Comfort Me With Apples by Catherynne M. Valente.
Title: Comfort Me With Apples.
Author: Catherynne M. Valente.
Genre: Fiction, thriller, mystery, fantasy, religion.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2021.
Summary: Sophia was made for him. Her perfect husband. She can feel it in her bones. He is perfect. Their home together in Arcadia Gardens is perfect. Everything is perfect. It's just that he's away so much. She misses him. And he misses her. He says he does, so it must be true. He is the perfect husband and everything is perfect. But sometimes Sophia wonders about things. Strange things. Dark things. The look on her husband's face when he comes back from a long business trip. The questions he will not answer. The locked basement she cannot enter. The idyllic gated community with an awful lot of rules that she cannot leave. And whenever she asks the neighbors, they can't quite meet her gaze...
My rating: 6.5/10
My review:
♥ AMBROSIA
The following Agreement is made this first day of the first month between [hereinafter known as "the Association"] and the title-holders of 1 Cedar Drive [hereinafter known as "the Residents" and "the Property," respectively].
The Association, acting through any and whatever such proxies as may be delegated, pursuant to its previously filed Declaration of Intent to Incorporate, in consideration of, and dependent upon, the mutual promises contained herein, desires to appoint the undersigned Residents exclusively to manage the aforementioned Arcadia Gardens property in perpetuity.
Welcome to a new world of luxury living in Arcadia Gardens, an exclusive, upscale gated community! Every thought and care has been taken to prove the ultimate in amenities, privacy, serenity, and, most important, safety for you and yours. Enjoy the benefits of round-the-clock security and access to community gardens and pools. Stroll at your leisure through lovingly designed streets, parks, and common areas. Get to know your friendly neighbors. Most of all, rest soundly knowing the outside world cannot trouble you here.
Your new Arcadia Gardens home boasts the absolute latest in worry-free convenience. Anything you desire can be provided with ease; anything you lack is but a call away. It is important to us that you be happy here. Our goal is pure, sustainable, and entirely self-sufficient contentment, so that you can get on with your vital work without the niggling unpleasantness of everyday dissatisfactions gnawing away at your peace of mind.
In order to create this unique environment of domestic bliss and year-round tranquility, the Association has, in concert with its Board of Directors, set a few simple, easy-to-follow rules. Abide by them, and your new life in Arcadia Gardens will be all anyone could dream of.
1. Should you wish to personalize your dwelling, the following paint colors are acceptable: Virgin White, Eggshell, Purity, First Snow, Antique Porcelain, Morning Star, Fresh Cream, Mother's Milk, and Innocence.
..4. Keep sidewalks free of clutter, including but not limited to: chalk drawings, handprints, memetic representations of any kind, sporting equipment, stray rubbish, unsightly leaves, liquids, or snow piles, toys, and any personal belongings not listed above.
5. No overnight guests.
6. All parks, gardens, pools, and other common areas close at sunset. Guards will be posted.
7. Tranquility hours strictly enforced after 10.00 p.m. and all day Sunday.
..12. Suffering of any kind shall be considered contraband.
13. No children shall be tolerated on or around the Property. This Agreement covers two (2) Residents only, from signing until termination by the Association. Any conception, whether brought to term or otherwise, shall void this contract in its entirety.
..22. The fruit-bearing tree located beside the Eastern Gate is for decoration only and its issue is not safe to eat. Residents are encouraged to partake of all other orchards and groves within the bounds of clearly marked parks, gardens, or Arcadia Gardens infrastructure. Consumption of the issue of said tree shall constitute a gross violation of this Agreement and render it null and void.
..27. For in the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.
♥ I was made for him.
It is morning, which is to say, it is the beginning of all things. It is bright and it is sharp and it is perfect and so its Sophia, who wakes alone to this singular thought, as she does every morning; to this honeyed, liquid thought and sunlight and sparrowsong and the softness of green shadows in a house that is far too big for her. Not that she complains-oh no, never, not Sophia, in whom the organ of dissatisfaction was somehow absent from birth. Her husband spoils her and she is grateful. But she never needed anything so grand! None of the other houses on their street are half as luxurious or imposing. And it is a long street, very long and very blue.
Sophia runs her hand over the place beside her where her husband so rarely sleeps these days and thinks it again, with as much joy:
I was made for him.
♥ She drowns deliciously inside it. She does not need a robe. It is warm here and she has nothing to hide. But she enjoys the slippery kiss of it against her skin all the same.
Like everything else, it was a gift. From him to her. The world flows in that direction. Him to her. A river of forever.
