Mom’s eyebrows rose as Cassie emerged from the bramble. “That was fast.”

Cassie’s brain jammed. “What?”

“The crown.” Mom pointed at the blackberry circlet. “I didn’t realize you could make those so quickly.”

“Oh! Oh.” Cassie almost collapsed with relief. “That. Yes.”

“I brought buckets to harvest the berries as we go along. I figured we could make pie tonight.”

The memory of the druplets dissolving in her mouth made the ground unsteady again. “That sounds fantastic,” she said, struggling to keep her voice even. “Thanks Mom.”

They set to work with shears and buckets, swaying slowly between the two as they went. Snip snip, pause to pick the berries, plop plop into the buckets. The trimmings piled up behind them as they worked in companionable silence. Snip snip, plop plop, pretending like she hadn’t just kissed a nameless man in the bushes a dozen feet away. Kissie Cassie. Could he see her now? Was he watching? Who was he?

What was he?

She had more or less established the reality of his existence, since Matt had sighted him on at least two occasions. Unless she had hallucinated that moment with Matt, too? No. Cassie discarded the idea as soon as she had it; solipsistic turtles all the way down was no good. Almost as certain: he was the same person as the boy she had spent so much of her childhood with in the bramble. He seemed to have indicated as much, at least obliquely, and he definitely looked like an adult version of the boy she remembered. What were the odds that a real man perfectly resembled an imaginary boy? Particularly with such singular eyes? Not zero, but exceedingly low. Cassie tossed another handful of berries into the bucket.

Which left two open questions: firstly, how could her mother—both her parents—have mistaken a real boy for an imaginary one? Not just once or twice, but dozens of times over a span of years. Hundreds, even. Shouldn’t they have glimpsed him skulking into the bramble from the parkland? Heard his voice? True, he was soft-spoken and occasionally taciturn, but did they really think she was consuming double shares of snacks that regularly? Or just leaving sandwiches to molder in the underbrush? Surely her brothers would have noticed at some point and said something. Could that have been mistaken for humoring her, or harmless childhood folie à deux, and simply glossed over or forgotten? Far from impossible, but still somewhat incredible.

Secondly… the hairs on Cassie’s arms stood on end as she paused to take a sip of water and re-settle the circlet on her head. Secondly, there were the unaccountable memories of the boy. Some were merely unusual, like how often he went barefoot, or how thin his winter clothing was. Poverty could easily have explained that, as well as his interest in her food and, much more ravenously, her books. He never seemed to owe an adult insight into his whereabouts or activities: neglect, then. Unfortunate, but not unexplainable.

It was the stranger memories, only now surfacing in dark anamnesis, that possessed her thoughts.

A vague recollection of him asking the peach tree to grow an enormous peach in honor of the book he had just finished reading, James and the Giant Peach, which it did: a single, perfect fruit, inflating like a balloon until it was the size of a soccer ball, at which point Cassie became unsettled and asked it to stop. (What did they do with it afterwards? Eat it? Cassie couldn’t remember.) A crisp mental snapshot of him listening to her while stroking a skunk. The illustrated incident with the tether ball. Running back inside the house with a perfectly heart-shaped blackberry leaf the size of a dinner plate, screaming, “Look what he grew for me, Daddy!”

Perhaps it wasn’t so strange that her parents thought he was imaginary after all.

Cassie emerged from her reverie to discover the afternoon was waning and her bucket was full. So was Mom’s, and the job wasn’t even halfway done yet. Her muscles felt wrung out in ways that did not bode well for tomorrow. They lugged the buckets back to the house and Mom bribed Matt to haul the bramble trimmings out front for compost pickup with promises of forthcoming pie. Cassie took the thorn circlet off in her room and hung it over the corner of her headboard before rinsing off and heading back downstairs.

Mom dug a pie pan out of the clattering avalanche of bakeware in the lower cabinets while Cassie started washing blackberries. They probably had enough for three or four pies here. She hoped they’d eaten a sufficient volume of funeral leftovers to store whatever they couldn’t fit into the pie. Matt returned from sorting the trimmings just as Tyler’s car pulled into the driveway; Cassie could hear him rev his engine once before cutting it. He must be in a good mood. She busied herself with making the pie so she wouldn’t have to talk to him.

Tyler slammed the front door open. “Guess what!” he yelled by way of greeting, and slammed the door shut again.

“In the kitchen!” Mom called.

Cassie started weaving a latticework cover for the pie.

“Guess what?” Tyler repeated, at the same volume, once he was in the kitchen.

“Chicken butt,” Cassie muttered.

Tyler ignored her. “Linda said she’d cover the cost for the surveyor!”

“What surveyor?” Mom asked absently, checking on the casserole in the oven.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Tyler sighed and thumped into a chair. “Mom, we talked about this.”

“Well, honey,” she replied, closing the oven door again and taking off her mitts at a deliberate pace, “I’ve had a lot of things on my mind.” Tyler actually looked chagrined for a moment before scowling and fiddling with a salt shaker.

“Who’s Linda?” asked Matt.

“The real estate agent. She came by yesterday for an assessment.”

The latticework top was somehow done already. Cassie started crafting a dough braid for the circumference.

“Is the property line in question?” Matt sat down next to Tyler, in the same seats habitually occupied since childhood.

“Not especially. She just wants to check the rear boundary; apparently the original development was pretty cavalier about marking off the parkland.”

