Midnight in the Orchard

The orchard had not been tended in years. Apple trees grew wild and leaning, their branches interlaced overhead like the fingers of old lovers who had forgotten how to let go. Fallen fruit perfumed the ground — a sweet, fermenting scent that hovered between ripeness and ruin.

Elara walked barefoot through the grass, damp from an earlier rain that had left the world rinsed and gleaming. Moonlight came through the canopy in silver coins, decorating her skin and the path ahead with equal generosity.

She heard him before she saw him — not footsteps, but humming. A melody in a minor key, old enough to have no origin, only echoes. He sat against the largest tree, the patriarch of the orchard, its trunk wide enough to be a wall. An open book lay in his lap, though the light was far too dim for reading.

"You cannot possibly see the words," she said, stopping just outside the circle of shadow the tree cast.

"I am not reading. I am remembering. The book is merely a prop for my hands." He looked up. His face was all angles in the moonlight — cheekbones, jaw, the ridge of brow. Handsome in the way that ruins are handsome: shaped as much by what has been taken away as by what remains.

"And what are you remembering?"

"The taste of an apple I ate in an orchard like this one, twenty years ago. I have never been able to find its equal." He stood, brushing grass from his trousers. "May I offer you one?" He reached into the low branches and selected a fruit — small, imperfect, freckled with russet.

She took it. Their fingers brushed — the same electricity as the air before the earlier storm. She bit into the apple. Tart and sweet simultaneously, the juice running down her chin before she could catch it.

"Well?" he asked.

"It tastes like midnight," she said. "And a little like trouble."

He smiled — a slow, deliberate thing. "Those are the same flavour."

The orchard held its breath. Above them, the branches shifted, and a new pattern of moonlight fell across the ground like a road that led nowhere sensible and everywhere worth going.