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There is a tree at the end of the world. It grows around a broken old brick wall—the wall is broken because the tree is strangling it, bursting through its mortar with its silver-red roots. The tree is stunted because the wall was built too close to its root system. That is how things are at the end of the world.
The end of the world is easy to find. There’s a boat up north will take you there for twenty dollars and an apple. If you don’t have the cash, Annie’ll probably take you anyway. But the apple is mandatory. Annie has been running the ferry so long that she breaks off a strand of her hair when she wants salt for her soup. She wears a black hat with a silver pin, so you’ll know who she is, and the boat-horn sounds like a widow weeping. But if you don’t bring her an apple, she’ll take you to Bar Harbor with the rest of the tourists, tip her hat and give you a nice little coupon for 20% off your lunch at some nameless cafe. You have a nice summer, now, sweetheart.
The dock at the end of the world needs some work. Annie keeps meaning to get her girl Frigg to replace the planks, but somehow it never gets done, winter comes and goes, and the same barnacled redwood-trunks slowly rot into the sea. Frigg got it into her head to go to art school in New Hampshire. I’ve heard she’s studying juggling, with a minor in wire-walking. I don’t judge, even though one of the dock lines broke last year and a poor trireme sank right off the pier. All hands drowned, except the Red Hound of Mykenos, who bit the sea until it spit him back. Old boy sleeps by the tree now, and growls at the summer people. Annie gave Frigg an earful during finals week. It’s ok, though. If the end of the world wasn’t a safety hazard, there’d be hotels here by now.
The tree at the end of the world is an apple tree. Trust me, I know. Some folk say it’s fig, and some say pomegranate, some say walnut when they’re very drunk, and I don’t begrudge them tenure. The locals know better—they’re apples, big as basketballs, the color of the sun. Some of the apples know the difference between good and evil. Some have kallisti written on them. Some will get you pregnant for six years. Some know how to live forever. Some will drop you dead in the ground before your second bite. Trouble is, it’s damnably hard to tell one from the other. Even I have to squint, and even I’m wrong, sometimes. We’ve only had one lady up looking for the kallisti apples, and frankly, we’re a little more careful with our receipts now.
Black Sally built the wall at the end of the world. She said she did it to keep the wolves out, away from the damn tree—worse than deer, wolves. One summer she hung little slices of green stuff all over the tree to keep the local fauna off. She said it was shards of the World-Emerald her cousin sent from Peru, but we could all see Irish Spring stamped in the stuff, and the World-Emerald doesn’t smell clean and fresh as the Irish countryside.
It smells like bones.
Anyway, it wasn’t the wolves. There’s only three of them, and they’re not so bad. Sure, they mess with the roots and gnaw a bit—they’re only dogs, after all. If I were a dog I’d probably chew on the tree, too. Mostly, they lope about looking hangdog and hoping Black Sally will fall in love with one of them and make them human. She tried it once, but he ran off to be an aeronautical engineer and she said that was the end of wolves for her. Everyone knows Sal built the wall because of the meridian. That’s the actual end of the world, you know. The tree and the dock and all, they’re just decoration. You can’t see the meridian, or smell it, or hear it. And sometimes it moves, just to be contrary. But it stays on the other side of the wall, because Black Sally told it to. The wall says: Danger: High Voltage. It says: Keep Behind This Line Until Your Name Is Called. It says: that’s far enough, son. If you, because you didn’t listen to Sally or Annie or me, hop the wall like a hooligan and step over the meridian, well, that’s it for you, kid. You vanish—there’s no poof, or popping noise, or flash of light, but you’ll blink out, sure as Sunday. It’s not very nice to watch. We post signs, but there’s no telling some people.
The coffee at the end of the world is bitter. Harry Half-a-lion sells it for a dime a cup out of a little kiosk about half a mile from the tree. Used to be a nickel, but times are hard. Harry used to be somebody, he likes to tell us. Used to be a big strong man somewhere down south; made his money wrestling lions and snakes and mucking out stalls for some rich old man. Harry rowed himself out to the end of the world—Annie never forgave him for that. He meant to take an apple for some lady back home, but I can’t think of a soul who looked at those apples and didn’t sneak a bite for themselves. Harry sat down in the dust and cried, poor soul. I think he must have gotten the kind that tells you you’re naked, no matter how many furs you’ve got on your back. Naked and weak and young, and no help for any of it. Harry gets his coffee shipment in from Mexico by way of dinghy every spring, and everything smells like beans for a week while he roasts the beans himself in a big bronze barrel. You should see his arms when he’s turning the berries over, it’s like something out of a storybook. When folk come looking for the tree, he pours them little dixie cups of hot coffee—it’s cold at the end of the world, even in July. Apples don’t grow in the heat, you know. Harry doesn’t allow cream or sugar. That sort of thing is too decadent for him to bear. Once, someone suggested he ought to offer croissants. Harry just punched him right in the nose.
That said, we do eat, even at the end of the world. Idun wears an apron and not much else, even when ice forms on the ends of her hair. The wolves watch her and their tongues loll out of their mouths—but she’s not interested in aeronautical engineers. She keeps her stove smoking all winter long: apple pies and apple tarts, caramel apples and baked apples and apple upside-down cake, apple-spice bread, apple pudding, apple popovers, apple jam and applejack. Once, as a kind of joke, she brought a fig-pomegranate pie with walnuts sprinkled on top to the annual bonfire. We all had a good laugh. Idun doesn’t say much, but she’s got a friendly face . I think she had a husband once, but she doesn’t like to talk about it. Anyway, it’s all pretty dangerous stuff, mixing the apples like that. They smell wonderful, but I never eat them. I don’t want to know what that applejack knows.
