---

The Eye of Applethorpe

by E J Delaney

Úna’s dad once said to her: “You never know what you’ve got until it’s gone.”

Spring had turned and they’d come cycling up the highway, fourteen kilometres north through a land bedecked with rocky upthrusts and pink-tinged blossoms. The Big Apple loomed before them, appraising its empty kingdom from atop a stubby pole.

Úna hadn’t understood. Where the Apple’s expression was unambiguous—a spray-painted frown—her dad’s was hidden beneath thickets of beard. He rested on his tiptoes astride the bike, as big and improbably balanced as a granite boulder. Sunlight danced through his cherry-candle bristles.

Úna held his hand. To her the world had seemed perfect. She was happy and loved, and she’d recently befriended a turtle where Quart Pot Creek curved past the homestead.

What could he have had, she wondered, that wasn’t there anymore?

---

It was on Úna’s eleventh birthday that she first began noticing the changes.

It wasn’t just her body. No sooner had her singlet tops shown the first faint swell of breast buds than her dad booked her a session with the Eye. On the next sunny day, its inbuilt Education Matron gave her the talk, appearing as Lucy Osburn from the history module and answering all her questions. Pubic hair. Periods. Úna was fine with all that.

But there were other differences. Odd changes in people’s behaviour.

Like how her father’s tiredness gave way to worry when he came in from the orchard at night. Or when Finlay Bissett-Brown had knocked on their door that morning and, scuffing his feet, presented her with an apple carved in the shape of a turtle. That was just… weird, right?

Not that it was a bad job. The apple he’d used was unripe, so the pared shell patterning was greenish rather than Cripps Pink rouge. He’d peeled the skin off the lower half and cut flippers and a rounded head with seed-eyes. It was actually rather sweet!

But that wasn’t the Finlay she knew. It wasn’t the grinning boy next door whose usual practice was to throw her an apple and call out, ‘Enjoy it while it lasts!’—a reference not to the apple but to this one week of the year when she was as old as he.

Today Finn hadn’t smiled, or met her eye. He’d just mumbled something incomprehensible and—stood there.
“Baffling,” Úna reflected. She knelt by Billie Eilish’s favourite log and broke the tail from Finlay’s gift. “But good news for you, Billie. Cannibalistic treat!”

The Mary River turtle regarded her through keen, dragon eyes. Then it stretched its neck out and took a nibble, chin fangs ghost-chomping at the offering. Úna ran a finger across its tufted green algae haircut.

She murmured:

There once was a boy, Bissett-Brown
Who wouldn’t wear pants around town
Though apt to play dumb
About showing his bum
He sat on a cactus and—Oww!

“That’s a limerick,” she explained. “They’re supposed to be rude. Not really a turtle thing, I guess, but Finlay would have liked it. Old Finlay. Before he turned weird.”

She fed Billie some more apple.

“Boys, right?”

They sat awhile in companionable silence, a newly minted eleven-year-old and a pond-punk veteran at peace in its shell and skin. Then a breeze sprang up from the east, rippling the trees reflected upside-down in the creek. The looming ghost gums turned hazy.

“Well,” Úna declared, “time for my present from Dad. See you later, B.E.”

Leaving the turtle to munch on its effigy, she marched off for her one-on-one with Banjax.

---

The thing that mystified Úna most of all in the whole of Applethorpe—and as far beyond it as her dad had taken her on co-op exchange days—was that no one else wanted to spend time with Banjax.

Of the Eye’s myriad aspects, Banjax had always been her favourite. Ever since she was little and the solar panels weren’t quite so dinged up and he’d read Dr Seuss and ‘Mulga Bill’s Bicycle’ to her and Finlay and the other kids, she’d marvelled at his wrinkled face, his rumbling intonations; at his way with words.

And she kind of got it. When the Eye had grown glitchy and the adults began shunting schoolwork through the text interface, poetry had lost some of its allure. ‘Jabberwocky’ and ‘Up the Country’ were performance pieces; so too ‘Banggliga’ and other First Languages poems. Without Banjax to interpret them—to give voice to their cadences and rhythms—they were like pictures of apples, or even just the word ‘apple’. They lacked the juicy crunch! of the real thing.

