky was — how do I say this? Closed . Shut. It was like a lid had fallen over Appleseed.

Sentence saw it, too. He pointed up and said, “We’re confused.”

Everyone else seemed to be, too. On Wenonah, we passed a camel in a white T-shirt sitting on a five-gallon bucket and staring at the sky. He looked over at us as we passed. “What the fuck,” he said.

On the next street over, a hairperson was shouting to anyone who would listen. “Can you see ?” she asked us. “Because I can’t even read the page!”

As we were walking up Ellipsis, though, I realized what was happening. It wasn’t as if the sky was closed. The sky was closed: you can’t have a book without a Reader.

“Oh. Shit,” I said.

“I am what,” shivered Sentence.

I didn’t answer him; I didn’t want to frighten him. Inside my brain, though, my thoughts were understanding: that wasn’t a lid over the sky, but a cover — the inside cover of the book itself.

Just then a prayer came in for me. “ ?” It was my mother.

I didn’t answer.

“Honey,” she prayed again.

I closed the prayer — I wanted nothing to do with her.

On Converse Street, all of the traffic had stopped behind an accident by Redfern. Some people stood outside their cars, talking to other drivers; others just stared up at the darkness and the inside cover. In the opposite lane, passing cars were switching on their headlights.

Another prayer came in — this one from my Dad at Muir Drop. “Hey, ,” he prayed. “Look at the sky, buddy. Something’s going on.”

In the margins, wild language began howling. I looked across the street in time to see two lunging, drooling sentences—“This is your fault, you piece of shit,” and “These are your sentences!”—step brazenly out of the treeline.

I picked up “I am.”, ran inside, and locked the door behind us.

The darkness was complete; it covered Appleseed like silence. For the first few days I just stayed inside, living off chips and melancholy, feeding Sentence scraps of time. Every half hour or so I heard sirens: people prayed about visibility problems, freak accidents, injuries or death. The TV told me that the hospital was full, that there were fires on far pages. “But no one knows where the fire trucks are,” said the TV. “The pages are burning out of control.”

Soon I lost track of time — it was difficult to know if it was day or night, when one day passed and the next day began. My Mom prayed to me frequently—“I’m concerned about you!” “Just let me know that you’re OK!” “You answer me this instant young man!”—but I shut down every one of her prayers. I didn’t want her help — she was someone else’s Mother now. I was almost eighteen by then, and old enough to know how to take care of myself — I knew all I needed to: where to buy the chips, what kinds of chips to buy, and in what order to eat them.

Once or twice, my father came by to check on me and drop off some meaning. The first time he didn’t even come inside — we just stood in the driveway talking for a few minutes. At one point he said, “This will all get better soon.”

“How do you figure?” I said.

He pointed up to the dark sky. “The Mothers are working on a way to lift up that cover,” he said. “Speaking of which — pray back to Mom, will you?”

“I don’t want to talk to her,” I mumbled.

“She’s worried about you,” my Dad said. “And she has some business to discuss with you too. Regarding your friend.”

“Who?”

“The Reader,” my Dad said. “Everyone’s looking for her.”

“I don’t know where she is,” I said.

My Dad checked his watch. “Shoot,” he said. “I’ve got to get back.” Then he punched me softly on the shoulder, got back in his truck, and drove away. Just out of the driveway, his truck stopped short to let a wild sentence pass — I saw the sentence’s eyes flash in the headlights and scoot off.

Soon, meaning lost all value in Appleseed. The Big Why sold out of most of its questions and couldn’t get more from the distributor; the Big When followed suit. Phrases smashed the window of Small Pear and looted the shelves; a frightened Cordial Carl stood guard outside his restaurant, barking angrily at everyone who approached. A few weeks after the cover closed, a crew of puns walked into Appleseed First National, held up the word “gun” and said, “Give me all your meaning.”

“I can’t read the word you’re holding,” said the bank teller.

“It says ‘gun,’ ” said the first pun.

“It looks like ‘fun,’ ” said the teller.

“It says ‘gun,’ motherfucker,” said the second pun, “and it’s going to say ‘killed’ if you don’t open the vault.”

They ran the security-camera footage of the stick-up on the news, and you could see one of the puns suddenly put down the word as if he forgot what it — the meaning, the guns, the heist, any of it — meant. “I’m hungry,” the second pun said to the first pun. By the time the teller opened the vault, the puns were gone.

People still prayed, but for what? To whom? The Core ? I sent some psalms to my sister—“Where are you?” “It sucks here!”—and I watched the words sail high. Like most darkness-era prayers, though, mine bounced off the inside cover of the book and back into Appleseed. I saw them fall somewhere to the west and disappear from view. The next day, The Ear showed up and pulled a prayer out of the back of the truck. “This yours?” he said.

It was my prayer to the Auctioneer. “Yes,” I said, embarrassed.

“Landed on my property. Put a nice fucking dent in my shed,” he said.

I’d either forgotten those words—“dent,” “shed”—or else they’d been removed from the language. “Your what ?” I said.