There are aphids on the tree at the end of the world. Little milky green ones, and they love the apples. A butterfly landed on the tree once, and then another, and another, and we all came out to see them, they were so beautiful, blue and white and black. Black Sally sighed like her lover had come home to her, and the aphids roared up in a thin green wave and devoured the butterflies, so fast I almost forgot they were ever there, like the aphids could eat my memory of them, too. I think the aphids know what the applejack knows. They eat from all the apples. They’re dead for all time and alive forever and they know they’re naked and they don’t care, and they know they’re the fairest and they know the butterflies are, too. I’m afraid
of them. One autumn Black Sally and I got out these old perfume atomizers and sprayed cayenne pepper and lemon juice on them. I was sure I could hear them laughing, tiny, green laughter—they shriveled down to nothing for a day and then swelled up again, milkier and hungrier than before. There used to be a nice kid who sold little silver apples on chains down by the wall. Not anymore. I don’t really want to talk about that. We leave the aphids alone, now.
Once, a woman came to the end of the world. She was dressed all in black, with a high collar. Annie let her off at the dock—Frigg wasn’t even born yet, and Annie had pigtails but a ferryman’s license all the same. Harry didn’t want to give her any coffee, but she just stared at him till he grumbled and pulled the tap on his thermos. The wolves ran off yelping—one bolted straight into the meridian and vanished. She walked up to the tree like she’d known it all her life.
“What do you want it for?” said Idun.
“My daughter,” said the woman.
“Is she pretty?” Idun always loved pretty girls, like they were her special sisters.
The woman in black nodded. “The fairest of them all.”
“Be careful, then. It’s hard to tell the apples apart.”
“I have faith,” said the woman, her stony face set, her lips red as blood. “I know all the old gods; they come ’round Thursdays for cake and checkers. They will guide my hand, and my daughter will know I love her, that it was all a mistake. She will live forever, and I will fade and die, and that is right and proper. She will live forever and know that her mother loved her, really, so much more than mirrors and huntsmen.”
“Be careful,” said Idun.
The woman in black reached up and plucked an apple, a beautiful one, shining in the twilight and the mist of the end of the world, white on one side and red on the other. None of the other apples were like that. She could barely hold it in both arms. But the apple got smaller as the ferry drifted back over the water, until it could fit in an old woman’s basket.
Years later, she came back. She was old. Her feet were covered in blisters. Idun shook her head and kissed them. Idun is like that.
Well, that was a long time ago. The tree punishes pride, it’s always had a bit of a thing about that. I can’t really walk anymore—some things don’t ever heal. I mostly sit by the wall in my old boat deck chair and watch the wind blow milkweed into the meridian. I watch them silently vanishing as the moon comes up. I knit, when my arthritis lets me. Frigg sends up a nice home-spun wool from New Hampshire at the end of each semester. Black, of course. When tourists come, I hand them headphones and an audio tour on cassette tape. On it, I tell them all the apple-stories I know. Except one. I used to do a live show, but the kids seemed so bored.
When winter comes to the end of the world, the sea freezes over, and we all have a little peace. The dock is clotted up with chunks of ice, and even the meridian freezes in places, huge circles of ice floating in the air like mirrors. It’s so quiet. That’s when I think about her the most, when I touch the great apples, hanging red and bright even in the cold, as they always will. I think about chances, statistics. What was the probability of choosing so badly? One in a hundred? A thousand? Less? Was there ever any chance that I might choose the right one, or did the tree choose, all along?
I dig my nails into the flesh of one, and the juice like blood runs over my wrinkled hand. I look up, helpless, palsied, childless, into the flat, frozen heavens, a sky like skin, skin as white as snow.
The Wedding
Last summer, my aunt married a rime giant.
The wedding was lavish; neither clan approved. My uncle-to-be stood dripping in the hallway of Grandmother’s great, sprawling house, miserable in a black suit that had already split twice at the shoulders.
Aunt Margaret always had a thing for foreign men. When they were kids, she and my mother tried to learn French from tapes so that they could grow up and marry Parisian dukes and dance in pink dresses with peonies on the shoulders. When they progressed past je vous renconterai au palais vendredi, Grandmother sat them both down and gave them ginger cookies and explained to them very gently about the revolution, the impracticality of flowers as personal decoration, and the difficulty of obtaining an EU visa. My mother shrugged and promptly threw over the French for mathematics. Margaret simmered and seethed in the kitchen.
“Ces paysans stupides ne peuvent pas m’arrêter,” she whispered, and took two more ginger cookies just to spite the guillotine-masters.
Her wedding dress was the palest possible pink, so pale you might be excused for thinking it white. Two enormous violet-rose peonies nodded from the shoulders, wilting lightly in the June heat. I told my cousin I thought it was cruel to our prospective uncle—couldn’t they have done all this in January? But my aunt has always had a perverse streak. At the reception, Volgnir put his wet blue hand to her cheek and whispered: I melt in thy service. They didn’t think I heard, but I did. I’m quiet; I sneak. Nobody really notices me, so I get to hear all kinds of things. Like when Grandmother took a lover from the local university—she had four of them come to the house and line up on the lawn like prize horses for her to choose. Grandfather sipped his limeade and gin and laughed at all of them, all discomfited and nervous, anxious to please.