Still Úna seized each opportunity. While her peers scrimped and saved up for movie nights, she put her own allowance towards sessions with Banjax.

Why wouldn’t she? Why didn’t they?

“Flummoxing,” she told herself. As she left the orchard’s netted rows behind, she glanced back over her shoulder at the stunted, jewel-studded trees and the children who, on their birthdays, would squander their chance playing mindless games. “Utterly discombobulating.”

When she reached the ruins, she pushed inside and made her way to the central dais. Here she typed in her personal ID, then the one-off code her dad had given her.

The Eye opened, its twin membranes irising contrariwise to each other.

“Happy birthday, Úna. Which aspect do you seek?”

“Banjax, please.”

“Acknowledged.”

Milky clouds swirled inside the rondure as a familiar face coalesced: a big-eared, bristle-haired old man with twinkling eyes and a prominent hooked nose. He had weathered skin and a paunchy grey-white beard. The lips beneath twitched in greeting, the default monotone giving way to a lilting twang.

>blockquote>It’s my birthday; I’m Úna mac Cumhaill
Eleven years old; you’ll find me at school
With a pickle-brained poet, preserved in a jar

I’m destiny’s apple; I’m fixed to fall far

“A Balliol rhyme!” Úna identified the form. “Four beats per line, ribbing me in my own voice. But what does it mean, Banjax: ‘fixed to fall far’?”

“‘Fixed’ in the sense of being prepared to, or on the verge of. ‘Falling far’ in reference to ‘never falling far from the tree’, meaning that children grow to be like their parents.”

“So… that’s saying I won’t be like Dad?”

“In many respects, of course, you will. But not in your love of poetry.”

“Ah!”

“When you give your heart to heroic couplets. When you pine for pyo or yearn for a yagan.”

Úna considered these examples, then added:

When I close my eyes and lean in, the monostich soft upon my lips

Banjax laughed. “Aye, lassie, you’re a poet all right—what your farmers might call a bard apple, had they the wherewithal. Now, how fare you with the Burns stanza?”

Úna made a so-so gesture.

Today I picked a six-line stave
A Habbie hung from bygone days
Where dug this fellow Burns his grave
And grew from seed
A tree of twisting, whimsic ways

It made me weep

Banjax nodded. “Dutifully satiric. More assonant than true but ‘whimsic’ is a nice touch. Well done, my girl.”

They settled into discussion then, talking scansion and enjambment and other devices to send Úna’s mind soaring. The minutes flew alongside her and before she knew it the hour was up. Banjax offered a sad smile.

“And now I must away. Time and tide, young Padawan.”

A few years ago he might have extended their session. Now the limits came pre-programmed; encoded. The Eye was too precious and its hardware too erratic.

What couldn’t be maintained had to be curbed.

Úna bumped back to earth. “I know. But I’ve had a lovely birthday. Thank you, Banjax.”

He winked at her, roguishly complicit as in those preschool days reading ‘Custard the Dragon’ and ‘On the Ning Nang Nong’. As his avatar faded to mist, then memory, she whispered:

“See you next year.”

---

Her twelfth birthday fell amidst what seemed a near-continuous, weeklong downpour. The overarching cloud cover precluded any use of the Eye, and Úna knew that even once the solar panels began humming again, the adults would claim precedence to consult with Banjax’s scientifically minded brethren. Her own session wouldn’t come any time soon.

She spent the morning instead with Billie Eilish, feeding the turtle pieces of carved apple—the latest from Finlay: an intricately rendered frilled-neck lizard. In the afternoon, her dad took her out past the orchard to where they were clearing land for an expansion crop.

“We’ll start with cabbages,” he explained. “Tomatoes. Beans. Applethorpe’s climate is good—mostly!—but the soil is poor. By growing veggies we’ll sweeten the ground for when we put the new trees in.”

