June 2024 Flash Lit 2.2 Apple

Ellie opened her apartment door and stumbled into a basket of apples.  Not again, she thought.

But there the apples were, rounded, colored from greenish yellow to red.  Macintoshes maybe.  The basket was the kind they had at fancy farmer’s markets and expensive grocery stores, not wicker, but thin strips of wood.  The markets chose them to look authentic.  Ellie knew that Bill had it because he was authentic farmer to the core.

 

How Bill had ended up living in a third floor apartment in the city was a mystery.  Elie knew she could just ask and he’d tell her, but she didn’t want to encourage him.  This was already embarrassing enough.  Plus she was going to be late for work.

 

She nudged the basket inside the apartment and shut the door on them.  Even so, they followed her down the hall, into the elevator, out to the car.  What should she do?

 

Bill had moved in a month ago.  He’d literally gone along the whole hallway knocking on doors to introduce himself.  “Gotta be neighborly,” he said.  Ellie had lived in her apartment five years and the only neighbor she could even recognize was the guy next door because he ran his very loud blender every morning to make his smoothie and then galumphed down the hall in running shoes while Ellie was still trying to sleep.  And now Bill.

 

Ellie didn’t know what Mr. Smoothie and Bill thought of each other, but Bill had developed an instant crush on Ellie, expressed in fruit.

 

She had come home to bunches of grapes, some red pears, on perfect pint of strawberries, and now apples.  It was impossible.  Bill was not boyfriend material—he wore unironic cowboy boots, for God’s sake.  She’d have to stop it.

 

That evening, she baked the apples into a pie.  Ellie was good at pie, her crusts flaky and brown.  She even made pretty pastry decorations for the top crust.  When it came out of the oven, she let it cool long enough that she could nestle it into a towel-lined computer paper box lid and carry it down the hall to Bill’s door.

 

Her plan was to ding dong ditch him, but just as she got to his door, he opened it.  “How’d you like them apples?” he said, then looked at the pie.  They both burst out laughing.

 

She married him.