She says to me, let’s boil our love. We’ve a basketful of apples from our orchard and they’re browning and grainy and no good, no good at all.

“Toss them,” I suggest before I can think better of it. We planted the tree sometime a dozen Februarys ago, or perhaps it was a March. I don’t like the word toss, the way my mouth shapes wetly around my vowels and how my s’s whistle through my crooked teeth. I try to amend it, say “bake” instead, but the damage is done: I watch my own carelessness slip through my fingers, all of me unfurling like spools stripped from a cassette. 

“No,” she says, tart, prickling over me like roving hands on shy skin. “Get the pots out.”

I arrange all of our stainless steel in formation on the stovetop. Click the switch on, then rotate the dials to four and a half. My breath hangs cold in my chest. I slosh water into one of the pots and watch motionlessly until it begins to bubble. There’s water everywhere, dripping off the counters, clinging to my sweatpants, slick on the stove. What was it that I said about cassettes? 

Behind me, she chops the apples. Slices some, juliennes others, dices the smallest ones. My mother stole our chopping board the last time she visited. She cuts directly onto a red ceramic plate. I have a terrible premonition of water—my water, the water I’d thrown everywhere, careless—sneaking below that plate and her slipping, fingers and apples and knives coalescing bloodily. I fetch a towel. 

When she dumps the apples into the boiling water, there’s no splash, no splash at all, the universe affording her the benefit of the doubt, keeping even her clumsiest movements clean and elegant, honouring every brush of her hand, flex of muscle, footfall. Sometimes she leaves candles burning overnight, or falls asleep in the bath, or chases codeine with tequila. I have never seen her unwell. The world seems to have childproofed itself for her. I understand its urge to. 

The apples boil frothily, and she kisses me in the waning kitchen light, pressing a dozen conversations into the seam where our lips meet. I press my answers right back, and then a timer dings, and we must strain our apples through a holey cheesecloth. Lose the mealy pulp, save the silky juice. She decants it, clear as glass, into the second pot. I’m trusted to shake in the brown sugar. She stirs. I stand. No knives for me. Not even spoons.

So I compost the apple cores. I wash the red ceramic plate. I slop the moist, gritty mush half into the sink and half down my front. She smiles, and I love her, and life, and this sepia moment in our kitchen, and even the bruised apples. We eat the syrup tipped over fat pancakes, still a little doughy in the middle, with blackberries and cinnamon. The rest we keep in jars for another loveless day.