The Whole World in His Hands: an exercise in writing about two unrelated things

His powers of perception were open for business.
He smelled wood smoke and sawdust, vinegar and leather and felt
the cold outside trying to get in. He heard a horse snort in his neighbor’s barn.

He was in the kitchen, about to pare an apple, six of them actually, a mix of varieties.
This one was a Granny Smith.
He had to pare them, because his apple-peeler-corer gizmo was broken.
“Pare,” now there’s a word. An old word. People began paring things hundreds of years ago.
To chop and to slice, they used to use sharpened stones, until somebody
thought to borrow some small blades from the keepers of the weaponry.
So now he was back in the seventeenth century or something with a steel blade and some dough,
an oven getting warm, and an assortment of apples to peel, for a pie.

It was going well so far. He held the apple in his left hand,
cradling it with his fingertips and the sides of his fingers.
His right hand, now, it had several jobs to do.
In the curl of his four right-hand fingers he held the wooden handle of the knife,
its blade pointed towards him.
His right thumb extended away from his hand as if it didn’t want to have anything to do
with those fingers, or like a “thumbs-up” gesture but pointing out to the left instead of up.
Both his right thumb and the four curled fingers also helped to hold the apple,
and kept it from jumping up and falling to the floor.
But mainly his hands worked together to advance the blade against the skin of the apple, just so.
With slight but firm pressure his hands rotated the apple so that the blade,
guided with care, bit through the skin, just enough, not too much, and his right fingers,
clutching, drew the blade on and under the skin, further and further,
while his right thumb braced against the as-yet-unpeeled part of the apple.
A lot going on! Pressure this way and pressure that way, all for the desired outcome.
In this way he separated the peel from the apple, but took care not to cut away
too much of the white “meat” of the apple. That white part was the grail.

Again and again the blade approached his thumb, almost touched it, sometimes did
touch it, just a tart little kiss, the sharp blade against the soft thumb pad.
He had learned how to do this from someone long ago, not his father. Probably his mother.
He would have been a balky pupil then. He had really wanted to know how to do it right
and not cut himself in the process, he just didn’t want to be taught.

And his mother knew how to peel an apple, she sure did. And fast!
She had peeled a lot of apples, a lot of potatoes, in her time. On many occasions
he had watched her work the paring knife, a knife he knew to be almost as sharp as a razor,
watched her draw that blade up to her right thumb over and over, and not get cut, ever.
How the heck did she manage that?

Someone had to show you how to do it. You wouldn’t get it by reading directions in some book.

It was going quite well. And now, like the peel separating from the apple,
his mind began to separate from his task, and his task began to go on along without him.
He had started with the first apple up about where the top of Greenland would be.
Because, you know, the apple resembled the planet.

The green apple was spherical like the blue planet, and had two poles on it like the planet
and had a tough outer skin like the planet. And when you rotated it in order to peel it,
it rotated in the same direction as the planet, the western parts traveling right around
to where the eastern parts used to be.

Under his gentle, steady surgery the apple completely became the planet, the one he lived on.
His hands kept working, but by themselves. His mind had gone adrift,
and he was up there in space now, looking down at the apple, his planet.
He could see the oceans, the great deserts, the thick and sudsy formations of clouds.
The blade cut across the globe, a formidable storm edge shearing away the surface of the planet.

Now the blade became a sharp winter gale, the brunt of it a thousand miles wide.
He watched it cut down mountain ranges as it passed through them,
slice off the crests of the mightiest waves far out at sea.
He inclined his head slightly, and the blade became a great ship with a sharp prow,
circumnavigating the globe, rolling and surging, and now it was an enormous silver bird,
wings spread wide, fierce with hooked beak and talons, a shadow of woe.
He looked closer. The blade was now coursing south of the equator,
heading down towards the pole. He could see – what were these? – the high peaks of Chile,
the Galapagos Islands, the vast South Pacific, the parched and forbidding interior of Australia.
He saw these things drawing nearer, and he could hear them and smell them too.
He was no longer in his kitchen but adventuring around the planet, a fearless adventurer,
going off to where the beach sands were black, where volcanoes shot fire skyward,
where the wind knocked his hat off, tore at his coat, pushed him down into the wet heather.

All of the places he could go!

Then he had reached the end of the single long piece of peel. He stood the apple up
on the cutting board and deftly split it. Chop!