Úna shrugged. She loved her dad, and she knew he wanted her to take more interest in their livelihood; that and to distract her from the dreary skies. But it didn’t help. With Banjax offline, her birthday was a washout. She mooched back to the river and sat weaving salty than-bauk chains in the drizzle.

Poetry had always been Úna’s salve, panacea for a multitude of hurts, like when she’d wobbled and fallen from her bike, only to write off the pain in tottering steps of iambic tetrameter; or when Emily Aitken had teased her about her gap-toothed lisp and she’d snapped back with a savage, extemporised Büttenrede.

Yes, poetry was a cure-all. But her work was raw and she needed a second opinion—which she wasn’t going to get with clouds clustered around and the Eye closed. Her dad was off checking the new drainage ditch. Even Billie Eilish had left her torn-faced, slipping down the muddy bank and into the creek.

The Owl and the Pussycat, Redux, Úna decided, squinting peevishly at the sodden landscape. Where the pussycat dies and the money’s all spent.

Suddenly she was quite sure she never wanted to grow up. And though she outstared the Scotch mist that stung at her eyes, and kept her back straight while the trees drooped and the evening closed in, still she couldn’t rid her thoughts of the owl sat hunched in time, strumming his puny guitar.

---

Úna’s thirteenth birthday dawned brighter, though still confounding.

It started with another present from Finlay: an apple-carved miniature flame tree in blossom, which was fine as far as it went but he’d still barely spoken to her in two years. They’d been friends forever; now he talked less than Billie Eilish.

Úna couldn’t understand it. She spent a calming half-hour logside, feeding blossoms to Billie; then she set off for the ruins, kissing her dad as she passed by the homestead.

The morning was cool, the air still braced with that overnight squeeze that lent the apples their distinctive blush. She was halfway through the orchard when Rory Macpherson jumped out at her like a bunyip from the shade of a cross-row.

“Úna of the clan Mac Swoon! Happy b—”

Rory was Finlay’s cousin, and until recently his oversized shadow in all things boyish and unfathomable. No sooner were his arms around her than she had one foot hooked behind his ankle and shoved him in the chest. He toppled over backwards.

“Ouch!” he complained.

“Personal space, Rory.”

Much though she tried not to, Úna couldn’t help joining the pimply, adolescent dots as to what—or rather, who (most perturbing!)—Finlay and Rory had fallen out over. She stepped past Rory and continued on down the slope, muttering:

“Mac Swoon. Hmph!”

And while the last thing she’d have wished upon herself when starting a session with Banjax was to turn up in high dudgeon, she found it impossible to shake her ill humour. Tweenage obsession / raging afresh. She stomped up to the ruins and picked her way inside. The Eye lay waiting, its tarnished gleam darkly befitting of a polished future brought low.

“Happy birthday, Úna,” the login voice greeted her. “Which aspect do you seek?”

“Banjax, please.”

“Acknowledged.”

The Eye slowly opened and clouds swirled inside the rondure, extracting personality, pulling her mentor from the depths of a dreamless sleep. When he appeared, she wasted no time in putting her thoughts into verse:

Thirteen years among the gum trees
Pouch-reared on eucalyptus leaves
Úna emerges
Boys flaunt their urges

Courting birds, courting bees

“Oh ho!” Banjax adjudged. “An Aussie bush spin on the classic Welsh clogyrnach. Am I to take it, young Missy mac Cumhaill, that the lads you once knew have become shambling self-parodies?”

“Yes! They’re not boys anymore, Banjax. They’re… they’re… mutant, cripple-brained wallabies!”

“Very distressing. But then, all of us change.” Banjax rubbed at his whiskers. “Aye, even we bards! When we outgrow our nursery rhymes or find ourselves moved to shape list poems into lanternes. When we take to kennings like a bowerbird to the blue.”

Úna frowned. “Me, too?”

“Assuredly. When young Finlay sets eyes upon you nowadays, I’d wager he sees—”

“A constipated wombat?”

