But even that—the beloved apple tree of their childhood, “Jonathan the Apple Tree,” their mother had called it—even that behaved strangely. Its leaves would get a white powdery substance on them and then they curled up and fell off, and the apples themselves were tiny and wrinkled and deformed in a way that made them look like little ugly heads, and as he sat in the backyard on the sleeping bag he heard one drop. … tunk? A sinister little questioning sound. And then, after a long silence, another one—“tunk?”—and he imagined he saw the whispery movement as the shrunken apple rolled through the
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