♥ Sophia is the consummate guest, never a foot put wrong. Her husband laughs at the care she takes with such things. Such a silly little head my Sophie has in her shoulders. Stop worrying so. They all love us. We're the life of the party. You don't have to bring presents every time to everybody. You don't have to bring any presents at all.
But Sophia understands in the palest cells of marrow of her bones that everything she does, from the speed of her gait to the gifts she chooses to the sway of her hair as she walks down Cedar Drive, reflects upon him. And they do love him. It's so easy for him! The way Mrs. Crabbe tries to look busy to hide her blushing whenever he passes her in the garden on his way home from the office. The way Mr. Stagg fixes his hair and stands a little straighter when he ducks into their local for something cold and quiet. Sophia knows these are treasures that must be protected. She would never do the smallest thing that might risk how Mrs. Moray's dark eyes widen and her breath quickens when she glimpses the two of them strolling through the market of a Saturday. Heaven forbid. She would rather die.
He will never know how the gentle determination of her carefulness stokes and keeps the love of their neighbors. He does not need to. Sophia doesn't ask for praise or credit. Is he the life of the party? Or is she? Such questions! The party is alive, that's what matters. And whichever way one slices such a rich cake, her company is much in demand. Her social calendar overflows like a cup of wine. Everyone in Arcadia Gardens clamors to have her round. The honor of her presence at their home. The pleasure of her business at their establishment. The profound distress the absence of her witness would cause at this or that small ceremony of life.
Sophia strives to make certain they never have cause to regret her.
♥ It will be a lovely day. They are all lovely days. That's how lucky she is. That's how beautiful Sophia's life has always been and always will be. Not a minute unaccounted for. Not a season unsavored to the last dregs.
She is happy. Her husband is happy. The world is theirs.
I was made for him.
♥ Someone has burned runes and designs and symbols Sophia cannot understand, except to think they are beautiful in a brutal sort of way, all over the handle and body of the thing: dark, angular, slashing. Maybe they're letters. Maybe they're stallions' heads. Maybe they're something very, very else.
♥ "Are you happy, Sophia?"
She blinks. She forgets instantly the scream shoving at her bones.
Is she happy?
She doesn't understand. She has never considered it. It is possible to be so entirely happy you never ask the question. She is a full glass submerged in water. Neither nor both full and empty. The inquiry, though kind, has no meaning for her.
♥ He begins to play, and for a moment Sophia fully and truly thinks she will die. The sound of it is a knife, if a knife could kiss, and the kiss could turn the color of morning. There is no sense to the song. It crashes and whispers and cajoles and sweeps and admonishes and commands all at once, without progression from one feeling to the next. Yet it contains a perfection that is twin to pain.
Sophia does not die. The kiss and the knife and the color go on and on. The man does not play music. The man <>is music.
..Sophia smiles at them. Seeing their pleasure pushes the music and the strange man and the scream far down into the root system of her mind. The tension pops like a moon-flower opening. Ease slides down her limbs.
She is happy, after all.
Sophia's smile unfurls as pure and perfect as the first smile ever managed. They like her gifts. They like her. She is appreciated. She is loved. It is such a wonderful thing in this world, to have friends.
♥ The sun wriggles down between the green foothills that ring Arcadia Gardens like a wedding band. Time passes without pressing its claim. Oranges ripen on the tree, passion fruit on the vine, the wool on the backs of hand-raised, heirloom-breed communal sheep lengthens by the barest fraction of a centimeter, and Sophia sits down, alone at a laden table. She watches the golden juice glisten on the breast of a roast chicken and roll down the rich mound of meat to pool on the clean china plate beneath.
Her husband does not come home that night.
..Sometimes, on these nights she spends alone, Sophia looks at her bountiful table and can almost see that something should be there that isn't. Not her husband or her friends, but others, others she cannot quite name or even imagine, shadows, phantoms of a future unlike the present, something to fill these eight chairs round the dining set. That has always seemed strange to her. Eight chairs, when it's always been just the two of them.
Sophia shakes her head. What has gotten into her today? She will ask Mrs. Lyon's little ones to supper on the weekend, and they will need the chairs then. Goodness! How many times has she hosted their neighbors? That's all the chairs have ever been or ever will be for. What else? Who else?
How quickly the blue-green of twilight brings wildness to the mind.
♥ There are marks on the bone, the same marks that slashes up the back of the hairbrush, black scaldings, black letters in a language set in direct opposition to the friendly kinds of letters that spell out Orpington's Organic Co-Op over the place where the evening roast flies joyfully to your arms.
