“The prettiest trees always grow near a grave” someone told me once.  I didn’t believe them until I saw the apple tree behind the road-side marker.  The marker was one of those generic white crosses the state provides to mark the sites of grisly auto-wrecks.  The tree was a magnificent specimen of organic beauty—each blossom and branch so perfectly and prettily sprung as to have one believe the tree had simply danced right out of a Disney picture.  
I wondered then what the apples would have tasted like.  Would they be sweet and red and delicious, the way the apples of our childhood memories always were?  Or would they be bitter, with the faintest tang of copper?  What did tragedy taste like, and were apples its best vessel?  There was a man in Japan who believed that the gods of Death loved apples, and as I sped past the pretty tree and the lone white cross, I wondered if he might be right.

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          I started small of course; a single potted twig from Home Depot and my neighbor’s poodle.  I suppose now you’re staring at me with the uttermost contempt, but before you judge, condemn, and otherwise start brandishing a torch and pitch fork, let me tell you about the little bitch.  It yelped and nipped and shit on my lawn with an almost gleeful contempt, scampering away with its bared ass taunting me.  Of course, every time I caught her, the deed was already done and I had no recourse.  I started spritzing her with the garden hose, much to my neighbor’s displeasure.  The old woman threatened to have me arrested for abuse and harassment, and won a small-claims suit against me a few years ago—apparently her precious Mitzy caught sick after a run-in with my hose.  I was more inclined to believe Mitzy caught sick because she’d been eating the rhododendrons in my backyard, but no one cared to hear my opinion (I was not a licensed veterinarian) and the judge was a poodle-humping bastard anyway.  
          I caught the dog early one Sunday morning, just as the little bitch was about to take another of her famous dumps on my lawn.  I simply hurled a brick at her curly white head as she squatted, and she went down with a single pathetic yip.  Of course, I had to sprint across the front yard and scoop the bloodied and still-shitting creature into my arms and rush her into the backyard before my neighbor could waddle outdoors to catch me.  I’d already dug the hole the night before; all that was left was to dump the dog, a little compost, and the twig into it and fill it.
          Naturally there was an elderly inquisition; everyone over eighty on the block hated me with a singular passion because of my neighbor’s fantastic story-telling.  Everyone under eighty quietly cheered—whether they believed I’d knocked off the beast or it had been taken out by God’s more forgiving hand, no one ever said—but the neighborhood was a damn sight more pleasant without the incessant yipping and shitting of that damned old poodle.
          When the former twig sprouted blossoms, I noted no difference in them.  They were not the singularly fantastic petal-ed wonders such as that on the tree I’d seen on the highway, and that disappointed me.  The apples it offered were small and tender, skipping that stage between their initial budding and cider-y brown over-ripened nightmare.  
          This did not, however, put me off my goal.  I decided, as I pruned and watered and loved that little store-bought tree that because I had bought it in such a domesticated setting, and was raising it in an even more domesticated setting that I had to go bigger.  I had to go better; I had to try harder.

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          His name was Rick—no last name given—and he’d been in desperate need of a good meal and a decent pair of shorts.  What he’d wanted was to earn enough cash to buy a gram of cocaine and maybe a cheeseburger if there was enough left over.  When I offered him a sort of ‘Pretty Woman’ style escapade, he’d all but come in his shorts right then and there.  True, he was no Julia Roberts and I am no Richard Gere; but perhaps in his fevered mind the scenario was plausible.
          Before you go about making assumptions, and noting on your little yellow pad, I should tell you how I found him.  I did not go trawling the crime-laden streets of a bad neighborhood, or the equally crime-ridden wharfs.  I’m not that foolish or that bourgeois—I am not Jeffrey Dahmer, or Hannibal the Cannibal.  I never ate anyone directly…but there’s more to be said on that point later.
          No, Rick was loitering outside the local bowling alley.  His eyes were wide and empty as a wartime refugee’s; I whispered the code words Dateline NBC always said marked a ‘john’ and it was as easy as that.  I must admit I was proud of myself; I’d picked him up and returned to my house in relative anonymity.  No one—insofar as I knew—even glanced at the car even as I ushered him up the front walk of my home and inside.
          I suppose you’ll want to know if we did the deed.  We did, after a thorough examination in the bathroom and a hearty meal in the kitchen.  I remember the unsatisfying squeezing of his lips around my cock, the mundane way he stroked my balls and called me ‘the biggest’ he’d ever had.  Even the rhythmic flexing of his anus once I’d gotten inside him was tired and humdrum.  I, being the considerate person I am, manually worked his cock even as I daydreamed about pussy with my cock buried in his ass.  He came, I came, and the evening stretched on after that.
          The junkie in him took eight crushed up Ambien and a case of beer to go to sleep.  But I waited and bid my time and even smiled as he babbled about his life and his luck and whatever the else he was babbling on about.  I couldn’t kill him while he was awake.  I probably should have when we were fucking, but I just didn’t have the heart.  Let him drift off to sleep and simply never wake up; that’s how I had decided I wanted to handle it.  True, there were some who got a little rougher treatment, but they brought it on themselves.
          Anyway, he drifted off to Dream-Land and I got to work.  The night was pitch-black and the only light I allowed myself was a candle; I didn’t want to draw attention to myself.  After all, what sort of person digs around in their garden at four ‘o’ clock in the morning?  Certainly someone who’d have to be watched for other behavioral oddities!  
          I dug a nice deep trench around the tree, carefully avoiding its roots.  I didn’t want to run the risk of ruining my little tree or my experiment.  When I thought I had a good enough hole, I went back inside for Rick.  
          Rick was sleeping like a baby, sweating all over my nice sheets and muttering about nothing.  I put the shopping bag over his head, and made sure to tape it nice and tight around his neck with duct tape.  The little warning label was near his mouth; when he breathed in and out I was reminded over and over again of the suffocation hazard the bag proposed.  It was ironic and droll.  He struggled a little towards the end, fingers pulling first at the bag and then at my hands as I held him down.  Luckily, most of the fight had gone out of him so I didn’t wind up having any strange scratches to blame.
          I kept the plastic bag on his head until I actually rolled the body into the hole.  He’d stayed nude after our brief coital bout, and that had certainly spared me some grief—he was heavy as hell dead, and I didn’t want to think about trying to force those dead limbs through holes in clothing.  As he laid in the ditch, pathetic and bony and clearly dead, another thought occurred to me.  
          The apple tree over the memorial marker had to have been exposed to some blood; just as the older trees in the older cemeteries worked their roots through shambling coffins to wrap and feast on the flesh inside.  I’d have to do a bit of dirty work if I wanted my apple tree to be beautiful...so I beat poor dead Rick with the shovel.  It was loud and every time the shovel hit his body I would swear I heard a whimper; the same sort of yip old Mitzy had made when the brick hit her fluffy white head.  No one came out to find out what was going on, so I shoveled the dirt on top of poor dead Rick, threw a bit of compost on and some pine chips, just for good measure.
          And I waited.

