All things considered, it is a comedy about fruit.
People travel from miles around to buy produce from the stand on the side of the highway. They get out of their cars and look around anxiously, as though they’re being followed. One of the Allaways sits on the stool behind the stand, all doing a different hobby to pass the time, waiting for the customer to come to them. Gavin Hernandez-Maizer used to watch the stand, but after what happened last summer, he is now only allowed there when with one of the Allaways, usually Desdemona.
It is a beautiful produce stand in the hills, just a few miles from the lake. Anyone coming into the vacation town for college students and middle-class families or anyone coming to the neighboring resort town for rich grandchildren of congresspeople and C-list celebrities must drive past it. It’s tucked between the two-lane road and the forest. The gravel driveway turns into a gravel pit where people park their cars; the stand a simple wooden construction with a bit of awning over the till. Afterwards, the gravel pit turns into a grass driveway, two rows of brown, dead weeds where the Allaway car drives down to take them home.
People come to the stand for different reasons, many because they don’t believe the stories and want to try it out for themselves, several because they do believe the stories and want to try it for themselves, some because they’ve experienced the stories and need to again, and a rare few to buy simply produce.
It’s the lemons and the blueberries the people come for; they come for the persimmons too, but those aren’t sold often. Oh, the stories people come up with in hopes to get even just a slice and a recipe card.
It’s all word of mouth.
There is no sign advertising the lemons and blueberries, and there are definitely no signs advertising the persimmons. The Allaways do not talk about it unless someone else brings it up. They ask those they sell not to not share the fruit or the story that will come from it. With the fruit people listen – at least most of the time. Sharing the fruit has consequences. Visible, tangible consequences. With the stories though, well, people just can’t keep their mouths shut. If you stay in town for long, if you sit in the coffee shops and on the benches without headphones on, a notebook in your hand, writing what you hear, you will start to see a story. A story of the Allaways and the fruit. A story of the fruit and those it’s helped. A story of people making pies and sauces and drinks out of the lemons and learning about their wife or best friend. A story of people making tarts and jams and smoothies out of the blueberries and learning about their dead son or mother. A story of the fruit and those it’s hurt. A story of the boy and the persimmon. A story of the lives ruined, and the lives lost, and the lives waiting to be destroyed.
All things considered, it is a coming-of-age story about Desdemona Allaway.
Desdemona is the youngest of the Allaways, and for several different reasons, the one who knows the least about the family business. She does not write recipes, simply finds old ones from under the till that will do the trick, and if one does not do so, she scrambles one up on the spot. The recipe is less important than the question, but those who don’t understand need something to ground them.
If you are looking for Desdemona, your best bet is to go to the stand outside of school hours and when it is raining. All the other Allaways do not work in the rain – the matriarch, Crystal, cannot knit in the rain; the aunt, Nina, cannot scrapbook; the twins, Aphra and Dean, cannot read and blast music from the five-dollar speaker they bought three years ago from the clearance section of the only secondhand shop in town; and so forth. Desdemona does not mind. She just sits on the stool mindlessly playing cat’s cradle while Gavin sits next to her, leaning back in a chair with his legs up on the stand’s counter and a pair of sunglasses on.
Sometimes, especially during the summer, you will find her when it’s sunny. When the twins ambush her in the bathroom, leaning on opposite sides of the door frame, with the same fake desperate smiles on their faces.
“Can you cover our shift today?” Aphra will say, her arms crossed, though because of all the folds of her baggy brown dress it will be hard to tell.
“Why can’t you do it?” Desdemona will ask, while applying her moisturizer, not even looking at them in the mirror. It’s a charade that they’ve all played their parts in for years, and though it ends the same every time, the show must go on.
“I’m getting my hair done,” Dean will say pointing a thumb at his grown out flat twists.
“Well, why can’t you watch it, Aph?”
“I have to flirt with the girl who does braids.”
And Desdemona will sigh and say fine and Aphra will say, “Hero!” then turn around and skip down the hall to her room and Dean will follow, walking backwards and pointing at Desdemona and whisper “Hero,” before turning around and following his sister.
On days like these Desdemona will call Gavin and he will meet her at the stand, dressed in the same faded black ripped jeans and black hoodie and black Converse and sunglasses that he wore the day before and will wear the day after.
The two will sit the way they always do, but Gavin will have a sketch pad and charcoal out drawing something no one has ever seen while Desdemona, the closest person to ever have, will fiddle with her cat’s cradle and stare off, waiting for a car or a bike to turn into the gravel patch of a parking lot and ask for a lemon or a blueberry or maybe a persimmon.