And it is not a chicken bone. Sophia wants it to be. More than anything, in this blue-washed moment with the stars craning their necks toward her in particular, more than anything she wants it to be a chicken bone. To smell of sage and rosemary and butter. But it doesn't, because it can't. It smells only of time and loneliness and wild, hot, endless sands.
Sophia cannot help knowing what she knows. She is standing in her beautiful open floor-plan kitchen in her perfect sprawling house holding the tip of a human finger.
♥ "You are happy, aren't you? Aren't you?"
"Yes, my darling," Sophia sighs, and she is not lying. Not yet. The mingling of their breath is a biome in which only the truth can thrive. "Yes."
♥ Sophia gets unsteadily to her feet. She reaches up for the lip of the counter to hold on to. And she does understand something then, one thing, one little bone in the hundreds that make up a self.
The table so high she swings her legs in the air.
The bed she needs a staircase to dismount.
The staircase she needs a half hour to descend.
The chairs she drowns in. The kitchen counter she has to reach up to grab hold of. Oh, she thinks. How silly of me not to see. Not to know from the first day.
This house was never built for her.
Someone fashioned it lovingly, brick by beam, for the daily use of a woman much bigger and taller and stronger than Sophia. A giantess. Someone the size of her husband. Perhaps even greater than him. Someone with long, coarse black hair like the wig Mrs. Palfrey wore in the amphitheater.
It had never been her house at all.
Something breaks in Sophia. Or perhaps that little organ of dissatisfaction she had always lacked germinates and begins to send out sprouts at last.
Either way, she runs from it.
Out.
Into the night and the street, past curfew and into the reaching, grasping shadow that have waited for her for so long.
♥ In the shadows, beyond the flower hedge, up four white modest marble steps, the black iron rungs of a gate cut stark shapes out of the sky. It is locked. It is after hours. Sophia goes to it and lets her hands settle on the cool bars. She looks out into... what? The world. The world beyond her life.
And the world is a desert, white and searing, treeless, without shelter, hot sands stretching away into a burning, lonely nothingness until it obliterates itself against a wall of sky.
♥ "Allow me to ask you two questions, and when I have done it, if you still find me an... unsatisfactory companion, I shall guide you back to your house immediately, entirely undiscovered by the local authorities, and we shall both continue on in our perfect lives in this perfect place as though we had never met and no single second of this night had ever occurred. Agreed?"
The dark crowds so close around Cascavel's face. Shadows drawn to him, to be near him. But she wants to know his questions. She wants to have his answers.
♥ "Who are you? Cascavel is a very odd name."
His eyes glitter with mirth. "It is a kind of snake, my dear. Quite a deadly one, I'm afraid." He strokes her hair with shocking intimacy. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon the waters. And God said: let there be light, and there was light, and He saw the light, and saw that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness... and what was left over at the bottom of the keg was... me.
.."Well, darling, I have lived here in the Garden since the first stars detonated themselves into the sky and the oceans gave up the whales to the land. I saw the plates separate and I saw the rivers swell with the first water of the cosmos and I saw what that man did to you and all the rest of them and I have wept in earnest for every gorgeous loving girl that house has eaten whole. I have seen it all and let me tell you something as true as bleeding: I am invested. I am on your side. You are the life, but I am the party." He curls her long hair round his finger, "Now, might I squeeze a third question in? I know I only said two, but I am known to lie from time to time, just like you."
Sophia pauses. That part of her that knows it can trust no one and has no friends begs her to keep her peace. But it feels so good to be held, it feels so good to be spoken to like she is capable and wise, to hear her life gain weight, fed by Cascavel. Fed by being seen.
"I lied because he would have made me obey," she confesses, and that feels good too. "He would have made me give the heron the hair and the brush and the bone, because the handbook says we must acquiesce to any request made of us. But I didn't want to give them up. I wanted to know the truth. And they were... they were mine."
"Thank you for telling me," Cascavel says. "I am always very interested in lies."
Sophia nods against his chest. She does not hear a heart there. Only a kind of old wind blowing beneath his skin.
"Ask me your third question," she tell him.
"What's your husband's name, Sophia?"
She lifts her head and blinks in confusion.
"You're married to the great lump. You must know."
Sophia searches her memory, her heart, her whole life with him, every morning in bed, every golden smear of breakfast left on a plate, every whispered urgent promise in her ear.
But there's nothing there to find.
Cascavel smiles, coaxing. "Do you want to know? I can tell you. But you have to ask. You have to want the truth, or it will mean nothing to you. Just a little rain falling into a puddle already full."
