Now and again she was aware of somebody in the next room, or in the kitchen. Sometimes it would be her mother, or Donny, or a nameless girl she remembered from dance classes, but nobody ever came back in to where she was lying on her back, on her bedroom floor, staring upward.
She threw the apple up away from her, toward the ceiling. It was like a ball, but mostly an apple, making the most satisfying apple smack when it came rushing back to her hand just right. She threw it again, directly away from her like a yo-yo, watched it slow, spinning, and reverse itself to hurtle toward her with force, as though someone had thrown it all over again. The ceiling was finished in crowded plaster arches, like a thicket of plain white rainbows. The apple rose, slowed, dropped, and rose again, quiet except for the hollow chock of its return.
In college she'd known several people who dabbed stars onto their ceilings with phosphorescent paint, invisible during the day. She thought sometimes that she would like to do this herself, but only if she did the work of making it an accurate star chart, not just a playful smattering. There was Orion, waiting patiently for some lethal beast to prowl beneath his upraised club; there was Aldebaran, and Deneb, and somewhere was the Southern cross, somewhere on the other side of the world. Underneath her stars she knew all of these names and just where to put them, and she slung her apple through space like a comet.
But no, this was her old room in her parents' old house, with the pink walls and the white ceiling, the speckled red of the apple stark against it. Away and back. The floor was a carpeted wall pressed close against her spine, bruising her heel, and every time she whipped the apple away it was stilled and then hurled back. Its path was well established; she'd done it a hundred times already.
But still there was something unknowable about it; at times the same practiced throw might send the apple a little to the left or the right, a little closer to the ceiling, or once in a while--carelessly--close enough to bump away from it. She tried to catch it the same way, though its homeward flights varied; she always stopped it before it was bruised against the floor, but often it came wrong into her hand, stinging one finger, or making a muffled noise, not the delightfully decisive sound of a proper catch. How long had she been throwing the apple and watching it? Such a lovely apple, the ideal apple, the sort that should fall on someone's wig and show him gravity, as surely as it was driven into her hand one more time.
Part of her was already tired; it's boring to throw the same apple too many times. She threw, she reimagined up and down, she watched the ball come home again. She knew. Wasn't it enough? How could she stop, get up and go downstairs for a while?
Each throw was just slightly imperfect, and each somehow too graceful to let go. Her apple hung suspended, as close as it could come to the off-white expanse beyond without touching, and then it was spurred toward her again, gaining in speed and violence, only to meet the very center of her palm again, the spot where all the muscles meet, the trigger point that closed her fingers around it all at once, automatically. It made the perfect sound, loud enough to surprise her again, the finality of an apple caught just right, an apple held as surely as the carpet held her. Undeniably.
And then the slightest pause, as long as the others, just long enough to begin to be jealous of the memory of the apple's last fall, before she had to throw it away one more time. To be sure.
Christine, Dreaming