In the Shade of an Apple Tree, by Virginia Granchester
"In the Shade of an Apple Tree, by Virginia Granchester" – email from Cyberpunk 2077. My first memory isn't an image or a sound, but a smell. The smell of rotting apples – intense and dizzyingly sweet. I must've been around four. We were spending the summer at my grandparents' house.
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My first memory isn't an image or a sound, but a smell. The smell of rotting apples – intense and dizzyingly sweet. I must've been around four. We were spending the summer at my grandparents' house. They had a small orchard with this old, huge apple tree by the fence. That year it grew so many apples that nobody even bothered to pick them. We just watched them fall to the ground, where they lay rotting.
It's hard to imagine now – a world where things used to grow out of the ground without our help, without bioengineering. Where an apple was something normal – a fruit whose shape and taste every child knew by instinct. Where a normal person, like my granddad, could have more than he needed.
Sometimes I think back to that orchard and that sweet, drowsy smell. But all I taste is bitterness.
It's hard to imagine now – a world where things used to grow out of the ground without our help, without bioengineering. Where an apple was something normal – a fruit whose shape and taste every child knew by instinct. Where a normal person, like my granddad, could have more than he needed.
Sometimes I think back to that orchard and that sweet, drowsy smell. But all I taste is bitterness.
