An Apple Tree in a Dying World
She chews the pen until her teeth ache, the plastic splintering faintly under the pressure. The ink is metallic, bitter as it seeps into her mouth. The paper beneath her hands is soft and damp, its edges curling inward as though retreating from the weight of her touch. Bread. Canned beans. Powdered milk. Each word she presses onto the page feels like a confession, a surrender to the mundane. Outside, her son crouches in the yard, dragging a stick through the cracked earth that crumbles like old bones. The sun hangs low, smothering the landscape in heat so thick it feels hostile.
Yesterday, he’d tugged on her sleeve, his fingers sticky with the last dregs of condensed milk, and asked for apples. ‘Maybe tomorrow,’ she’d said, the lie slipping from her lips before she could stop it. She’d turned away from the way his face lit up, the faint spark of hope she’d extinguish again tomorrow. The last apple she’d seen sat in a box at the co-op, shrivelled and waxy, its skin splitting like old leather. A man had grabbed it first, his trembling fingers gripping it with reverence. She’d wanted to hate him.
She writes ‘eggs,’ then scores through it so hard the paper tears. Eggs are a memory now, one her son will never have. The co-op shelves flash in her mind: bare steel ribs, humming under flickering fluorescent lights. She can still smell the place, its sour tang of rotting greens and too many bodies packed into stale heat. ‘The rain’ll come,’ a woman behind her had murmured. But rain didn’t save; it took. It surged and swallowed and drowned everything it touched. Her house had held the water like a dying lung, every wall and corner choking with it.
Rice. She drags the pen across the page, her hand heavy. Meat? Her stomach clenches at the thought of the butcher’s shop, its windows grimy, the ‘Closed’ sign yellowing in the sun. Once, she’d fried pork chops, the grease snapping against her wrists. She’d cursed the sting, the mess, the luxury she hadn’t even recognised as such. Her son wouldn’t know meat if it sat on his plate now.
His laughter rises suddenly, shrill and sharp as glass shattering, and she flinches. She grips the table’s edge, her knuckles whitening, as the sound ricochets off the quiet walls. There’s something alien about his laughter. He doesn’t feel the ache she does, the low hum of grief that starts in her stomach and spreads until it suffocates everything. How could he? He’s never known anything else. He hasn’t lost the world she did—the one where apples grew heavy on trees and water didn’t taste like rust.
*
She picks up a can of condensed milk, its weight cool in her hand, and thinks about how much he loves it. She thinks about the way his face lit up yesterday when he asked for apples. She puts the can back.
When she gets home, the sky is bruised purple and yellow, the horizon bleeding into itself. Her son is perched on the porch steps, his stick abandoned at his feet. His eyes lift to hers, cautious and expectant.
‘Did you get apples?’ he asks.
She shakes her head, her throat dry. ‘Not today.’
His shoulders sag, but he doesn’t argue. He never does. His silence feels heavier than words, like he’s already learned the futility of asking for more. She wishes he’d cry, demand, rage—anything but this passive surrender. But the thought makes her stomach turn. Why should she get to want more, when he’s never even known what more looks like?
*
After dinner, he sits at the table, hunched over the back of an old flyer, his pencil digging into the paper. She watches him from the sink, her hands submerged in dishwater gone grey and cold. The plates clink faintly as she scrubs them, her eyes tracing the slope of his back, the tightness in his shoulders. She knows he’s too young to carry it—the weight of waiting, the weight of her. But he carries it anyway.
‘What are you drawing?’ she asks, her voice cutting through the quiet like a knife slipping into flesh.
‘A tree,’ he says, his head bowed. His pencil drags hard lines across the page, the strokes too dark, too forceful.
She steps closer, her shadow spilling over his work. The tree sprawls wildly, its branches stretching in unnatural shapes, red circles dotting the ends like wounds. ‘Apples?’ she asks.
He nods, grinning faintly. ‘We used to have one, didn’t we? At the old house?’
The memory comes in pieces, she sees the apple tree, its limbs sagging under the weight of its fruit. She sees the grass beneath it, littered with fallen fruit, their skins split open and leaking sweet rot. She remembers the taste of them, crisp and bright, the way the juice clung to her fingers. She remembers thinking there would always be more.
