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The little town where she lives has a crabapple tree growing in the square, tall and proud. When blooming season comes around they pluck the fruit and turn it into jam, into sour pie that tastes good after swimming.
Max has only ever heard of oranges, only ever seen them in books, in the painting at church, only ever been told about them by her mother, reminiscing on a childhood so long ago Max cannot picture the winters.
In the church, the only church for miles, the one that everyone attends, a portrait of the king hangs in the foyer. Beneath it is the only gold in town, a bowl polished weekly by various clergymen and always full of coins to tithe to the good king Kasimir. The portrait makes him fierce, standing with a hand on his sword and another on a low table next to him. Whoever the artist had been had placed a bowl of oranges on the table, a small paring knife on a saucer next to them.
When her mother speaks of riches, she speaks of oranges in a golden bowl.
The orange cart finally comes trundling into town on the back of a donkey with beach pebbles in its hooves and a man in a straw hat, and Max is lucky enough to be in the square to watch it take shade beneath the sour tree.
The sun’s high in the sky, making long shadows out of the donkey’s ears, and the breeze sends the pure smell of citrus over to Max, drawing shapes in the dirt and bullying her neighbor’s toddler.
She’s off in a flash immediately, leaping over fences and charging through gardens, much to the chagrin of the women withering by their sinks. Even as she goes, she hears the shouts from the people lucky enough to live on the square. She hears feet pounding in the opposite direction of hers, even feels the blisters forming on the heels of dozens of people who will wait in line for hours for one chance at wealth.
This town’s small enough that by the time she finds who she’s looking for, twelve different people will have alerted her mother to her delinquency, and the idea of an orange, her very first orange, almost makes up for the lashes she’s sure to receive when she gets home.
Max finds Bea and Joseph playing house, Joseph with a ragdoll in his hands and Bea with embroidery in her lap. She pauses, hands wrapping around the top of the fence and chest heaving.
Her best friends have been doing this dance for years, under the shadow of the old church bell and the weeping willow in the garden. Bea’s been trying to master daisies for three months now, and as Joseph shifts from his place on the ground, braiding the doll’s yarn hair, Max hears the telltale jingle of coins.
She bursts from her place of watching, scrambling over the wood fence with a strangled “give me all of your money!”
Bea and Joseph look up in surprise and Max waves her almost-empty coin purse from its strap in front of their faces. “Go on! Do it!”
Bea, ever the pessimist, doesn’t even crack a smile even as her cousin next to her dissolves into giggles and greetings. “What.”
The wind shifts Bea’s hair and clouds cast shadows over her face, framing her jaw and adding worry lines around her eyes that haven’t even had the age to form. Inside her chest, Max’s heart beats a little quicker, and she shakes her coin purse again.
“Eeeempty your pockets!” She trills.
“Max,” Bea says, her face set. “This is the worst attempted mugging ever. Joseph, quit it.”
“No, listen.” Max drops the coin purse at their feet and settles in, crossing her legs and grinning wide. “A huge cart of oranges just rolled into the square and people are already swarming! I don’t have enough money, obviously, but if we pooled ours we could get one!”
Bea’s still frowning, fingering the coins in the pocket of her deep-blue dress. “I don’t know…”
Max can almost hear her about to start talking about the importance of tithing to the king, the sanctity of it, and she’s about to cut her off, but then Joseph accidentally elbows Bea in the ribs in his haste to fish out his money. “I’ve never had an orange!”
Joseph has this thing, this widened-eyes, big smile thing, that he uses sparingly, but when he does, it works like a charm, and even frugal Bea falls for it. “Fine.” She pulls three coins from her pocket and pours them into Max’s cupped hands, joining Joseph’s five and Max’s one.
“That’s just barely enough!” Max crows, and again she’s off, dumping the money into her coin purse and scrambling back over fences, disappointing the withering women in their kitchens again.
Behind her, she hears the fading sounds of Bea and Joseph talking.
“You know she’s not going to share with us.” Bea’s deep voice, disappointed and always frustrated, a tone she learned from her mother.
“I think she will!” Joseph’s sunny reply, learned from the sparing sound of his own mother’s laughter.
Dummies, the both of them, Max thinks as she joins the queue for oranges. Obviously, I’ll share. But I get the bigger pieces. The sun plays hide and seek behind the clouds, and the crowd gets bigger and bigger. There can’t possibly be enough oranges. She watches the mountain get smaller and smaller even as she gets closer and closer to the front of the line.
By the time she gets there, only two remain. One has somehow survived its time crushed beneath its brethren, withstanding the pressure and still shining in the sunlight. The other has a clear divot in the skin, and Max has seen enough apples to know which of the two will be the best.
Behind her is a girl that must be more than a good two years younger than her, eyes wide, cheeks red, and clutching ten pennies in her fat fists. This will be her first orange.
It’ll be mine too, Max thinks, and she takes the perfect fruit at the bottom of the cart.
She takes the long way back, not wanting to crush the orange against the fences in her scramble to get over all of them.
Bea and Joseph have moved fully under the shade of the willow, and even Bea’s face lights up as Max comes prancing back, the perfect orange cradled in her palms, smelling like a sunny summer day and not a bit like crabapples.
They split it between the three of them, and Max does her best to take all the big pieces, but there’s not many that she can find.
The royal painter wants to frame her like the old king.
“A woman king taking the place of the old one, stealing his stance and his glance! People will not be able to look away!”
He’s a short little man, curly hair and fine-boned like a bird. He sets the bowl of oranges down and Max sees that there was always much less than anyone had ever thought, only three or four. Beneath them is just some orange cloth, and when folded it will blend in perfectly for the painter using it as reference. Max feels something rotten and bruised churn in her stomach.
Her hands are shaking.
“Out.”
The word is soft, but the painter hears it well enough, and tales of Max’s anger run rampant through the castle.
She hears the scrambling of feet against carpeted floor, and as the door clicks shut, she lets out the scream that has been building up since she was first sewn into this ridiculous dress.
She slams her hand against the bowl and the oranges go flying. As the porcelain shatters against the wall, bits of the cloth stick to it and Max feels sick.
An orange rolls to a stop at her feet and she collects it, clutching it in her palm. When she looks up at the gilded mirror on the wall, she sees a little girl many years younger, eyes wide and cheeks red. Her fingernails dimple half-moons into the orange skin.
Her dress is so fine, spun silk and ribbon and pearls. Her crown stands so tall, gems inlaid on the brim. With one hand, Max reaches up and tracks her own movement in the mirror as she flings it away from her head.
She stalks over to the table and snatches up the paring knife. Tears are forming in her eyes and she feels so sick. She hasn’t taken a full breath in hours, and her ribs feel like they’re going to split apart.
There’s a little pouf in the room, and she kicks the oranges closer to it, not wanting to expend the energy to bend and get them, not even wanting to admit that all this feeling is building up at all.
When Max collapses onto the thing, the oranges have collected like little soldiers around its clawed feet.
One by one, she takes the knife to them, methodical and slow.
She peels them, trying to preserve the wholeness of the skin. When it inevitably rips, she starts again.
The sun sets on King Max Novikov, surrounded by orange peels, a knife in her hand and tears dribbling from her chin, and in the palace gardens a crabapple tree begins to sprout.