All things considered, it is a tragedy about Gavin Hernandez-Maizer.
Once upon a time a woman left the doctor’s and seven hours later pulled up to the produce stand in tears. And after a twelve-minute conversation with Helen Allaway, walked away with a persimmon and a recipe card. The recipe in question was less of a recipe and more of a set of instructions.
· Light a beeswax candle.
· Turn off the air conditioning or heater.
· On a bamboo cutting board cut the persimmon into twelve slices. Dispose four slices into a compost container.
· Cut ten pieces of softened brie cheese.
· Transfer onto a ceramic plate.
· Eat one piece of cheese, then eat one slice of persimmon with cheese until out of slices.
· Eat the last piece of cheese.
· Clean up and go to bed. Do not talk to anyone until 11:03 AM the next day.
· Do not share the persimmon, the recipe, or the dream.
What Helen Allaway did not know was that twelve hours earlier the woman’s husband had come and purchased a pint of blueberries which he made into a salad for his wife. What Helen Allaway did not know was that the woman was pregnant.
After the surrogate gave birth and after the boy was officially adopted by his parents and after he asked his second-grade teacher why she wore a rope necklace was the problem realized and he was taken to the produce stand where Crystal Allaway interrogated his fathers and then made them call the surrogate and interrogate her, were the repercussions of the persimmon discovered.
The purpose of the sunglasses is unclear, but since he bought them with his birthday money when he was nine, he’s always worn them. Maybe it helps dull what he sees. Maybe it makes it easier to cope. Maybe there’s something wrong with how his eyes look. Maybe it’s to freak people out. But he’s never taken them off around another person, including his parents, including the Allaways who already know what’s wrong with him, including the one person he dated for three weeks, including the doctors, and possibly – though it cannot be confirmed – including himself.
On the sunny Summer days, when he sits with Desdemona at the stand and he has his sketch book and charcoal and a steady stream of conversation to centre him, Gavin draws what he sees. He draws the people who come to the stand how he sees them. Take the old woman who just wanted to buy a perfectly normal peach. Where Desdemona and you and I would see her in a blue blouse and jean shorts with sandals on, Gavin would see her in a hospital gown. Where Desdemona and you and I would see her grey hair in a bun on the top of her head and her tan skin freckled with liver spots, Gavin would see her hair thinned hanging over her shoulders and her skin pale, too pale. And where Desdemona and you and I would see the huge bright pink glasses over bright blue lively eyes, Gavin wouldn’t see glasses but sunken skin and dull, dry eyes. If the woman smells like anything to Desdemona or you or I, she would smell like the perfume her granddaughter bought at Macy’s or the basement of the church two miles away. But to Gavin, she will smell like something, she will smell like the start of rigor mortis and the salty tears of her son who held her hand when the heart monitor flattened.
Gavin has seen death and has never seen life, at least in humans. The two dogs his papá lets run free on his acres of forest look different every day. He cannot see the ribs sticking out of the flesh and the shattered legs that the husky has when she is hit by a truck one evening. He will not see the cancer growing in the poodle’s neck until his papá takes her to the vet to be put down. When Gavin watches the birds, he does not see them with broken wings or broken feet or missing feathers or eye infections or bloody beaks, he sees them how Desdemona or you or I would see them. He sees them as alive.
But he does not see humans as alive.
And yet one day the girl biked to the stand on a sunny summer day, her blond curly hair pulled back but flattened with a brown helmet and Gavin saw it. She wore high waisted khaki shorts and a black button up and boots and Gavin saw those. She wore a gold pendant and gold rings and Gavin saw those. She looked alive.
As many people he’s seen, as many deaths he’s watched, he’s never seen human life.
“Des,” he said, and Desdemona looked up at him from her string. “What’s she wearing?”
“Uh,” Desdemona looked at the girl and watched her take off her helmet. “Shorts, button up, like she just walked out of private school.”
“Gold necklace, a heartbeat.”
Desdemona whipped her head to look back at him. “You can see her?”
Gavin didn’t respond, just kept staring ahead at the girl.
Once, when he was twelve, Gavin’s dad fell off the roof and went to the hospital in an ambulance. Gavin sat in the front staring out the windshield while the EMT driving kept trying to offer him fig newtons.