‘Yeah,’ she says, her voice a whisper. ‘We did.’
*
That night, she tucks him into bed, the quilt pulled tight around his small body. His face softens as sleep pulls at him, his breath evening out, filling the room with its rhythm. She sits on the edge of the mattress, smoothing his damp hair away from his forehead. He looks so much like his father it feels like a betrayal. His father, who’d been a fleeting promise, something she’d thought she could keep. She hadn’t planned for her son, but she’d kept him anyway. And now here he was, fragile and irreplaceable.
The storm rolls in slowly, a low rumble shivering through the ground before it reaches the air. She wakes to the distant growl, blinking against the darkness, then moves through the house, checking the locks, listening. Outside, the sky churns, swollen and heavy, its weight pressing against her ribs. When her son stirs, she pulls him close, bolts the door, checks the latches. He presses his face to the glass, his breath fogging the surface as he watches the clouds tumble into one another.
‘It’s going to rain,’ he says, his voice tinged with awe.
She nods, her mouth dry. ‘It is.’
The first drops hit the roof like stones, sharp and deliberate, before swelling into a relentless roar. She lights a candle as the electricity dies, its flickering glow catching the slow drip of water from the ceiling. Her son sits cross-legged on the floor, his knees drawn to his chest, his eyes wide with wonder. She stands behind him, her fingers twisting in the fabric of her skirt. The last time it rained like this, the world had buckled under the weight of it, and she’d watched helplessly as their lives were washed clean away.
*
The wind hammers against the house, rattling the windows, forcing its way through the cracks, insistent, restless. Water pools on the floor, soaking into the edges of the rug. Her son laughs as thunder cracks above them, his voice bright and full of things she can’t touch.
‘It’s just noise, Mum,’ he says. ‘It’s not scary.’
She doesn’t answer. Her eyes are on the bucket now placed beneath the biggest leak, the water inside trembling with every drop. The room is loud with the storm, but louder still is the sound of his voice as he calls to her, pulling at her skirt, begging her to come look at the lightning streaking through the sky. His excitement grates against her. How can he be so unaffected? So eager to marvel at a world that is trying to destroy them?
*
‘I’m busy,’ she snaps, her voice cutting sharper than she intends. His hand falls from her skirt, and guilt pools thick and fast in the silence that follows. But she doesn’t soften. She can’t. Fear coils too tightly in her chest, fear that the roof won’t hold, that the walls will give way, that she’ll fail him the way the world has already failed her.
He sits back down, his knees pulled to his chest, his eyes dimmed but still watching the storm. She watches him from the corner of her eye. He doesn’t know what it was like before. He doesn’t know what it means to lose something so completely. To feel the ache of a life stripped away. He only knows this—this chaos, this hunger, this endless survival. He doesn’t mourn because he has nothing to mourn. And she resents him for that, for his unburdened heart, for the way he can laugh while she feels the weight of every broken thing pressing her into the ground.
When the rain stops, the ground outside gleams slick and swollen, the puddles reflecting the dull grey of the sky. Her son runs out, splashing through the water, his laughter cutting through the still air. She stands in the doorway, watching. He stops at a tree leaning crookedly by the roadside, its bark flaking like dead skin.
‘Do you think it could grow apples?’ he asks.
She crosses the yard and kneels beside him, her hands brushing over the rough bark. ‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘If we take care of it.’
His face lights up. ‘Can we?’
She hesitates, her fingers tracing the fragile trunk, then nods. ‘We can try.’
They dig it up together, and when the roots come loose, he crouches beside them, carefully shaking off the clumps of earth, his small fingers meticulous in their work. Her hands blister against the spade’s handle, the pain grounding her. Her son chatters as they work, his voice full of impossible dreams—how tall the tree will grow, how sweet the apples will taste. She listens, letting his words fill the hollow spaces she doesn’t dare to name.
Phoebe Robertson is a Pākehā author who has recently completed her MA in Creative Writing at the IIML. She was commended in the Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition and holds further awards from Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, NZ Young Writers Fest, and National Flash Fiction Day.