From above, the orchard looked like a fraying verdant oblong. The battalion of trees was arranged in a grid punctuated by equidistant channels. Observing the orchard from a mile away or more, you would merely have perceived a notably plush and abundant carpet of vegetation, with fathomless furrows. Above the orchard arched the celestial sphere; the midday sun, at its zenith, a phosphorescent crop circle in the sky. The clouds were nebulous, distorted by the torridity of the day.
The burgeoning canopy bristled with leaves stretching to emerge and be bathed in light. The shafts of light that did penetrate the dense foliage into gloom of the orchard floor, accented the dust motes pensile in the air. Apricots erupted from within leafy chrysalises. The downy orbs, marinated with droplets of condensation, gilded the air enclosing them; their cloying scent saturated the sluggish breeze. They were each supported by a scaffolding of twigs that groaned arthritically at slight movements. Their splitting skins bulged under the weight of the syrupy sap they contained. A few globular grenades had plummeted to the ground, and ruptured sousing the bordering earth with viscous puddles.
Cymbeline sat, reclined against the roots buttressing a mature specimen, highly revered by customers of the orchard for its delectable crop. Her face was tilted skywards, a sliver of granite pupil still visible under the weighty lids of her eyes. The planes of her face were wide and flat giving way to only slight inclines rolling over the chin and forehead. Her skin had become stiff and leathery, roasted across the decades by the unrelenting sun. Patches of darker pigment, a tell-tale mark of age, littered her cheeks and jowls. The face disfigured by a great sickness, was pitted and scarred. Her exaggerated pores visibly opened and closed and the bulbous nose was reddened, peeling and sore. She wore a shapeless dun-coloured garment fashioned from coarse sacking. Her thick snowy hair was tightly braided and twisted into a substantial knot at the nape of her neck. A few strands hovered expectantly around her face. She wore a pouch slung low on her hips that gaped open; spilling from it a tide of apricots that crested and beached on and around her.
It was high summer and the orchard was teeming with pickers. Most were perched precariously in the boughs of trees, straining with cupped hand to capture elusive apricots. William however, was late. He ran through the orchard frenziedly, seeking out his annual claim, as tardiness was high treason in the mind of the establishment’s proprietor. As he was bowling down a deserted avenue he stumbled upon Cymbeline. William was well acquainted with her so he stooped down to awaken her by grasping her hand. When this provoked no reaction he sounded out her name jovially, “Cym-be-line,” to a husky lilting melody. She still did not stir. Then he squatted low to the ground, his countenance gravid but investigative. Tentatively, he touched two fingers to a cord like vein prominent in her upper throat, expecting to experience a pressure surge radiating from her heart and subsequently relief. For a fleeting second the cacophony of noise coursing through the orchard was silenced. It felt like the continued existence of every pulse on the planet, each a pounding beacon of life, hinged on one variable: Cymbeline. He willed her to be alive. But nothing trembled beneath his fingertips. Her stagnant tepid blood had begun to congeal in the Byzantine pipe work of her muscular arteries and the capacious lumen of her veins. Her weary old heart had collapsed; the walls of the hollow chambers sagged. It was as if her heart wanted to tumble down into her legs and come to rest, nestling against the curvature of a heel.
William drew back from the body and delivered his grave internal diagnosis. She was, it seemed to William, perfectly dead.