“In the sense of keeping to yourself, perhaps. More likely a lyrebird whose proficiency of voice renders him mute and self-conscious.”

Wiggling his ears, Banjo recited:

Life is like a
Pathya Vat
Simple as that
Clear when you’re young

Then the rhyme shifts
Sticking its tongue
Out; feelings flung
Back in your face

Now you know that
Expectation
Ever changing

Rules over you

Úna thought for a moment, then took up the refrain:

No, no, no, no!
Say it’s not true
Oh what a rude
Awakening

Spare me my dreams
Where ravens sing
And quail-egg kings

Hatch uncuckooed

And on they went, riding the interplay: ABBC, DCCE, FEEG, each stanza shifting, beholden to its forebears. Call and respond. Message mingled with form until Úna felt her wings sprout; then she was laughing, soaring, shaping the world again.

“Alive!” she told Banjax. “Pure dead brilliant! That’s how poetry makes me feel.”

“Buoyed, not boyed, ay?” He winked at her. “And many happy returns, lassie.”

With all her heart, Úna hoped there would be.

---

Yet, on her fourteenth birthday she wasn’t able to visit with Banjax.

A wild summer storm had raged through Applethorpe overnight, snatching at the hail nets and unleashing a bombardment that stripped the trees of flowers and fruit. So severely was the orchard hit—so extensive the cleanup required—it took half the morning before anyone could be spared to check on the Eye. When Úna at last begged leave, she found solar panels torn loose and batteries charred. The eggshell dome, already half-cracked, had opened up entirely and admitted several bathtubs’ worth of rain to slosh down onto the central mechanism.

“I’m sorry, love,” her dad said. “I know it’s your special day and you look forward to it. But the orchard comes first. The crop’s near wiped-out and the trees are vulnerable now; if pests get in, it’ll ruin us.”

Úna nodded. She joined with the other kids as best she could, mulching fallen fruit and selectively thinning what remained on the branches, maximising yield potential. The adults, meanwhile, sawed through broken limbs and smeared paint over amputated stumps. It was grim, depressing work—damage control at the tail of an avalanche.

Her thoughts turned to the Eye. How badly had it been hit? Would Dr Mangakahia and her husband and old man Grevsmuhl be able to repair it?

Or was Banjax gone for good?

Just when she thought the day had bottomed out, Finlay came lurching along like some gangling zombie and presented her with a carved-apple cockatoo. The detail was exquisite—the beak, the eyes, the rippled plumage—and he’d glazed it with blackberry preserve, rendering a charcoal gloss to all parts save a sliver of red on the tail feathers. It was beautiful; heartfelt.

The timing couldn’t have been worse.

If only he’d talked to her, she might have been okay. But pictures smear paint across a thousand words, and Finlay’s sculptures were silent epics whittled from the friendship she’d once shared with him. On top of Banjax being flooded out, it was too much.

Úna burst into tears. Through bleary eyes she saw Finlay’s head snap up.

“Úna? Are you—? I didn’t mean—What—?”

Eloquent as a boiled egg.

And she was no better! When the adults came and confiscated Finlay’s knife—Wasting good apples, they said; slacking off, and at a time like this—she just stood there, snuffle-sobbing. She didn’t set them straight on how long it must have taken him to bring that cockatoo to life. And Finlay had no defensive instincts; he just curled up and cowered, a spineless echidna helpless against their allegations.

So this is what it’s like to be fourteen, Úna thought. Her mind sought refuge in haiku. No, in senryū. Darker. Unravelled. Only—

The lines wouldn’t come. Cockatoo sculptors / cast me to the winds of change ?

Stone-faced, featherlight ?

She wasn’t sure. Without Banjax, she didn’t trust herself to find the right path.

And when she fled back to the homestead, down to the creek to take silent counsel from Billie Eilish, she too was gone. No tuft of green, no drag marks in the mud. The sun cast slanted regard upon a log devoid of turtle.

Úna sank to her haunches. Hugging herself, she gazed west and beyond. She wondered: Do all rivers beget billabongs? Abandoned loops where idyll dries away to nothing?

