Faster Than Your Arms

by Laton Carter

I am picking up an apple. The world is a laborious place. Labor this and labor that. In the morning, rich people’s knees must not hurt. They don’t have to bend down into the dew and pick up last night’s apples. But that’s not what I’m talking about.

Anything can happen in a moment. Or everything. I see my hand open like those slippery metal claws behind glass trying to grasp a plush animal. My fingers work together without me having to tell them. My knees give a modest groan. I am still picking up an apple. How many streaks of red against the green jacket? How many beads of the morning, tucked at random between the crowded blades, refract the new day’s light? I want my brain to stop, but perhaps this is what it means to be present. Everything on a micro level. This all happens in under five seconds. I’ve lived another life—I’m holding a piece of bruised fruit.

The tree cuts a shadow. Misha, who are you? But nobody says this. Misha, move your body. Do something important. Picking up an apple isn’t enough. My mind is on track: self-doubting, the dye in the veins highlighting another error. I have to live with the results of my childhood brain evolved into my adult brain. I watch my silhouette crouch down against the morning light and wonder why I can’t do it better. “Misha” is a diminutive of Mikhail, but I’m not a boy. My parents are from Idaho.

My legs cut a shadow. I don’t know how long I’ve been standing. Could this be neurodivergence, but I’m too shy to ask. Who would I be asking? Everything I say or hear, I hear in my head. Most of the time I’m quiet. I’ve learned to mask. To be normal. But nothing is normal. Normal people are ruthless and busy. I just want to step back. I want to protect all the worms. I need the lawn to be uniform. As if anything, even a military, could be uniform. The world isn’t laborious, people are. The world is a roundabout. You have to know which exit to take.

I think I should want to wear a dress. Pretty women do that. Princesses too. I have no idea if I’m pretty. Princesses live in boxes and never talk. They die of hunger. My dress would be half pink, half blue. I’d be barefoot. My basket would be full of worms.

Perhaps I’m not a person. I haven’t said a thing, haven’t done a thing. People do both. I’m struggling not to slow down. Molasses is what I call it. My brain replays every microsecond, the addition of which is who I am and what nobody can see. No one will ever want to touch my cheek. It would send me into paralysis. But I make eye contact. I know when to nod and make affirmative sounds. Maybe I’m just like my neighbor in their own universe on the other side of the fence and now coughing a bit.

The physics of the smallest breeze against my bare ankles awakens a time I was holding a brown glass pill bottle. I’d come up from the basement into my grandfather’s backyard and the air noticed me. It curled around the openings of my cut-offs and brushed up against me like the side of a cat. Can I have this bottle? My grandfather didn’t answer. He rested his hands atop his pitchfork. I couldn’t see but imagined the brown half circles of dirt wedged under his nails. He smiled and I saw the gap between his front teeth. A smile means yes.

I don’t have to count—I have sixteen more apples to go. I push through this moment into the next. Pineapples aren’t native to Hawaii. Early botanists called any unidentified fruit that was firm and round an apple. They moved from there, editing and revising, essentially making things up. Pineapples looked like pinecones. But they were fruit. Therefore pine-apple.

Okay, okay. I am a person. Someone. A body with personal gravity. I reach out and weigh down. I’m connected to the earth, the evaporation of the morning a feathery tune against my skin. A frisson. No one says “a” frisson—instead, girls make videos and call them four letters: ASMR. But abbreviations can’t breathe. The letters suffocate each other, hiding the extensions of their beautiful bodies.

Put both hands on top of your head. Look down at your shadow. Your elbows on each side are the corners of your eyes, your head the darkened eyeball. Lift up your fingers. Move them. Now you have eyelashes. An outline shifting through space is who you are, a collection of memories falling away faster than your arms can hold them.