adventure · 2026.10.22
The ladder had eleven rungs and the eleventh was the one I kept stepping past. Below me the orchard tilted: pear trees growing out of a floor of grey gravel, each trunk ringed with a tidy moat of swept concrete. I was picking for the stand on Vanderhoek Street, where I worked summers as a boy, and the pears were warm as if they'd been sitting in sun that wasn't there. The air smelled of diesel and overripe fruit, and every so often a truck passed overhead on the overpass, and the whole orchard shivered but the pears didn't fall.