Mom sat down in her spot at the kitchen table and struck up a conversation about something else. Cassie finished the braid and looked up. There were only two empty seats at the table now, and they were next to each other. She stood for a moment, letting the sounds of dinner conversation wash over her, and then turned back to the counter. There was just enough dough left to fashion a little blackberry leaf shape. That would look nice.

Cassie finally forced herself into her seat when the casserole was at the table.

“It’s not the same, is it?” Tyler asked suddenly. Cassie looked up in surprise to see his eyes awash with tears. He rubbed them away. “Without Dad here.”

Mom reached across the table and took his hand.

“That’s why,” he continued, throat harsh with the tears he had swallowed. “I know it seems fast, to sell the house now. But it doesn’t matter. Dad’s not here.”

“Mom’s still here,” Cassie said, nettled.

Mom put her other hand on Cassie’s arm placatingly. “I am here,” she agreed, “but Tyler is right. It’s not the same without your dad. And I’m not sure I want to be here without him, either. Not forever.”

Cassie slumped in her seat. “Tyler,” she asked—pleaded— “why don’t you move your family in?” Was she really begging Tyler to take over the house? She was. “It doesn’t need to be sold…”

He shook his head, uncharacteristically morose. “It’s not big enough.”

“The difference between three and four kids isn’t that big, we did well enough—”

“It’s twins, Cass.”

“Oh.” Cassie sat woodenly. “Congratulations?”

Fortunately, Mom and Matt both drowned out her stilted reply with significantly more genuine exclamations. Cassie ate her casserole in silence, feeling like the Grinch. When the little stovetop timer dinged tinnily to let her know the pie was done, she leapt for it like a life preserver, nearly knocking her chair over.

“Cassie,” Matt said reverently, as she levered the pie carefully out of the oven, “that looks like it could be in a magazine.”

Cassie had to admit it was an unusually photogenic pie, which Mom did in fact immediately insist on photographing to send to her church friends. Miraculously, the latticework had stayed intact, and the braid and decorative leaf shape were toasted gold. The blackberry filling bubbled darkly beneath, shifting the latticework as it settled. Cassie felt momentarily dizzy again. She needed to take care to drink more water next time she worked in the sun all day.

They waited impatiently for the pie to cool, Matt and Tyler making themselves useful with kitchen cleaning for once while Mom hunted for vanilla ice cream in the blockaded freezer and Cassie dashed upstairs to send her proposal section, verifying it was free of FUCKs. She made it back downstairs just as Mom was serving the pie. Matt and Tyler loaded theirs up with ice cream and demolished them, pausing occasionally for an enthusiastic remark, and then helped themselves to seconds. Mom ate hers with more restraint, but otherwise seemed equally appreciative.

Cassie, however, was having trouble.

She’d started as one ordinarily does with a pie: at the tip. It hadn’t quite set yet—pie impatience—so the blackberry filling seeped across the plate, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that as soon as she’d put the bite into her mouth, a pleasure beyond taste lanced through her core, momentarily tunneling her vision. Her fork jangled to the floor.

“You okay, Cassie?”

Cassie nodded and shakily retrieved her fork. She didn’t trust herself to take another bite. She simply stared at the pie and tried to calm her pounding heart. Her mother and brothers continued eating their pie, oblivious to Cassie’s flushed face and labored breathing.

“I’m wiped,” she heard herself say, as though across a great distance of time and space. “I’m going to call it a night.” Plate and fork in hand, she acknowledged the full-mouthed goodnights with an indistinct murmur of her own and floated to her room.

Cassie clicked on the creaky old goose-neck desk lamp, set the pie in its pool of light, and collapsed onto a chair, finally clear of clutter per the latest round of cleaning. Other than the elegant crust-work, now beginning to soften and crumble, it was an entirely unremarkable slice of pie with one bite eaten out of it.

Maybe she was losing her mind after all.

She grasped the fork resolutely and took a second bite.

Again a thrill of pleasure rushed through her, threading from navel to groin. A soft noise escaped from her throat before she could stop herself. The room was still overwarm from the heat of the day. She leaned over and opened the window. It didn’t help; the night was hot and still. Cassie felt herself begin to sweat. She should stop.

She took another bite.

Not a rush this time, but a dark and insistent pressure that settled inside and threatened to grow. She didn’t wait for it to pass before taking the next bite and felt it build, tendrils of arousal spreading outward through her veins and rooting deeper with every mouthful. A bead of blackberry filling fell onto the desk; Cassie scooped it onto her finger and sucked it clean. The lamp flickered out, but she could still see the last few bites by the light of the moon. Her skin was covered in a silver sheen of perspiration. She was breathing raggedly, nearly panting, feeling the edges of the chair pressing against the back of her thighs so hard it almost hurt but she didn’t care, she was almost done, only one piece left, she could barely bring the fork to her mouth through the tension, the last piece was in her mouth—

She convulsed silently, eyes closed, sticky fork fallen on the carpet as both hands grasped the edge of the desk. When the waves receded, she eased her grip and rested her head in her hands, too bewildered and sated to form lucid thought. A few crumbs spangled the plate. She licked her thumb and smeared them up, nibbling them off again in a daze. A breeze finally stirred her hair, and Cassie looked out the open window. The blackberry bush loomed, dark and puissant, and the world was still.

Cassie wobbled to her feet, unable to think. She was so tired. She could think tomorrow, when her legs weren’t trembling and her arms no longer weighed a thousand pounds. She stripped off her clothing and fell into bed—the thorn circlet rattled gently against the headboard—and sank immediately into sleep.

Her dreams were green.