Somber Apples

The birdseed made a rattling “tink, tink, tink,” like a miniature machine gun, as Kass filled the metal container inside the golden wire cage. He scratched Emanuele behind the ear and whistled a good morning.

“You’ll never leave me, will you?” He asked the little blue bird who cocked his head to the left and then the right before smashing his face into the seeds.

Emanuele had been a gift from Pomona, his ex-girlfriend. They had been together for five years before they moved in together and, shortly after that, she broke up with him. She told him she wasn’t ready for “that kind of commitment.” She took everything she could with her, including Kass’s heart, but he wouldn’t let her take Emanuele.

“I don’t like that bird anyway,” she said, gazing at the rearside of the two muscular men hauling Kass’ couch out the front door, “he looks so sad.”

“He’s not sad, he’s blue,” Kass replied, “get it? Cause he’s actually blue.”

She wouldn’t laugh if she didn’t need attention.

“He doesn’t sing,” she said, biting her lacquered nail and maintaining eyes on the moving men.

“He’s a somber canary.”

In the month since she had been gone he would sit on his only remaining stool and whistle at Emanuele, who would flick birdseed at Kass in return, and imagine he would get over Pomona. He fantasized about hiring a hooker to find Pomona in a club and punch her square in the tits.

In an effort not to obsess he would try to occupy himself in his garden, the heart of which grew an apple tree, currently in bloom. Soon his apples would grow juicy and plump and he could switch gears from gardening to cooking.

Images of apple pie, apple cider, and apple jelly would float across his mind. He would bite little chunks off to feed Emanuele. All the elderly women in the cul-de-sac would ooh and awe and tell him how happy he would make some lucky young woman some day.

“You should meet my granddaughter,” they would take turns telling him.

“I’m not really interested.”

“I also have a grand…son?”

He would laugh on the outside, but on the inside he just didn’t feel anything. He wanted Pomona to come back to him.

It was a bright and sunny day when Kass came home to find that Emanuele had died. His little bird feet sticking straight up in the air, his blue feathers motionless and his black eyes lifeless. Kass wanted to cry, but his emotional crippling was already critical. The last remainder of his soul was shredded. He wanted to be strong for his tiny little friend who had sat for hours on end, listening to stories about his lost Pomona, being strong for him.

An emptied match box made for a perfect casket and it was only fitting that the burial be under the nook in the trunk of the apple tree. He spent the rest of the night curled on a blanket under a golden cage surrounded by discarded seed, somber, for his somber canary.

Time went by and the pudgy apples started to thrive.

On another particularly bright day, as he was mowing the lawn around the tree, he noticed a little blue bird near the top. He stopped and came to attention, cupping his brow to block out the sun, but something was strange.

“It can’t be a bird,” he thought as he tried to squint through the branches into the bright sun. It was an apple, a bright, blue apple.

The lawnmower was set to the side and Kass went looking for his ladder. Returning with it he climbed as close to the top as possible, which was still a little ways away from the strange apple, but close enough to confirm that it was, indeed, a blue apple. He climbed down, smiling, and finished mowing the lawn.

He checked the apple daily, sometimes climbing up the ladder and sometimes looking through a pair of binoculars. On some mornings he could swear he could see feathers ruffle on the apple when the wind blew.

He tried to think of what he would make with the peculiar apple, but he could never decide. Whatever he made needed to be as special as the apple itself. He figured he would know when it was time.

One morning he woke up and decided it was time to pick the apple; he could feel it. He ate a bowl of fruit loops at the kitchen sink and took out his binoculars to look at the fruit through the window.

It was gone.

In a fit of panic he dropped his bowl of cereal in the sink, letting it shatter in the basin below, rainbow colored milk splattering the sides of sink. He ran outside and pulled the ladder up against the tree, risking splinters on the old rung, he raced to get to the top.

The apple was really gone. He wanted to collapse and weep, but as he started to hang his head he saw that there was something stuck in the bark near where the apple had grown. He used a branch to stretch and pull himself up and between clenched finger and thumb pulled back two tiny blue feathers. Emanuele, his somber canary, his somber apple, was free from his golden cage and had moved on.

Kass could feel his heart and soul fill. He smiled and climbed down the ladder, whistling, and thought about an apple tart creation he wanted to make and wondered, “which of the neighbors should I give them to first? Didn’t Mrs. Meditrina say her daughter sold furniture?”

Not long after a bartender handed a young blonde a drink; she barely paid attention as she took the drink and handed him a $5 bill, with no tip.

“Excuse me.”

The blonde’s girlfriends waved to her from the dance floor and gestured toward a couple tall, dark, and handsome men. The blonde smiled and gestured back that she would only be a moment.

“Excuse me,” she heard the bartender again.

“I’ll leave a tip at the end,” the blonde said.

“No, it’s just… are you Pomona?”

“Yes, that’s me,” Pomona turned to see a big-chested brunette with three inch heels and an even shorter skirt standing in her path, “can I help you?”

The brunette punched Pomona square in the tits and walked away. She dropped her drink and held her breasts, “owww,” she rasped over and over. She could’ve sworn she saw birds, little blue birds, flying around and around.