They were in the ER, his dad lying in a bed, waiting for a transport to take him into x-ray, his papá pulling into the parking lot after leaving work, Gavin sitting in a chair watching the nurses and the doctors and the patients and listening to the beeping and the talking and the groaning. He sat there looking at everyone and trying to picture how he would sketch them. The woman sitting in a wheelchair across the hall and an IV sticking out of her hand in a hospital gown and blood dripping down her forehead. Will she die today? Is she bleeding now? If his dad was awake, if his papá was here, he could ask them to describe her, ask if she’s bleeding from her forehead, ask if she’s wearing a hospital gown – she’s in the ER don’t people wear street clothes in the ER?
Everyone here. People die in hospitals. Is anyone going to die today? Gavin’s always known that he doesn’t see people how they actually look – just how they’ll look after they die. But in the hospital, alone, these people could die; some of these people will die, and he won’t know. How close were those people’s futures? He always assumed years, but here it could be days, hours, minutes. He looked at his dad. His dad won’t die today. He sees pictures of his fathers; he knows what they look like. The Dad Gavin sees has grey hair and a beard in a hospital gown. The Dad in the pictures, the Dad that was lying in the hospital bed next to him, has black hair and clean shaven and wearing jeans now covered in dirt and blood. His dad was not going to die next to him from falling off a roof. But everyone around them, all the other patients. They could, some will, die soon and there is nothing Gavin could do about it. He has only ever seen death and he can’t prevent it.
Gavin ran out of the hospital and sat on a bench outside sobbing, ignoring his papá trying to bring him inside or his aunt coming and trying to take him home. He just sat on that bench and sobbed and everyone walking past assumed his parent or his sibling or his grandparent died and he was mourning them. No one had died but everyone is dead. He has never seen a living person; he will never see his dad’s black hair and he will never see his aunt’s favourite green dress; he will only see it in pictures and the sketches his papá does.
Everyone Gavin has ever known, or ever will know, is dead.
All things considered, it is a ghost story about Charlotte-Amber King.
To be clear, Charlotte-Amber King is not a ghost. No, Charlotte is very much alive and has been so for the past eighteen years, before then she was not born and so the question of whether she was alive is a bit too complicated to be dissected right now. Rather, she simply knows a ghost. A ghost named Olivier White who has followed her around since she was seven.
When Charlotte got to the produce stand, she panicked and went to the end of the stand as far away from the two people working it as possible, so she ended up examining strawberries and watermelons. Which meant she had to buy strawberries and a watermelon along with what she came there for. But to put a bad situation to good use she decided to examine the watermelons as an excuse to look at the two people running the stand.
They were both about her age with the boy wearing black despite the fact it was eighty degrees looking pissed at her but because he was wearing sunglasses he could just be pissed at watermelons. It was hard to tell. The girl had cornrows with flowers braided into the ends and was wearing a green dress and had a lot of necklaces. She was also staring directly at Charlotte, though she just looked curious and confused. Apparently, watermelons weren’t a hot commodity.
“I don’t like watermelons.” Olivier said standing right behind her, leaning his forehead on her shoulder. He does this all the time, but it still felt weird. Cold and slightly slimy.
“You literally can’t eat so you’ll be fine.” She murmured, just loud enough for him to hear.
“But they smell funny.”
“You smell funny.”
“I don’t smell and if I did I would smell-“
“Like dirt.” She cut him off and he moped harder, he slipped through her skin and into her lungs, causing her to have a hacking fit.
Charlotte decided to just go with the strawberries and walked up to the till with them. The girl watched with her mouth slightly open, and the boy glared.
“Hi,” she said and after a moment of debating cut right to the point: “you guys sell magic fruit, right?”
“Some of it is,” the girl said slowly. Her voice skeptical but soft. It reminded Charlotte of honey.
“What are the magic ones that allow you to learn about the dead?”
“The blueberries.”
“Can I have some?” Charlotte smiled hopefully and glanced at the boy and at the sketch pad in his lap.
He pushed himself away from the table and stormed away down the driveway, leaving the sketch page closed on his seat.
Charlotte and the girl watched.
“Sorry,” the girl said after a moment, shaking her head then looking back at Charlotte. “He’s having a panic attack so is going to go cry in the woods or call my mom.”
“Your mom?”
“My mom solves all problems.”
“Ah.” They looked at each other for a moment. “So can I have some blueberries?”
“Why do you need them?”
“Don’t tell her,” Olivier said, appearing right behind the girl looking scared though that didn’t particularly concern Charlotte, he usually looked either scared, sad, or concerned.
“Uh,” Charlotte looked back at the girl, “That’s a secret.”
“Not if you want the blueberries, it isn’t.”
“What if I say pretty please?”
