The Evil that is Apple, Massachusetts
by Howard Odentz
I’ve come up in the shadow of the orchards, the gnarled roots of fruit trees twisting and turning into the ground.
I’ve seen brick buildings grow where there were once fields, and I’ve gazed with a lizard brain as factories bloom by the reservoir, only to wither and die in great heaps of red-clay rubble.
I’ve witnessed Apple’s children, innocent and pure, turn from adolescence to adulthood, go off to war, and come home with missing parts—or never come home at all.
I’ve watched the very seeds of this town bear corrupted fruit along a backdrop that has morphed from soda fountains and penny candy stores to tattoo parlors and bars.
And amidst all the never ending change, as the darkness slowly engulfs everyone and everything in its cold embrace, I now stare with a psychotic detachment as the very flesh of Apple is drawn and quartered—literally.
Murder happens here, in lonely tobacco barns along the edge of town, or in the dense forests where the screams of the mutilated are muffled by a thick blanket of autumn rot.
Murder happens here every year.
I am not to blame.
Does one blame God for allowing a husband to strike his wife? Does one blame The Lord for allowing alcohol and drugs and the poor choices of pitiful minds to ruin lives?
Does one blame Him for murder?
I can assure you He took his leave of Apple, Massachusetts long before the first tree was ever planted and long before the first suspicious death ever occurred.
He doesn’t tarry here anymore.
All that remains is me and I’m just fine.
Right as rain.
Ducky, in fact.
For I am the Evil that is Apple, Massachusetts, and boy oh boy…
It is good.
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