At sixteen, we laughed at the townsfolk and their apple-themed hats, the Apple Fest banner stretching from one side of Main Street to the other.
So lame, we said, armored in our matching Van Halen shirts and kohl eyeliner. The thinning sun bore down on our shoulders, and we braced for the start of high school in a week, the final year before we’d cast off the grime of this dirty little town with its apple-faced donuts and apple-sized dreams.
Now, my children wear painted apples on their cheeks and whine for a turn on the ponies traipsing in circles on cordoned-off Main Street. Hoofs clip clop on the asphalt in time with songs like Applejack and Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree pumping through portable speakers.
We pause at apple-festooned booths selling homemade apple pie, apple jam, and apple cider. Stroll by tables displaying apple crisp, caramel apples, and applesauce, but you don’t buy anything.
What a bunch of apple-heads, you say, home for your parents’ twenty-fifth, and I know you’ve changed since Toronto, and you didn’t wear your matching Van Halen shirt like I thought you would, but instead pointed at mine, tight around my belly with my third, and said I forgot all about that silly t-shirt.
Dawn Miller’s work appears in Pithead Chapel, The Forge, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, Room Magazine, Toronto Star, and elsewhere. Her stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and anthologized in Best Microfictions. She lives and writes in Picton, Ontario, Canada.
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