The thought recalled Paterson’s ‘jolly’ swagman waltzing back home to die. The glee of his grab; the grim, grownup gait of the troopers. When Úna came of age would the meanderings of childhood recede into memory?

Something about that caught at her heart. She thought to transcribe it—to capture in words its melancholy essence—but she knew she hadn’t yet the tools for it; and by the time she did, the urge would long since have passed.

That made her cry again: fat, heavy teardrops as she squatted by the empty log.

She stayed there until her dad came and carried her inside.

---

Her fifteenth birthday was even worse.

The year had passed in fractious regrowth, the co-op arguing amongst itself while drawing Úna further and further into the adult world. Her dad wanted to prune. He said they should cut right back, rejuvenate the main orchard at the cost of another year’s harvest.

We’ll be scraping by anyway, he insisted. Why not go the whole hog? Commit to the expansion crops. Ride out a brace but look to the future.

It seemed sensible to Úna: regress the trees to young’uns newly grafted; untwist and unknot them. Remove the burden of expectation.

Let them find their way.

Those words resonated, yet not many people agreed with her dad; and when Úna voiced her support, Fionnuala Bisset-Brown told her flat-out she was thinking of herself.

“That’s what you want,” she’d said, not unkindly, “because you’d rather write poems than settle down and rebuild.”

That had disturbed Úna. She composed a casbairdne about it (ironic), working for weeks to insinuate her worries into its fourteen beats:

Oughtn’t we now intervene
As father first exhorted?
Kowtow not to cultivars

Turned twisted and distorted!

The casbairdne was a prescriptive form—heptasyllabic lines, trisyllabic endings; cross- and circular chain-rhyme—but that was the point. The more it boxed her in, the harder she strived to express how she felt.

Of course, now that she was done, she fretted about context. Beyond the rallying cry and the woes of the orchard, would anyone twig to her meaning?

Sighing, Úna pushed up from her crouch. Billie Eilish’s log lay sun-baked and abandoned by the edge of the creek, as bereft of testudine moxie as it had been every day for the last twelve months. Had it been flood waters that swept Billie away? Had she picked a fight with a kaiju-sized catfish?

It didn’t matter. Billie was gone, and Úna’s only turtle friend now was a large, rounded stone which Finlay had painted dun and teal and had hollowed out eye sockets for, embedding them with green-helix marbles. (He’d gotten his knife back after the cockatoo incident but lost it again for fighting. Rock art was his fallback talent.) To remember, he’d said, not replace. He didn’t mumble, and when he held her gaze she saw that he’d meant well by it.

“Goodbye, B.E.,” she murmured, scanning one last time for movement against the grain. “I miss you.”

Lonesome to her bones, she turned from the creek and trudged out past the orchard. Several boys called greetings to her. Rory Macpherson even walked alongside her a ways, saying little but flexing his muscles whenever he had the chance. She wondered: was he offering himself as a birthday gift?

“Preposterous,” she decided. “A human amphigory.”

“Huh?”

“You, Rory. Whatever you’re doing, please stop.”

She thought about how he’d tried to impress her at the Highland Games, going up against the men in a misbegotten pledge of heart and hernia. Actions, he seemed to believe, spoke loudest.

In rebuttal, she offered him a clerihew:

Rory Macpherson
A not unstoried person
Won lasting fame at the caber toss

Which he lost

Rory didn’t reply, but from the way he flinched, she might just have wounded him more than when his third caber fell back in a six o’clock fail, bounced off the ground and struck him in the man-apples. She said:

“Look, I’m sorry, Rory. But that’s me. I’m made of words, of thoughts, the same way you’re all bulgy in the biceps.”

“Yeah, but opposites—”

“—do not attract. Complementary attracts.”

“Sure, well, I think you’re the prettiest girl in all of Applethorpe. You’re—”

“Goodbye, Rory.”

