It was a gray, rainy November Friday. She didn’t feel like going to the hospital, but she had plans for the weekend, so it was better to get it over with that day.

It had become tiring. Her mother’s stay in the hospital had now gone on for months, with no signs of the next phase. After the first panicked weeks and daily visits, regular life took over, and visits became more sporadic.

She entered the dimmed room carrying the apples her mother had asked for.

“Don’t turn the lights on. My eyes hurt today,” she said immediately, without any greeting.

Her mother insisted on getting up and sitting at the table to eat the apples. There was a small table beside the window, with a single chair. She helped her sit there, thinking how fragile her body was, how rapidly it had deteriorated, how ugly it had become. She wiped an apple and placed it on a plate, along with a small knife.

“Mmm. These are good. My favorite kind.” She started to peel the apple with shaking hands, determined to do it by herself. The faint fresh aroma lightly crept in over the sterile hospital smell.

“Why do you think it was an apple, of all fruits, in the story of Adam, Eve, and the snake?” she asked.

“I don’t know. It’s definitely not because it’s an old fruit species. Maybe it was just practical for the story. Apples are common, people can relate.”

“You need to bite it. It’s an intention. But you don’t know what’s inside before that. It can be perfect or rotten. There could be a worm inside, or it could just taste bad.”

“Deceiving. That’s why it works well as a symbol.”

“But actually, it entered the story as a translation pun. Malum in Latin means both apple and evil. Same spelling, different vowel length. The original text mentioned only a fruit, without specifying which.”

“Too good of a coincidence that worked well. And they also look good in paintings. I’ll go ask for fresh sheets so we can change them.”

She left the room, and as she closed the door, she stood for a second, looking at the pale silhouette of her mother against the faint light coming from the window, sitting alone at the table, as usual.

When she came back, the silhouette was leaning on the table, her head on the plate. She ran and tried to lift her mother, but the body was not moving, and she screamed for the nurse.

She withdrew to the corner. The CPR, nurses moving in blurred lines, the squeaks of rubber shoes, the rustle of equipment. She didn’t know what to do with her arms, and they hung there like on a marionette dropped by its puppeteer. She didn’t understand anything from the muffled voices, as if they were speaking in a language she didn’t know. There was no monitor with a line to visually confirm for her what was going on. Whether those were minutes or hours, she could not tell, until — who knows how much time later — the doctor approached her and said, “I’m sorry.”

She stood beside the bed, looking at her mother, not saying anything. The nurse patted her arm, offered condolences and explained what followed. She just kept nodding, even when they covered her mother’s face and took her body out.

“Did the apple kill her?” It was the only question she summoned to say.

“Of course not. Her heart just stopped. Her body was weak, and it got tired. It was expected; we told you to be prepared. She knew it too — she was just hanging in there as much as she could. You can collect her things from here now. Let me know if you need anything.”

She couldn’t do it. She grabbed the bag with the apples and turned around, left the room, closed the door — as if that could close and erase the whole event. She leaned against the wall and slid down.

“Did you just ruin apples for me forever?”

She stared at the floor, not moving, not feeling anything. The phone rang. Convenient — her sister finally deigned to call back.

“Mom died. Come to the hospital.”

“Wait, what?!”

She pressed the red button. There was paperwork to be done, all those formalities. She couldn’t think of that. She just needed to get out.

She ran down the hall, through endless corridors and flights of stairs, avoiding elevators, dodging people, until she finally burst out of the main entrance. A slam of cold November air. She stopped, gasping.

“Mom won’t eat apples ever again,” she said quietly.

The tears finally filled her eyes. The bag fell from her hands. The apples rolled down the stairs, into the street, somewhere. So many people passed by. No one looked. No one cared. It started to rain.