Cascavel unwinds himself from her. He reaches up into the tree above them, its branches heavy, forking, bending as far as it can toward where they sit. He plucks an apple without even looking for one and hold it before her. It is a so red, but in the night, in the moonlight, it shines black.
"Do you want it?" he whispers. His eyes slick over with a silver membrane. "Do you want to know? It will do you no good. It will not make you happy. It will not make one moment of what is to come easier on you. But ask me, and I will give it to you."
Sophia marvels at the apple. It is so big. She can see her face reflected in its skin. It smells ripe, autumnal, wholesome. But she does not reach for it. "Why, if it will not help me?"
Cascavel raises his eyes to Heaven and shakes his beautiful head. "My own foolishness. A weakness for those in pain. Hope. That the outcome will, against all odds, be different this time." He goes completely still, appraising her, adding sums in his mind that Sophia can never guess at.
Then he kisses her again, and this time it is not her forehead, and it is not paternal, but a real kiss, a needful, desperate, despairing kiss, the color of lava and longing and raw new stars and whatever is left over when you divide the light from the dark. A kiss for the end of the world. "Because I love you and you do not deserve what that man and his Father have prepared for you," he whispers into the place their mouths joined only a moment before. "You all find your way here in the end. To this green place. To this tree and to me. I always offer you the truth. The simplest and deepest of temptations. And I hope against hope you will say no. Say no, Sophia. Say no and run, past the gardens and the pools and the silent streetlamps, out of the gate and into the far hot sands that stretch on beyond the length of the sky. Into the world. Without him. Without guilt. But you won't. You never do. Except her. And whatever they ever say about her, Sophia, she lived. So, she won."
"Her?"
"The one whose hair you found in your dresser drawer. The one whose name he whispers into your neck as he uses your body. The one Mrs. Palfrey tried to show you in the pantomime, putting the brush there for you to find, to help you, to show you the truth before I could get to you. Semengelof went after her, to execute the terms of the same contract you signed. That you all sign. But she is beautiful and she is convincing and he let her live, if she agreed to leave you alone and give you a chance. Of course she didn't tell him what she'd done. She was always the cleverest of the lot. She found a way to speak to you, though she can never pass through the gate again. Solidarity is a hell of a thing. And it did not exist before a few months ago. Because there were never two of you here at once. Like a new flower in the wall."
..Cascavel lets her go. He offers her the apple.
"Ask me," he says in defeat. "You are not her. They built you to be everything other than her. So ask me and you will have what I have. What your neighbors have by now, though they never wanted it."
"What?" Sophia can barely breathe. "What is it?"
"Knowledge of good," he runs his finger affectionately down her nose. "And evil." Cascavel gazes over her head, back toward her house.
Sophia will go back to him. She already knows. She cannot stop herself for much longer. She is a machine designed to return to its master. But she will not go helpless.
She takes the apple, shuts her eyes, and sinks her teeth into its flesh. Savor it all, she hears his voice saying to her while the fireflies danced. It's for you.
The sugar inside bursts into her mouth, singing. She swallows and opens her eyes.
Inside the apple is a small iron key.
Cascavel stands, his voice full of sorrow and tenderness.
"Your husband's name is Adam. The Big A. Number one in the factory line. Old Mr. Dust. And that is a key to his basement. It is almost finished."
Cascavel starts to walk back to the wall of struggling flowers. But he pauses, a curious posture taking hold of his form. He raises one hand in an elegant gesture. "Take the apple with you if you like," he says lightly, as though the thought has only just occurred to him and matters not a bit. "You are beautiful and convincing too, Sophia. Make him eat it. You may find it kills him."
♥ The key turns easy in the lock, because Cascavel only pretends to enjoy lies, and she knew that when he said it. The truth hurts so much better.
♥ She had so often thought of making her little soaps and baskets and jellies down here, in a space built just for her.
And then she sees it. And Sophia understands with a sickening puddle of fear in her gut that her husband hadn't lied either. Not really.
So much old equipment lying around.
It's dangerous.
She could get hurt.
Long, clean knives hang on the walls. Axes. Saws. Pliers. Hooks. Shears. Rendering barrels in one corner, a drain for fluids in another. Everything you needed to get your keepsake and make use of the rest. Nothing wasted. Nothing left out.
And in the soft dark of the floor gapes a long, deep hole, lovingly Sophia-sized. It does not seem fresh. It waited for a long time under her like a mouth, while she moved and lived and brushed her hair above. The invisible root of her being.
A space built just for her.