Something in her tone must have gotten through to him, or the weary despair when she slumped her shoulders. He fell back mid-sentence, receding like one of the old mileage signs on the road north. Broken boughs / blossoms disavowed. Úna left him behind and carried on to the ruins.

The Eye was in a bad way. Whatever semblance of functionality it had maintained, its decline lay exposed now in lashed-up piles of circuitry and wild, almost manically sutured cables. Dr Mangakahia had done her best. Everyone in the co-op had pitched in where they could—evidence the heavy-duty tarpaulin strung in place above the rondure. But the only true authority on lost tech was the Eye itself, and its expertise was useless without the requisite materials and a competent human agent.

—And time, which by Úna’s reckoning was the cruellest scarcity of all. The knowledge they so desperately needed was being lost to them because they were all too busy off-setting its lack. Life’s downward spiral / apples grown in ignorance. Even now, as their greatest resource sparked and sputtered its last, her dad and the others still tended the orchard, leaving Jebediah Grevsmuhl to transfer what he could onto e-readers and old-school printouts.

Even that was a form of triage, tailored to what was immediately germane: medical texts; animal husbandry; sacred teachings on horticulture and agriculture.

What of art, Úna wondered? What of language and literature?

What of music, maths, history, hope?

What of poetry?

With a wave to old man Grevsmuhl, she picked her way over to the workstation and typed in her ID, not rattling it off as she’d once have done, but rather marking its passing. The code from her dad came next. She didn’t know how he’d swung it, but she knew it wouldn’t have been easy. Five minutes. One last birthday wish congruent with snuffing out the candles.

Please be there, she thought. Don’t leave without saying goodbye.

She finished the sequence and held her breath.

The Eye juddered open.

“Hello, Úna. Which—which—” A glitch in the default voice spoke to turmoil beneath the surface. “Which aspect do you—do—?”

“Banjax, please.”

“Ack—ack—nowledged.”

This last carried an inflection as if the speaker had surprised itself, or discovered god; then the rondure activated. Instead of clouds that cleaved and fused, there manifested a grainy confetti swirl. Indeed, the whole mechanism appeared now to be shaking.

“Damned snow globe,” old man Grevsmuhl swore.

But the Eye held. Somehow, even on this most ashen of days, enough light made it through to bring a big-eared, hook-nosed poet drifting in from the blizzard.

“Banjax!”

He was just as Úna remembered, only clean-shaven—his bristles scattered to the backdrop? Catching sight of her, he quirked his lips and pinched the brim of an imaginary hat.

¡Hola! the Spanish say
Welcome to your party
Carrot and stick now
Must we mourn the donkey

So dearly departing?

Úna breathed in the form. “That’s a flamenca, isn’t it? A Gypsy cinquain; moves like a dancer?”

“Sí, señorita. Title: ‘Quinceañera piñata’. A parting gift from one old poet to his protégé.”

“Must you go, Banjax? I’ve so much still to learn!”

“And you will, little lady. With or without me, digging up life’s treasure in Spanish silva and with golden shovels. Through sunshine and sonnets, cloudy couplets and storm-swept sestinas. Always a custodian, your soul laid bare to the kural’s call and the song thất lục bát; the lonely howl of the Dinggedicht.”

“But everything’s so hard! The orchard, boys. And there’s so much inside of me. I want to let it out, but no-one thinks like I do. No-one except you, and Billie Eilish.”

“A turtle renowned for her skolia sub–sotto voce.”

“I miss her, Banjax. I’m going to miss you.”

“And I you, lass. It’s the way of the world. But still—” He leaned forward, drawing Úna closer to the rondure. “It wouldn’t do to abandon you altogether; and so I’ve left you some Easter eggs.”

“You have?” Úna whispered.

“Lessons, mostly, but legacy notes, too, for birthdays and breakups. A wedding, maybe? Or just if you find yourself missing old Banjax. I’ve snuck them into appendices of ‘Apples and Oranges’ and Whiffle’s ‘The Care of the Pig’.”

“Th-thank you.”