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          The blossoms bloomed early and were lovely to look at; the apples that came in afterwards were as pretty as a still life painting.  All shiny red and picture-perfect…but the flesh was bitter and yellow.  I wondered then if perhaps, like fertilizer, the people had to be a better quality.  
          When you start with a bitchy poodle and a jaded male hooker, there’s no place to go but up.  I tried a kindly but plain check-out girl from the local Shoppe-n-Save, a spinster school teacher, a rookie pizza boy, and a well-meaning but foolishly lonely Jehovah’s witness.  Every time the apples got a little better, a little sweeter…but they weren’t the perfect red spheres of earthly delight I imagined that road-side apple tree to be.
          I made so many notes about the people I’d used and the conditions in which they went.  That’s how I came to my conclusion about the children.  You see, the apples had come in best when the unsoiled pizza boy and spinster teacher had gone under.  Clearly, someone had to be without that special bitterness that sex entails.  
          With the state of the world being what it is, I naturally had to go very, very young.  I’d have loved to keep ten as the youngest I would go, but when I read the details of how eleven-year-olds were now having wanton sex, I knew I had to go younger.  Of course, the younger they are, the smaller they are, which is most likely why I got caught at all.  I even tried to keep to the unloved and minority children; everyone knows it’s always little perky blonde Becky-Ann that winds up on the news and the milk cartons when she goes missing.  Little Jasmine and Aleesha were, at best, back of the newspaper-crammed beneath the naughty personals-alerts.  
          I started with two; twins that had been left or wandered off in the mall.  They were small and sweet, smelling faintly of Pink and milk, and they’d gone down with only a couple of tears and Mitzy-like whimpers.  The apples improved considerably, but they were not that imagined perfection I so desperately sought.  So I waited and picked out three, and then four.  Every growing season seemed to call for more and better subjects.  The tree grew tall, and apparently hungry.  And always, the most perfect apples were out of reach.

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          Kid’s clothes and toys piled up in my basement.  I was debating whether to go to the Goodwill or have a yard sale when the cops came to my door.  They were holding a pair of tiny skulls and calling me a monster.  They threw me around my own house as though I was the one entering without permission.  Worse yet, their condemnable forensics team dug up my precious little apple tree, scattering dirt and bones all over the yard.  Damn them and their nosing!  I was so close…so very close!
          The trial was short and pointless.  Despite my attorney’s best attempts to have me declared legally insane and keep me silent during the process, I spoke in my own defense (quite eloquently, I personally believe).  But apparently the judge I had in this case was a relative of the poodle-humping bastard from the small-claims circuit.  I got the death penalty, and made a quick point of ruining my mandatory and pointless appeals.  If I could not grow the most perfect apples, and taste sweet perfection, I truly did not feel like living on.

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          Since a prisoner can request anything for his last meal, I demanded apples from that apple tree on the highway, along with a glass of milk.  The milk was nice; cold and refreshing.  The apples?
          The apples…were apples.  No better and in some ways much worse than the generic fabricated crap you can buy at the supermarket.  I spent all that time and effort cultivating my dream, and it turns out my dream was nothing more than a far-fetched delusion brought on by the mesmerizing sounds of traffic and useless DJ chatter.
          I can’t tell you how very much that upsets me.

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