Authors: Christopher Boucher
Golden Delicious (23 page)
“And the sentences change at will,” the muscled Mother said. The male Mother pushed a button on the projector and a new image appeared: a worm in the shape of the letter e. Then another image: a worm in the shape of an s.
“Are these all the—same worm?” said Cone O’Martian.
“This is bullshit,” said the sweater, standing up and pointing. “That one’s not even a
woman
!” he shouted. The tall Mother went over to the sweater, picked him up, threw him over her shoulder, and carried him out. “It’s bullshit!” the sweater shouted.
Cone Johnson raised his hand.
“Don’t need to raise your hand, Cal,” said the male Mother.
“So what if they change?”
“So
what
?” the male Mother repeated.
“Yeah,” said Cone Johnson. “Why is that a big deal? I think it’d be kind of cool to see a sentence change right in front of me.”
“It’s what killed the apples,” said the muscled Mother. “Appleseed is the story of happiness, soil fertility, and meaning. But now all that’s changing. It won’t stop with the trees. If we don’t stop the bookworms, they’ll erase all of Appleseed, destroy everything meaningful.”
“Or carry it away,” said the male Mother.
“Carry it away?” said Cone O’Martian.
The muscled Mother turned back to the screen. “What we don’t know yet,” she said, pointing to the pictures of the holes in the page, “is where those channels lead.”
“We don’t want to overreact and cause panic,” said the male Mother. “All we’re asking for right now is vigilance. You see a strange sentence? One that seems like it’s not from Appleseed? Pray to us about it.”
“In the meantime,” said the muscled Mother, “we’re doubling our reads and recruiting new Mothers.”
My Mom sat up in her seat.
“We’ll be trying out Mothers in O’Shady Groves next Friday at eight a.m.,” the male Mother announced.
Looking back, that was the moment I lost her—the moment that she became a Mother to the world, but the Memory of a Mom to me.
I didn’t attend the tryouts—I had school that day. I’d started at Appleseed High—a bigger, more dangerous place—the previous fall, and I was really struggling. It was easy to get lost in that school—to walk down a corridor toward your next class, take a wrong turn, and find yourself in a class on death or loss that you could never get out of. I know a scoom named Kyle who walked into a class on Aging? He emerged forty years later with wrinkles on his face and a curve in his spine.
I took the standard list of classes: Complicated World, Days of Joy, What to Be Most Frightened Of, the History of Depression, and Gym. I was failing almost all of them—it was like something was wrong with my brain. In Complicated World, Ms. Colton kept me after school to discuss my grades. “I don’t understand it,
,” she said. “The quizzes are open-book. Why is this giving you so much trouble?”
I shrugged.
“Don’t you find this interesting? The complicated world?”
“I guess I just don’t think it’s all that complicated,” I said.
“Are there problems at home,?” said Ms. Colton. “Or with your friends?”
“My only friend besides ‘I am.’,” I told her, “is the Reader.”
“The who?” she said.
“Me,” said the Reader.
“The Reader,” I said.
“Is that a real person?” she said.
“Of course,” I said. “She’s right over there.”
“Jokes aren’t going to get you anywhere,” she said. “I’m trying to
help
you.”
“I’m trying to help me, too,” I said.
The only class I did OK in was Depression. I never studied for the exams in that class and still I got the best grades. In his comments on one of my papers, my teacher—a lizard named Dr. O’Rich—said that I had promise. “I seriously think that you should consider a career in depression,” he wrote.
In all of my other classes, though, my teachers gave up on me. In What to Be Most Frightened Of, the teacher even moved my desk into the corner. The weather in my school was generally pretty good—mild sun, a few clouds—but those corners were often cold and sometimes inclement. That day, in fact—the day of the tryouts—it had started snowing in my corner, right in the middle of class. We were supposed to be creating fear hierarchies, but the snow made it difficult to concentrate. I got up from my desk and approached the teacher, a cardboard cutout, and said, “It’s snowing in my corner.”
“Is it literal snow,” said the cutout, “or metaphorical snow?”
We’d studied metaphors the previous week.
“Real snow,” I said.
“Are you sure your thoughts don’t seem
as
snow?”
I went back to my desk, pushed the snow off my paper, and kept working.
