Comfort Me With Apples

The story opens with the Arcadia Gardens Homeowners Association Agreement, establishing the setting as an exclusive gated community promising total safety, self-sufficiency, and domestic contentment. The rules mandate approved paint colors (all shades of white), prohibit outdoor fires, enforce strict lawn maintenance, ban overnight guests, close parks at sunset with guards posted, and impose "tranquility hours." The language frames surveillance and conformity as luxury and care.

Sophia, the protagonist, wakes alone in her enormous house on Cedar Drive with a single, recurring thought: "I was made for him." Her husband is frequently absent for work, but Sophia does not complain. The narrative notes that "the organ of dissatisfaction was somehow absent from birth" in her (5). Every element of the house is far too large for Sophia: the towering bed requires a small staircase to descend, the steep grand staircase has 28 carved steps, and the massive vanity requires stacked pillows for her to see her reflection. She does not question any of this, spending her days cleaning, cooking, and polishing, every minute accounted for. Everything she does, from her gait to her appearance, is meant to reflect well upon her beloved husband.

One morning, Sophia notices the top left-hand drawer of her vanity, which has a rough stone knob unlike the others. Though nothing in Arcadia Gardens is ever locked, this drawer is. She jimmies it open and discovers an enormous hairbrush made of antler or bone, covered in burned runes, and a lock of hair tied with a white ribbon. The hair is straight, coarse, and black, nothing like Sophia's soft, curly, pecan-colored hair. It smells of spices, rotting flesh, and hot desert sands. She brushes her hair with the bone brush and starts to cry without understanding why.

At tea with three older neighbors, Mrs. Lyon, Mrs. Fische, and Mrs. Minke, Sophia raises her concerns. The women dismiss her worries and mock the idea that her husband could be unfaithful. A surprise guest arrives: Mr. Semengelof, a tall, thin music teacher there to tutor Mrs. Lyon's children. Mrs. Minke reveals he was tracking a woman outside the gates who violated the Association's contract. When Sophia asks if he is a policeman, Semengelof rotates his head in a slow, owl-like revolution, establishing himself as something inhuman. He asks Sophia if she is happy; the women rush to answer for her, but Sophia replies that she is fed, housed, busy, and loved. Semengelof offers to remove anything displeasing from her life, but Sophia lies, wanting to keep her discoveries secret. As he plays the piano and Sophia rocks in distress, the three women consume their hostess gifts, a mass of bloodworm larvae and a still-glistening severed heart, with relish, revealing animal natures beneath their domestic facades.

Her husband fails to come home for dinner. While putting away the carving knife, Sophia finds it will not fit into the knife block. She tips the block and a small, dry bone falls out, bearing the same burned marks as the hairbrush. She recognizes it as the tip of a human finger. That night, a great blue heron with Semengelof's multicolored eyes appears at her window, offering to erase the objects and even the memory of them from her mind. Her husband's arrival interrupts. He asks urgently if she is happy. Sophia lies about the broken window, her second lie, sensing the world has changed.

The next morning, her husband dismisses her questions about other women, declaring she is the only woman in the world. At a summer pantomime, the community performs a play reenacting Sophia's arrival in Arcadia Gardens. Mrs. Palfrey, another Arcadia resident, plays Sophia onstage but wears a long, coarse, black wig and deliberately locks an oversized brush into the left-hand drawer of a prop vanity while looking directly at Sophia, revealing that Mrs. Palfrey planted the brush and hair for Sophia to find. The entire audience watches Sophia rather than the stage. Her husband grows agitated when Sophia mentions Semengelof's criminal case, grabbing her arm hard enough to leave a mark, and after the performance he departs abruptly. Mrs. Palfrey approaches Sophia and urgently asks if she understood; Sophia says no.

Sophia goes home and tears apart the house. She arranges her findings on the kitchen floor: a thighbone, a cracked vertebra, a jawbone with teeth, a desiccated lung, a shriveled heart, half a skull, a bottle of old blood, and many locks of hair in different colors tied with ribbons. She also finds a tiny lace cap, a flask of milk-grease with a rubber tip, and a stained quilt barely big enough for her lap. The remains belong to far too many people to be one person's. Standing amid the evidence, Sophia finally grasps what she never questioned: the towering table, the unreachable bed, the oversized staircase. The house was built for a woman much larger than her. Something breaks in Sophia, and she flees into the forbidden night streets.

She collapses near a great gnarled apple tree and a locked iron gate beyond which stretches a vast desert. A figure emerges from a wall of flowers: Cascavel, a thin man with dry, scaled skin who speaks with a hiss. He reveals himself as the serpent of Eden and asks whether Sophia is happy. She screams no with overwhelming relief, her first honest expression of unhappiness. Cascavel explains that she was made without the capacity for dissatisfaction and that she is far from her husband's first wife. He reveals that Mrs. Palfrey is actually Lilith, a previous wife who escaped through the gate into the desert. Semengelof was sent to punish Lilith but let her live on the condition she leave Sophia alone; Lilith planted the brush and hair anyway, an act of solidarity. When Cascavel asks Sophia her husband's name, she realizes she has never known it. He offers her an apple from the tree, saying it contains knowledge of good and evil, and urges her to refuse it and flee as Lilith did. He acknowledges she never will, but affirms that whatever anyone says about Lilith, she lived. Sophia bites the apple and finds a small iron key inside. Cascavel tells her that her husband's name is Adam and the key opens his cellar. He suggests she make Adam eat the apple: It may kill him.

Sophia reassembles the house before dawn and bakes a pie from the forbidden fruit. Using the key, she descends into the cellar, where the staircase, unlike everything else, is exactly her size. Inside she finds knives, axes, hooks, and rendering barrels: a fully equipped slaughterhouse. In the dirt floor lies a hole dug to her precise dimensions.

Adam appears behind her. Over the pie she serves him, he confesses. He was formed from dust by God, originally fused spine-to-spine with his first wife. He begged God to separate them, but she refused to let him touch her, demanding he should have asked her consent. God returned her to dust. The second wife was built from raw biological materials before Adam's eyes; though she served him perfectly, he found her disgusting and had her destroyed without naming her. Subsequent wives were made from light, seawater, grapevines, feathers, and eventually from parts of Adam himself. Each time he fell in love, and each time the wife became unhappy. God eventually stopped destroying them, forcing Adam to do it himself. When Sophia asks why God allows this, Adam answers that he was made in God's image. He reveals Sophia was made from his own eye and declares her broken like the rest. He will kill her, keep her remains, and begin again.

Sophia wants to tell Adam to eat the pie, which Cascavel implied could kill him, but the very atoms of her design will not allow it. She was built to serve, not to harm. Instead, she digs her nails into the back of his neck, drawing blood, hoping the scar will warn the next wife: a wound that should not exist in a world that knows no suffering. Adam closes his hands on her throat. She tells him she loves him, and she does, loving him as her vision fills with everything she has known. Everything burns away and she dies.

In the final chapter, titled "Pink Lady," the cycle resets. A new woman named Eve wakes alone in the same house to the same thought: "I was made for him."