The Orchard

Dec 9, 2022
3 min read

by Rick White

One September morning, when the moon has brought a chill to the late summer air, Cleo the cat worries at a drystone wall, trying to find a way into the orchard. The blushing fruit hangs heavy on the trees, or else sits and rots sweetly on the ground, having already given itself to the fall. Cleo purrs and squawks and chirrups and scritch-scratches the stones, questioning each in turn. Her bushy tail dances in the breeze, her whiskers twitch with anticipation — the heady thrill of trying to be somewhere she’s not supposed to be.

In the house where Cleo lives, Elizabeth isn’t worried about her. The cat disappears for days on end. When Elizabeth goes to the kitchen in the morning to make tea, suddenly there she’ll be, fast asleep in her basket. Elizabeth doesn’t know whether it’s the cat who’s been away for days or whether it’s her. Or if time really means anything in the places Cleo goes.

This morning, Elizabeth is gardening, like she does every morning. She prunes the rosebushes and waters the shrubs. She pulls out the weeds that have grown overnight by their roots. She repots seedlings and trains the newly sprung tendrils of vines to the trellises. There are miniature worlds here — spider’s webs hang like clouds over spruce-tops in the compost bin. Dots of sunlight in beads of dew form tiny underwater palaces on crisp, white petals. It is almost overwhelming, Elizabeth sits to catch her breath. The morning is chilly, there is a numbness in her fingers.

There are gardens for old women, there are baskets for cats. There are bedroom drawers with unused passports, one tiny vibrator in the shape of a lipstick. There are spaces, there are gaps.

There are studio apartments on the other side of the world, where dusk gathers behind a watchful, sallow moon — straw-coloured light on blinking stars. Bea has already lived the day Elizabeth is just beginning. She sits beneath a shroud of silvery smoke, a joint of homegrown lemon-haze between her crooked fingers — she has her mother’s bones. She looks up at the constellations. Her favourite is Pegasus — the great, winged horse galloping across the night sky. Foaled from the neck of Medusa as she lay dying, slain by Perseus.

The phone rings.

A numbness in the fingers, the arm, the face.

A blinding white light, a loss of vision.

The rattling of a gate.

A neighbour picks a lady from a flowerbed.

A siren blares.

A phone call to the other side of the world.

Cleo the cat finds herself alone in the dappled sunlight of the orchard. Amongst the wisps of bonfire smoke, the crackle of dead leaves. The auburn drowsiness of Autumn; the soft creeping of decay.

‘What do you mean there’s no fucking flights?’

‘Not until tomorrow, ma’am.’

Crying, sobbing.

Skin like paper. Pages glowing embers in the fireplace.

Rhythmical bleeps from the machine.

A woman lying on a shiny airport floor, alone in nowhere-space.

A halogen bulb reflected through a plexiglass window on a hospital ward.

The end of a dark corridor.

A bed.

As the plane banks westward across the celestial meridian, the indigo sky swims like the edges of a watercolour painting. Mintaka — the westernmost star on Orion’s belt — is visible above the aircraft. The dawn rays peep over the eastern horizon, shining through window blinds into tired eyes. On one side of the world, the day begins anew. On the other, it comes to an end. But the sun is always there, it hasn’t gone to bed. It is merely an illusion, Earth spinning on its axis, cool and indifferent, travelling through space.

Cleo the cat awakens from her nap. She stretches and yawns, flexes her sharp claws, curls her pink tongue. She tastes the air as her eyes readjust and focus. She will not leave the orchard the same way she came in. That particular hole in the world is closed, but a new one will take its place. She only fell asleep for an afternoon, but now it is nighttime, now it is winter. The ground is hard beneath the twinkling frost and the stars shine through the naked tree limbs. The birds have flown away to somewhere better.

Rick White is a fiction writer from Manchester, UK whose work can be found in many fine lit journals including trampset, Milk Candy Review and Lunate. Rick’s debut collection, Talking to Ghosts at Parties, is available now via Storgy Books.