“Not even if it is the prettiest of pleases.”
Charlotte bit her lip and glanced back at Olivier who was getting so scared he was starting to fold in on himself. She looked back at the girl and sighed.
“I want to know who killed my best friend.”
All things considered, it is a murder mystery about Olivier White.
He didn’t used to be anxious and scared and sad and concerned and nervous and hungry all the time. Now, though, it feels like all other emotions have left him. Of course that’s not completely true, Charlotte makes him laugh all the time, Charlotte makes him happy, but how rare those moments are compared to all the times he gets so stressed or mopey that he slips into walls or folds in on himself.
He also didn’t used to be dead, but that is a given.
After getting through the shock, for the first eighteen hours of his death Olivier was confused about the fact that he still felt alive. He was hungry, he was sleepy, he was… breathing? Sure, no air was entering his lungs, no carbon dioxide was leaving but it felt as though it was. At the beginning it was cool, but it has now been eleven years and the only person he has been able to talk to never knew him when he was alive, and he still doesn’t know how he died or who killed him or why. And that is draining, quite literally.
He used to be able to lean on walls or sit in a chair but now he has to constantly be thinking, “hmmm, wall” or “I am sitting in a chair I am sitting in a chair” in order not to fall through into the next room or crash land to the floor.
He heard about the produce stand through rumors and snippets of conversations heard in the next aisle over in the grocery store. He would listen while staring at Charlotte with wide eyes, making sure she heard too and she would look at him with a raised eyebrow and a bit of a smirk because of course she did, he is, after all, always a few feet from her, never able to get away, and so they hear everything the other does.
It wasn’t hard to get Charlotte to go to the stand and to see if the rumors were true and it wasn’t hard to find. Everyone talks about ‘the Allaway stand’ and about three miles down the highway there is a huge sign for ‘Allaway produce.’ Olivier might have died before graduating high school, but he is very good at putting together context clues.
When Charlotte said she was trying to find out who killed her best friend, for a moment he felt touched that she considered him her best friend, then that feeling was immediately followed by dread and folding in on himself. But somehow it worked out. Maybe when your job is selling fruit that answers questions about the dead and the living and sometimes those who haven’t been born yet people trying to solve murders is less odd because the next thing he knew Charlotte was walking back to her bike holding a small bag of strawberries and blueberries with a recipe card sticking out of the top.
The recipe will be followed that night and in the morning they will have their answers. In the morning he would be able to move on. In the morning Charlotte would be able to move on. In the morning, everything would be better.
At the stand, Desdemona watched the girl walk away and glance to her right like she was talking to someone. Desdemona looked at her watch. The twins were late, they were supposed to come and take over the stand twelve minutes ago. She sighed and crossed her arms. Next time. Next time they ask her to cover a shift she’ll say no, next time she won’t cancel her plans of sitting alone at the lake. Next time. Next time.
In the woods, Gavin sat on the ground leaning against a tree, his sunglasses next to him, his head in his hands. All that was going through his head was the fact that he saw the girl alive. All he was thinking was, “What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck?” His phone buzzed with a text from Desdemona saying that the girl left you can stop hiding in the woods you grape, which he ignored. What he saw was wrong, it must have been. Or maybe she will die later today, or she will die in that same outfit. But she looked so alive, she was alive. He won’t do anything. He won’t go looking for her, the girl. He won’t try to figure it out. But he will. He will find himself in town more and more, he will find himself hanging out at the produce stand more and more, waiting – or rather, hoping – to see her, to find out more about her, to find out what is wrong with him. But in the woods, with his head in his hands, he will pretend that he won’t. And he will pretend that he will be better.
And Desdemona will not tell the twins no next time they ask her to cover a shift, she will not go and sit alone at the lake. But sitting at the stand, watching the girl put her helmet on, Desdemona will pretend that she will. And she will pretend that she will be better.
And Charlotte and Olivier, all their hopes put in a pint of blueberries. Freedom, freedom for both of them, in one hundred and thirty-six blueberries. And it will not work. They will follow the recipe to a tee and yet when Charlotte wakes up the next morning, she will have no answer. And Olivier’s murder will remain unsolved, at least for a few more days. And for a moment, it will seem all for not. But getting on her bike, the two exchanging glances, they will pretend that it will work. And they will pretend that everything will be better.
And they all will be disappointed in the morning.
Findley Eve Holland is a Canadian writer with a Master’s in Professional Writing from Towson University. She is working on a memoir as well as her first novel. When not writing, she can be found hiking, traveling, or playing with her cat.