The Proverbial Apple

They say you’re supposed to be the apple of your parent’s eye, and I guess that’s true. The thing is, my mom never liked apples much. She’d eat them if she had to, but mostly she didn’t go in for healthy stuff. To her, fresh fruit was dirty; she like her food pre-cooked, pre-packaged, pre-sanitized. As for my dad, I don’t think he ate much of anything, except the occasional hamburger in a bar. I guess he figured liquor was easier to swallow. It doesn’t get you too far though; he only lasted about a year after I was born.

Maybe it’s genetic. The whole thing about apples, I mean. Because, truth be told, I’m not too crazy about them myself. This kid who used to sit at my lunch table, she brought in an apple for lunch every single day. She reminded me of those girls from old black-and-white sitcoms; she wore cute sweaters ans got stars on her worksheets, and every day for lunch she had a peanut butter sandwich, a thermos of milk, some home-made cookies, and an apple. I mostly had a Cup o’ Noodles and a Little Debbies brownie. Anyway, this kid, she was always giving my lunch these snotty looks, and one day I guess she couldn’t stand it anymore ‘cause she looked at me and said, “Jeez, didn’t you ever hear about ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away?’”

I hadn’t, of course. I never understood what the hoo-ha was about doctors anyway; everybody was so scared of them, even the meanest kids in class, and I saw one every now and then and he seemed pretty nice to me. He talked to me and asked me about school and told me how much I’d grown, and at the end he gave me a lollipop. The only scary part was when the nurse in the starched apron stuck a needle in my arm; I screamed the first time they did that, but Mom told me to quit hollering, she’d had worse than that, and anyway would I rather catch the dreadfuls and die? After that I shut up, but I wished they’d find some other way of keeping me from catching the dreadfuls.

One night I was lying in bed thinking about needles and the dreadfuls and that kid at my lunch table, and I started trying to figure how an apple was supposed to keep the doctor away. I mean, jeez, it’s just an apple. It says on the side of the Saltine box you’re supposed to eat every kind of food, and anyway a banana or an orange works the same way. So I thought a while, and I started thinking maybe whoever made that up about apples was poor. You know, ‘cause apples are the cheapest kind of fruit, my mom says, and maybe the only kind of food he could afford was apples. Maybe if he hadn’t had that apple he would’ve caught the dreadfuls ‘cause he couldn’t get any other type of fruit to make up for it. I pictured some skinny old hobo living in a shack somewhere, eating apples all day. I felt sorry for him, being so poor and having to eat the same thing all the time. I thought about him and his apples for a while, and then I fell asleep, and then I woke up and thought about something else, because it didn’t seem to matter so much in the daylight, and because I had other things besides apples.

A/N: I feel like the ending to this is weak. If anyone has any suggestions, I would love to hear them. Thanks!