I will not be called on to save the world, she says.

But she will peel these apples in this dawn light by this drafty window inside her mother's house during the swollen month of December following the death of her child. She listens to the fire crackle and wonders if this can be done, if pie can be made, if anything can be made again.

She feels the weight of the apple in her palm, the weight of all the things she has held and borne. The bassinet, the school book, the trophy, the mending, the rope, the coffin, the stares.

She folded at the waist and rested her body over his body over the wood over the cross before the whole church, before friends children cousins, before mother father God. My God. She will never be called on again. She pressed empty hands against wood, remembered how she used to hold his hand crossing roads, crossing rivers, climbing hills, climbing heartbreaks.

The apple is red, not the red of blood, not the red of Valentine, but a softer red, a red infused with pale lifeless light, with a stillness that only comes after great shock.

In her palm, it is cold.

The skin is delicate, is ready. It will yield to the paring knife, to the transformation. It is prepared to unwind, to swirl, to ribbon. She tied ribbons round the party favors at his fifth birthday, scraped the crinkled fabric with a scissor till it curled like a baby's hair.

She polishes the red with a cloth before setting the knife against this skin, against this cold, against this eternal moment, presses hard enough to break through, to crack, to forget. The bully, the bully, the bully. She expects a cry. She expects the floor beneath her to give. But the sound is too gentle for the harm that is done. The world is too gentle—everything wrapped in white snow, in goose down, in voices hushed like she hushed him when he cried.

Cry louder, she tells the apple. Cry so I can hear you.

The juice of the apple drips to her palm, over her wrist, into the folds of her muslin blouse. She brings sleeve to lip, lets sweet fall to tongue like memory. Everything is memory now. Falling, falling.

Careful not to tear this thread, more threads, the thread between them, she peels round and round. She digs out the bruises, wipes away the brown spots. She pushes back the thoughts, the thoughts.

When the apple is naked and glistening like an infant after birth, after bath, she puts head to table, holds sob in chest.

She strokes the apple's flesh like a cheek she once kissed, like a face slapped hard.

And then she slices. Apple after apple. She cuts flesh to pieces, pieces to sliver, so thin, so thin she can peer through, slip through to the other side, to that tender place just beyond her mother's crackling house, beyond this rocky earth.

Ribbon after ribbon.

Apple after apple.

The whole day, time unraveling, unraveling.

She coats them in sugar. Dusts them with cinnamon. A squeeze of lemon. A touch of salt. She rolls out the dough like her mother rolled out the dough, like her mother's mother taught them, like she taught her son, her only son, that day after apple picking. Oh, how they carried the apples.

The pink lady, the honeycrisp.

When their hands weren't enough, she held out her shirt, she carried the fruits like she carried him, against her chest, over her heart. How you save me, she remembers telling him in that windy orchard, that golden shuddering place. How you save me. With swallows flying tree to tree.

The fire by the drafty window is ember now. Before the flesh cools, before the sun sets, she digs into the sweet, the tart, into the place she once was, the spot they once stood. The pie she has made, for she has made it, tastes like something he once said, some beautiful surprising word. A nutmeg memory. She lets the apples burn her tongue. The roof of her mouth. The roof of her mother's house. Everything.

.