Apple Anybody

Apple Anybody, in 20 sentences he'll be a fable.

He was born and raised in the middle of the tracks. With sky-high rails to his left and right he said, This place is low and fine. Apple, he stayed there for 33 years until he had every black oak-tie worm for miles around eating toward his core. Apple Anybody, at 33, with his meat going and brown at the holes realized, I've still got my seeds.

Apple Anybody, then, he threw the trainbed rocks, those ragged hunks of gray, oily granite, up against the left-hand rail. The first few made ominous bonging sounds as they hit the metal, funeral sounds; then the sounds became irregular scrapes of rock on rock and the bonging echoes died away. But as Apple built, something else was happening -- sure enough, as he pulled the stones from beneath his feet the rails, they got even higher.

But so did Apple's cairn, it rose, too. (A cairn, indeed, for those stones were the ground beneath Apple's feet, his very foundation, and now they were forming a monument that was being erected to themselves.) The stones piling up, they were everything Apple had ever held safe, and close, and warm. And as the cairn grew, it got colder. And colder.

Apple Anybody, now he's standing on soil, soil so cold that nothing in it could ever heal or grow. And the thing is, now Apple can't see the top of the left-hand rail; or even the top of his cairn.

Apple, he has no idea if he's built high enough, strong enough, sturdy enough. But you know what? Those sounds you can hear now, that muffled pat of leather on stone, and that gaspy hum of a young man's voice? That's Apple; and he's climbing.

He's humming, and he's smiling, too;
and he's climbing.

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