prompt: the apple story, title: goodbye my pretty in misc. flash fiction

She’d heard the story of the wishing apples in the ruins before she understood the words used to tell it. She was always drawn to that tale but when still just a child, the adults tried to protect her. From the danger of ruins. From the power of double-edged sorcery.

She grew into a petulant teen, needing for nothing but always wanting more, blossomed into the radiance and cleverness required to talk her way into the ruins. A few lies, a leg flashed for the guards and she was off toward that crone and her tree, in pursuit of wish-craft.

“I want to be remembered,” she told the magic-maker, “to be more than the little people with their little lives who hold me back.” “Odd for one so young,” the witch asked, “wouldn’t you rather be loved?” She laughed. “Love? Love’s family protecting you from outshining them all. Sweaty tumbles with strapping dullards under hay-bales. Nothing worth wasting wishes on.”

“Gods, I like this one” she thought but said, “Why not wish for wisdom or power?” “I’ll acquire those as needed, why exhaust a miracle on things easily attained through patience?” “Why not, then, for beauty?” “Have your eyes leeched by barbers, witch, I possess seas of that already.”

The conjurer nearly laughed aloud. She really liked this one.

She snatched the reddest apple she could reach. “But I don’t want to remember this. I must believe I did it by my hand alone.” Now the enchantress paused. “What if you’ll become a monster?” The girl smiled, “Monsters get remembered,” and bit confidently down.

“Dearie,” she said as the girl drifted to forgetful sleep, “may I live long enough to see what you become.” The girl woke up back in her gray village, dimly aware of some fantastic dream. Even after sealing her own fate, she’d never know she’d once been that demanding child. Magic, even its vestigial remains, cast properly binds completely.

Over ages she would subsume or supplant every other witch, before or since, lost inside the depths of her indigo shadows. Even after monotheism and science, twin spawn of modernity, withered magic to nearly-nothing, she would persist, if only as myth. She would indeed be remembered forever, as the wickedest, the cruelest, the least fair witch of all.

As for their meeting, magic’s time did not work as ours now, an arrow linear until Rapture or Heat-Death, as Abraham and Isaac Newton wrought. Magic, same as its last descendant Story, marked time not on entropy’s straight line but upon flat circles, cycles that enfold when retold. Magic, like Story, repeats with every casting, every recitation. Time was overcome back then, overlapped by repetition’s mysteries. An old witch could meet her younger self, no problem.

So, raise an apple high, children of Eve, in honor of that sorceress made unto herself forever remixed but never forgotten. Such fruit no longer brings us our deserved fates but might still return to us our stories and, with them, our dreams.