“You’re to be master now, young Padawan. The poet of Applethorpe! May you uphold the art and never stop uncovering—nay, coining—new forms. Most of all, may your talent bring you happiness, whatever your involvement in matters more mundane.”

Úna trembled, the glass turning molten as she blinked back tears. When she tried to speak it felt like she’d swallowed a Cripps Pink.

“I… I will, Banjax. I’ve… loved our time together. You… I—”

“It’s been my pleasure, Úna mac Cumhaill. Now bide a wee but dwell not, ay? Nothing is lost that is thought upon fondly.”

Úna nodded, quick little jerks of her chin.

Landay ahoy! the lookout boy cried
A ghost of a smile on her lips as the ship went down

Then she was crying, head pressed to the rondure. Hot tears and butterflies / stomach tight. Straining her cheeks to match his weather-beaten regard.

Their gazes locked until the clouds came and took him. Then the Eye of Applethorpe closed up forever.

---

Later that week, Úna and Finlay cycled north up the highway. They rode in silence, fourteen kilometres in wavering convoy until they came to the Big Apple. It glowered at them from atop its pole, defaced liege of a rock-strewn, ash-petalled fiefdom.

Úna declared:

You never know what you’ve got until it’s gone
When apple-pink blossoms fall, cast to the wind
And death stirs the branches in lost, lonely song
You never know

Who’ll read your poems now? the gaunt old reaper grinned
Why not seek solace down at the billabong?
Dive in and rest there in peace, hope rescinded

Naw, life’s made of memories; death’s not so strong
To prise free the butterfly essence held pinned
In our hearts, might love forever flutter on?

You never know

Roundel delivered, she helped Finlay manoeuvre the extension ladder off the bikes and into position, leant there against the Apple’s swollen head. She held the base steady while he climbed up and painted out the scowl. Mottled red / cheeks blushed afresh / on a promise.

“Give it five minutes,” he called, “then I can put in something new. A poem, maybe?”

Úna considered. She thought of Banjax and Billie Eilish, of the aching, yin-yang hole in her heart; but also her dad and Finlay and painted-rock keepsakes; of apples in a tartan avalanche; even poor, strutting Rory and nature’s odd bent towards verbless, wordless, ineffable expression.

She said: “No, Finn. How it is will be fine. Come down now.”

And so he did, and they pedalled home together, ladder balanced precariously between them, back to Applethorpe.

Back to the homestead and the unfolding poetry of life.

---

Host Commentary

Once again, that was “The Eye of Applethorpe”, by E J Delaney.

The author had this to say:

The story opens with mention of the Big Apple. Listeners not familiar with Australia and our national propensity for oversized landmarks—especially fruit landmarks (the Big Pineapple, the Big Banana, et cetera)—might naturally think of New York City. In fact, the apple in question is a steel and fibreglass sculpture located just north of Stanthorpe in the Granite Belt region of Southern Queensland / Northern New South Wales. The Granite Belt’s elevation and climate make it ideal for growing apples. These same conditions, atypical of Australia but reminiscent of the Scottish Highlands, enticed a wave of Scottish immigrants in the 19th Century. While Úna is faced with an uncertain future, her existence remains rooted in a picturesque past and present where apple trees blossom alongside remnants of Scots heritage.

The transition from adolescence to adulthood is filled with big feelings for which we struggle to find words, making it a time ripe for poetry. In this story, access to the local artificial intelligence, which serves as a repository of knowledge for the community, is strictly controlled because the technology is degenerating, and essential survival needs take priority over literary frivolities. Growing up means taking on greater responsibilities and engaging more fully with the world as it is rather than as we imagine or wish it to be; and yet, while literal apples may feed the body, the fruits of poetry feed the soul, equally important when the world is, as Wordsworth said, too much with us. It is up to each of us to carry the seeds of art inside us, to plant them and nurture them not only to sate our own spiritual hunger, but that of generations of children yet to come.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please do share it.

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Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from the poem “From Blossoms” by Li-Young Lee, who said:

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

Thanks for joining us, and may your escape pod be fully stocked with stories.