It came off the counter sideways, which I want on record, because a fair drop is one thing and this was not a fair drop. She had a bag of them open on the counter, doing whatever it is she does with a knife and a cutting board when she’s making something involve apples, and one of them got loose from the pile and rolled to the edge and just went. No warning. No wobble first. Straight off.
I was under the table at the time, not doing anything in particular, and I heard it hit the tile before I saw it, a sound like a small dense ball, and by the time I got my head around the corner it was already moving. Rolling. On its own. Across the kitchen floor, in a long unhurried curve, like it had somewhere specific to be.
I want to explain that an apple rolling across a floor by itself is a genuinely difficult thing to watch happen for the first time. It doesn’t roll like a toy does, quick and forgettable. It rolls with weight. It has a rhythm to it, this low knock-knock-knock as the little dimple on the top end comes around each rotation, and it doesn’t slow down the way you’d expect something round and heavy to slow down. It just keeps going, unbothered, off toward the refrigerator like it had been planning this the whole time it sat quietly in the bag.
I went after it. Obviously I went after it. What I did not expect, and what I am still somewhat sore about, was the gap under the refrigerator. I did not know that gap was there in any functional sense — I’ve walked past that stretch of floor every day of my life and never once considered what was happening underneath it — and the apple did not hesitate for one second before vanishing into it. Gone. Under the machine. Into the dark, dusty, humming underworld beneath the refrigerator, where I am too substantial to follow and where, apparently, things go to simply not come back.
I put my paw in after it. As far as it would go, which was not far, my leg stopping at the shoulder against the metal lip, my claws finding nothing but a thin coating of floor dust and, at one point, what felt like a very old dried pea. The apple itself I could not reach, could not see except as a rounded shadow-shape somewhere back in the depths, red going to black in the low light. It had made it. It had gotten clean away and it knew it.
She noticed me lying flat on my side with my arm buried under the appliance and laughed, actually laughed, and said something like “did it get away from you,” which — yes. Obviously yes. I don’t see what was funny about it. She got down on her knees, which I appreciated as a show of solidarity even if her methods were wrong, and used the handle of a wooden spoon to sweep around under there, and after some scraping and a truly upsetting amount of dust coming out with it, produced the apple, now furred gray along one side, and set it on the counter with a look that suggested this whole event had cost her nothing and meant nothing.
It meant something to me. I sat and watched that apple for a long time after that, from the chair, from the floor near the cabinets, from the doorway on my way to somewhere else and then not going to somewhere else after all. It sat innocently on the counter next to its siblings, dust and all, like it hadn’t just spent several minutes as a fully autonomous creature loose in the kitchen. I don’t trust it. I don’t trust any of them now. There were four more in that bag and I have decided all four are potential escapees, patient, biding, waiting for their moment near an edge.
Later she cut the dusty one into pieces for whatever the dish was, and the smell that came off the cutting board, sharp and clean and slightly sweet, was nothing like what I expected from something that had just proven itself capable of independent locomotion. It smelled soft. Ordinary. Like nothing had happened. I sat under the table again and watched the knife go through it in even slices and felt, honestly, a little betrayed on its behalf, though I couldn’t tell you exactly why, since I’m the one who chased it.
I checked under the refrigerator twice more before dinner, just to be sure nothing else had rolled under there in the meantime that I’d missed. Nothing had. Just the dust, and the dried pea, sitting exactly where I’d left it, keeping its own counsel in the dark, not going anywhere at all.