WALKING TO BUY APPLES Christopher O. McCarter The orange butterflies found yellow ones, the orange marigolds found black ones, and no fruit glistens quite like bottles of liquor in the sun. The sunny side of the street is not always the side of the street where the houses face the sun openly. No, because this side of the street is actually the shadier side of the street due to the oak trees’ shadows stretching way over. Sometimes I wonder about shadows, specifically, the difference between shadows in the day and shadows in the night. More specifically, what is dark and how is it dark in the day. In the morning, Billie Holiday can come over and make her voice the night in rain, she can make her voice the way a bruise saturates sugar on a fruit, she can make her voice like the tracing of the outline of the path of cigarette smoke in the air leading exactly back to an individual’s fingers, leading to their mouth, to their breath, her voice leading to their room and their bed, where it rests on their pillow with the sweet peace of dry hair and smoke. I walked by the cemetery. I saw all of those flat beds with stone headboards. I felt everyone get really quiet and hushed as I approached. If I were buried like that I wouldn’t shut the fuck up. If I had known this would feel like being a bulb planted in the very wrong season, never to bloom, never to break from an even smaller box, barely forgotten, never to be, I would have been cremated— I want to swim as ash. I want to be a shell! I might have never left. Maybe they were so quiet so that I wouldn’t leave. I couldn’t tell.
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