Floodplane 1 | Page 37

She stacked the golden apples in a circle as a base, and then layered the other apples randomly on top. It was striking to me that she had no thought in putting the golden apples on the bottom. It was striking because I thought how easy it was for her to arrange the apples in this manner, that it was second nature, an unconscious placement. The way the apples were arranged appeared to me like the roles of the genders in society. Woman is clearly being made responsible for holding up the many. She’s being rested upon and the structure of the pile affords for those on top to forget the significance of the golden ones underneath.

I bought two golden apples that day and sat at a wooden bench pushed against the brick façade of the bakery, right underneath the storefront window, and held onto the last passing moments of the sunset. I popped one whole apple into my mouth and chewed until the last of the almond graininess no longer clung to my teeth. Inside my gut the golden apple pressed into a cider of epiphany and revolution. The metaphoric seeds from the apple grew a tree of knowledge inside me to proportions wide and strong. On three branches of this giant tree of thought were my three children. One daughter, one son, one

son. I imagined my sons eating regular apples, maybe one green and the other red. They looked content; their legs hanging over their own branch lazily swinging back and forth with a gentle breeze tickling their toes. I saw my daughter stiffly eating a golden apple. I saw how heavy it was in her hands, how it weighed down her jaw as she tried to bite and chew. I wanted to tell her I’m sorry. I wanted to apologize for the burden compressing her because of her gender. I’m saddened that probably even in her lifetime she will be

considered less than a man. In this uncertain world I cannot guarantee she won’t face the same amount of patriarchal overload as my mother-in-law and me and every woman ever in existence has ever been affronted with. This leaves me with a sense of despair, a sense of helplessness that things are unable to change, that woman’s subjugation will always be subconsciously perpetrated by man.

As I was sitting at my computer writing this and pondering the ways of our

gendered culture, I felt compelled to walk down the hallway to look in on my daughter while she slept. She was wrapped like a pupa in her purple comforter, her hair matted to her face with saliva. I tripped over the theories milling around in my head and wondered if I felt this way, if I felt this strongly about woman as God merely because I was one myself.