I was even more distracted than usual that day, though—all I could think about was how my Mom was doing. That and what the Mothers had said about the bookworms. Was
Sentence
, I wondered, a bookworm?
No. “I am.” acted fierce sometimes, but his “bark” was way worse than his “bite.” My sentence wasn’t like the wild language you read about in
The Daily Core
—the sentences that had been seen slithering up storm grates, making holes in our stories. The previous month, someone had been
killed
by a sentence, even, when she mistakenly came between the clause and its mother-sentence while hiking in the margin. “I am.” wasn’t capable of that kind of cruelty—he was just a sweet, innocent statement!
That afternoon, though, I rode right home after school. My Mom wasn’t back from the tryouts yet, so I found the pamphlet from the meeting and sat down on the couch with Sentence.
BROUGHT TO YOU BY
THE MOTHERS OF AMERICA
In many ways, bookworms are similar to the common earthworm—the
oligochaeta
—except that the bookworm, which is known as the
literaficidae
, has
a printed skeleton. This print-based body allows it to morph from one character or idea to another, shifting its appearance and meaning on a whim.
Literaficidae
survive most readily in narrative, stories, or other text. They crave stories: predicaments, conflicts, crescendos, denouements. They digest the tension and secrete the rest. This results in a “trail”—a telltale pathway of inconsistencies or red herrings left by a passing sentence.
Bookworms can change font and style at will, quickly emboldening and italicizing, shrinking to hide, underlining or enlarging to scare predators. The most common
literaficidae
fonts, incidentally, are Cambria and Palatino. Courier New is frequently seen as well.
Reports of recent bookworm incidents suggest that they can carry elements of plot or premise in their stomachs. In other words, they transport settings and moments in order to ensure their survival. If they can contain the story, that is, they save their place in it.
Metaphoring is another word for meaning simultaneously.
The bookworms’ ability to metaphor is unparalleled. They can represent literally any number of ideas, motifs, or themes. Literary scientists suggest that this metaphoring is the result of evolution over hundreds of thousands of years on the page.
Like the common
oligochaeta
, the
literaficidae
can regenerate if injured. Say that a sentence, prior to injury, represented the threat of nature. If a group of them were attacked and unable to regenerate as nature, they might opt for another syntactically similar comparison—the threat of the
future
, say.
Q. My community has been infested with strange words! What do I do if I see one?
A
. Pray to the Mothers! Send them the page number and locale. Then stop reading in that direction and read the other away as fast as you can.
Q. Is metaphoring contagious?
A
. Not that we know of, no. Metaphoring is not an illness or virus; rather, it’s the bookworms’ way of making themselves seen and known. Human beings show no tendency toward metaphoring.
Q. What have we done to deserve this invasion?
A
. Nothing. The bookworms have chosen your story at random, in the same way that termites infest a house or typewriters attack smaller typewriters. It’s a question of narrative survival—nothing more.
Q. Do the bookworms have anything to do with the disappearance of apples (the blight)?
A
. The current theory says yes, that the apple trees—which draw nutrients from the page—were not able to sustain the growth of appletree groves because of bookworm-inspired page-rot. This is one of the reasons that we’re aiming to stop, or at least curb, bookworm infestations. And with your help, we will!
Thanks for doing your part to help save Appleseed from bookworms!
I heard the Fart in the driveway and I put down the brochure. A minute later, my Mom walked in with her reading goggles over one shoulder and her nunchucks over the other.
“How’d it go?” I said.
“O
K
,” she huffed, but I knew it went great; her face was as happy as I’d ever seen it. And just two days later, I came home after school and saw two duffel bags by the door.
“?” my Mom hollered.
“Yeah,” I said, staring at the bags.
“We’re in here,” she said.
I walked into the kitchen and saw my father, mother, and sister sitting at the table. “Sit down,,” my Mom said.
I sat in one chair and the Reader sat in the other. “No,” said my Mom to the Reader. “This is for family only.”
“Mom,” I said, embarrassed.
“She can go sit in the TV room,” said my Mom. Then my Mom looked at you.
“Go,” she said.
You got up and went into the TV room. The TV stared at you. “What do you think they’re talking about?” the TV asked.