An Excerpt from "The Golden Apple" (from The Clarity of Hunger)
by Cheryl Pappas
There will be a ruler of a kingdom of the last women — a man, of course. He will have countless female subjects in his desolate territory on the western end of the globe. They will not know his name, but they will feel his presence.
A woman pierces the cold, packed dirt with her shovel. The sound of metal on earth is an ancient song. Zing, zing.
The man will send messages in the sky every morning: “You are nothing, and that is everything,” or “Be the worm in the golden apple!” All the women will hate him with the fire of a thousand suns, but they’ll do what he says. They will work the dirt in their fenced-off square plot of land that is already dead and will keep going, in spite of everything. They will keep not seeing.
It is noon, and she is waist deep in the hole now. She won’t eat a crumb until it’s done.
When the man has grown very old and very tired, his messages will become more enigmatic. He will say things like “The great sea is at bay,” or “I am terrified.”
In the dark, she has built a room to walk around in; the sun and sky seem miles away. She makes a little shelf and mounts it on the wall. She lights a candle and places it on the shelf. The room blooms with the scent of rosemary and honey. She drinks water from a hidden cup of stars in her coat.
***
Cheryl Pappas is an American writer living outside Boston. Her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in Juked, The Chattahoochee Review, Hobart, Ploughshares, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. She runs the popular online Hermit Crab Flash Fiction Workshop.
Her debut collection of flash fiction, The Clarity of Hunger, is forthcoming with word west press in September 2021.
photo via.