The Thing In The Orchard Had Knees That Bent The Wrong Way

Our orchard is nine trees and a fence. In September the ground goes yellow with windfalls and the wasps get drunk and my mother pays me to rake.

I went out at dusk with a torch because I had left the rake against the fence and my mother has strong opinions about tools left out in dew.

There was a figure between the fourth and fifth tree, and my first thought — I want to be honest about my first thought — was that it was a heron. Because of the way it stood. Very still, weight on one side, head lowered like something that fishes for a living.

But herons are not five and a half feet tall, and they do not have arms.

It was collecting apples. It would bend, and the bend happened at the wrong point, high up, so that the lower leg swung forward instead of back, and it would pick up one apple, turn it, and set it down again. Not eat it. Set it down. Then take another. It did this maybe six times while I stood there with a torch I had not switched on, because switching it on felt like knocking on a door I did not want opened.

The grey of it was not skin grey. It was the grey of a wet stone.

Then it turned its head — just the head, nothing else moved, and that is the detail I have never been able to talk about without my voice doing something stupid — and I ran. I ran so badly I lost a shoe on our own back step.

My mother says I saw a deer. There are deer. I have seen a thousand deer and I have never once run home crying at twenty-two years old.

Here is my note of doubt, and I will give it to you honestly: I had been awake for about thirty hours, because of exams. I was not sober in the way a tired person is not sober. Any court would take my mother's side.

But the next morning, in the wet grass under the fourth tree, there were eleven apples, standing on their stalks, in a line. Have you ever tried to stand an apple on its stalk? It takes a long time, and it does not survive the wind.

They stood there for two days.