• APPLES: CHAPTER ONE

    The autumn leaves fluttered in the breeze. The trees were flaming with colors almost like fire. I'd never seen leaves like that-almost magical. the sun bloomed halfway through night and halfway through set. Could I reach home by nightfall?
    Life had been this was since I was five. Seven years of this. The ten years of no water from faucets and such made life almost waterless. I wished it had only been two. Or none.
    I took the watermelon and smashed it in the clay bowl I'd made once a long time ago. Stuck together by literally a hundred layers of glue made it pretty much unbreakable. A bunch of watermelon juice spurted out, which I combined with the orange juice from earlier. I sipped it thirstily while walking to my horse, Apples.
    Apples had been my pride and joy for a long time. In the second year of the drought, my father had bought me a black stallion horse. At the time, it had been only a fowl. As I grew up, so did it.
    We own a farm here in Florida. Somewhere in it, because all the maps were lost in the state fire- a fire that happened two years ago.
    I watched the T.V anxiously as the reporter yelled at the camera. He seemed to be saying there was a terrorist in the neighborhood. The camera went black for a second, and then a new guy reappeared on the screen. He was unhappy. He began to say how the maps were finally finished, and how they had found the 2010 copies of it. As he said this, a small group surrounded the wooden house called President's House. They laid a thick string around it, and the string was black. A kid lit a match and all the people ran. I gasped at what happened next; the house blew up. Pieces flew at the camera. In two seconds, it was off and everyone was left stunned. Now, no one knows where we are or when we are aloud to move.
    We're good now, though. We drink milk from Marcy, our cow. We grow watermelons and smash them for the juice. We set out buckets in hope of snow. Grew water related crops, and drank from rivers. Sometimes we boiled ocean water until it was clean and sometimes we just plain went to market and bought some. We were water freaks.
    I stomped on the sand, glad to be out of the weeds. My Converse high-tops flipped around for the laces never stood tied.
    "Hey Apples!" I said in a singsong voice. Her name was apples because she loved apples. Which still grew, miraculously. I plucked a ripe apple from a tree, and set the dish of punch in front of her. I went to grab the brush.
    I'm Carla, by the way. I'm 15 years old, and I have Carmel hair that's almost always in a ponytail and light blue eyes. I'm not curvy or fat, like the city girls. My clothes range from white or yellow tank-tops and always denim shorts. Always Converses with a necklace that is a small, petrified white rose. On top of all that, I wear a belt with three things: my miniature pack, my water bottle, and my switchblade. I carved a oak staff with a fork at the top and a point at the bottom two years ago. I now take it wherever I go.
    After the water call was set upon Florida. Then all the grass dried up, we built country houses and fended for ourselves. Of course the city had so much; Apartments, Diamonds, and Water. Diamonds. Speaking of them, I'd grown other things- crops, crystals, and of course, tons of apples.
    I sighed and reached into my pack, producing a tower, a apple, and a small strap of leather with an ever smaller piece of rock shaped like a key. I fed Apples the apple and put the towel on her back. I put they key on my neck, mounted Apples, and set off to home.