The garden was humming. I couldn’t have called it ethereal; it was strangely muted, and childlike. The trees stood in more or less perfect rows, iridescent bunches of leaves blushing up at the clouds, their branches filled with blue light.

I had been staring at the greatest tree – not necessarily the biggest, but the greatest – for some time now. The veins threading through the leaves zigzagged back into the thick, grounded trunk, flooding the roots with the color of gold. Standing among the leaves were apples, at least fifteen to a branch. They, too, were golden, and they looked soft. Too golden to stay that way, I thought, and with skins too soft not to be broken.
I raised myself up on the tips of my toes, my bare feet arching in the grass, and stretched out my arm for an apple. The humming increased, as though a million little people in the air all around me were stretching their throats and pressing their lips together even harder.

My finger was just inches away when something toppled out of the leaves above and knocked me sharply on my forehead.

“Ow!”

I cursed, less than elegantly.

“What the hell?” I said.

Rubbing my head, I knelt down. Sitting on the ground, cocked awkwardly amidst the dewy grass, was a rock wrapped in yellowed paper.

I stared at the rock for a moment and considered unwrapping it. All the while, the humming was growing louder and louder. The air around me dampened a little and my skin felt cold.

I stood up, without touching the rock, and reached for the apple again.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

My arm fell to my side, and I turned in exasperation to face the source of the voice. “Oh, what now?”

The boy was my age, I think, or a little younger. I couldn’t exactly remember my own age and I didn’t like the thought of trying, but something about him seemed younger. “I’d have a look at that paper first,” he said, pointing at the rock.

Eyebrow raised, I bent down again and snatched it up. I pulled the paper off from around the edges and flattened it out against my palm and read four words, scrawled in faded permanent ink:

DON’T EAT THE APPLES!

I snorted. “Are they poisoned or something?” I asked the boy.

“Oh, no, nothing like that. They’re actually really good.” With that said, he stretched out a thin arm, plucked an apple from one of the lower branches, and sank his teeth into it.

I watched him come closer. He moved past the branches and I got a first look at his features: red hair and brown eyes. Someone had once told me people with red hair were all liars, but I’d also heard somewhere that people with brown eyes were supposed to be trustworthy. Screw them all, I thought.

“I thought you weren’t supposed to eat them,” I said, kind of stupidly.

“It’s okay. That note wasn’t for me.”

I looked down at the paper again. “Well, it isn’t addressed to me.”

“’Course not. It’s not for you, it’s for everyone.”

“Everyone except you?”

He shrugged and took another bite.

Ignoring the humming, which was growing louder and louder with each second, I reached up a third time and snapped an apple from its branch. The second I took it, the hums tapered away into a million silent, tortured gasps.

“Who wrote the note?” I asked.

“The man who owns the tree, I’d expect.” He swallowed a mouthful of apple and stared at me.

I looked down at the apple in my hands. “Well, if he doesn’t want me to eat it, I probably shouldn’t.” Still I didn’t drop it.

The boy smirked and took another bite. “Suit yourself. They’re even better than they look, though.”

They did look incredible. “Doesn’t matter how good they are,” I said throatily, hunger gnawing at my stomach and clawing its way up my throat. “They’re not mine.”

“They’re not mine, either. But I’m hungry.”

I opened my mouth, exhaled, and closed it. Somewhere very far away, the hums started up again.

“Do you hear that?”

“What?”

“The humming.”

“What humming?”

He lowered the apple from his mouth and stared at me, head cocked.

“Nothing,” I said.

A moment of silence passed. Then he strolled toward me and said, “Anyway, who knows how old that note is? Look at the edges. They’re all yellow.”

“The words are still clear.”

“That’s what happens when you use a Sharpie. Doesn’t mean it still applies.”

“Maybe he used permanent marker because it does still apply,” I persisted. “And maybe that’s why he wrapped it around a rock – because he wanted it to last.”

The boy was getting impatient, I could tell. “So what? Why should you listen to him, anyway? You don’t know who wrote that letter.” He stepped closer under the branches. We were inches away from each other. “Could’ve been anyone.”

I looked from one hand to the other, from the apple to the rock and back again. “If you want me to eat the apple so badly,” I said quietly, “why did you tell me to read the note?”

He gave a small, slightly guilty-looking grin. “Where’s the fun in convincing you if you don’t know what you’re doing?”

“The result would’ve been the same.”

“It would have?”

I stopped. The boy was close, too close for comfort. But I didn’t push him away.

“You know you want to,” he whispered. “It’s just a question of whether you listen to me or whatever stranger wrote that note. Incidentally, if he really cared about those apples, you’d think he would have fenced up the tree.”

Subconsciously, my grip on the rock slackened and it dropped to the ground. The hums swarmed up around me into an invisible buzz of tension.

“Think about it,” he murmured. “I’ve given you ten reasons to eat that apple. The only reason to contradict me is an unexplained note that’s been here for ages, and you don’t even know who wrote it.”

The boy was clever, I had to give him that. Clever and slippery, like a snake.

I closed my eyes, raised the apple to my lips, and took a bite.

The instant my teeth broke the skin and sank into the juicy flesh of the apple, the hums ground into a violent cacophony, screeching up into deafening wails and cries that vibrated in the air all around me. I felt the apple drop from my hand, and I clapped my hands over my ears, squeezing my eyes tightly shut.

“You don’t hear that?”

“Hear what?” asked the boy calmly.

My eyes flew open, and instantly the wails were cut off and the garden was steeped in silence.

“You don’t hear anything?” I asked in disbelief.

He bent down, picked up the apple off the ground, and straightened up again. Then he flicked what was left of his own apple, reduced to a seedy core, into the grass. “Nothing to hear,” he said.

He held out the fruit, but I didn’t take it.

“Who are you?” I said.

“I don’t have a name.” He shrugged. “But you can give me one, if it’ll make you feel better.”

I paused for a moment and decided that yes, it would make me feel better. Something about the boy scared me a little, but I’d be less scared if I knew who he was. I didn’t even care if his “identity” was a fabrication, so long as it was existent.

He was still waiting for me to accept the apple again, his hand outstretched.

I glanced down at the ground to see if the rock and the note of warning were still there. Just bare feet and grass. I looked back up again.

“You seem like an Adam,” I said, and took the bitten apple from his hand.