The Mansion, the apples, and the bodies

He was trying hard not to show.

He was holding, so tightly, onto the superficial façade of his calm like his life was depending on it, which technically, he did feel like it was. The current view playing out before him, however, was pressing onto the cracks already threatening the facade.

His wife, his dear dear wife, was currently pressed, so close, to a man that wasn’t him. They were both seated at a comfy booth, nestled deeply into the coffeeshop, that John had to be using his binoculars today. On other days where his treacherous wife and her lover were on a rendezvous, John wouldn’t need to succumb to such measures. But today, he had to. 

It was like his wife was starting to sense an inkling of his catching onto her indiscretions, and was trying to maneuver her secret life more discreetly. 

Little did she know that he was past that naivety point, and has been onto her for quite the months.

He was hunched in his car, binoculars glued to his eyes, masking his face, but even with the physical space and obstacles adding distance between them, John couldn’t miss the ringing boisterous laugh she had just let out. He could just hear it in his own head, how it plays a melody and turns heads toward its source with its sweet musical notes. John sighed, thinking how he prided himself on landing such a win that turned heads.

Now that very woman was the one turning her head, toward someone that was not him.

For the past weeks, he had mulled it over in his head, over and over again, why she had decided to tear her eyes away from him. Steer her heart toward someone else. What had he done to prompt that? What had changed between them that had her seeking the attention and cares of someone else? 

But he was well past that now. 

Sure, in the beginnings, he’d rode the whirlwind of utter shock, denial, sadness, and betrayal. But now, he’d come to terms with it, and decided he would not be the man waiting for his woman to play him.

If they were seated right there, right now in this instant, plotting against him, he was not going to allow them the pleasure of his demise. For he was the one that was to plot against them first.

Sure enough, at first, he wanted redemption. To win back his wife. To fix whatever heinous mistake he’d committed and piece back the beautiful marriage life he’d had with her. To hit the remote’s button and rewind their bodies and souls to the time where everything was fine. Before she abandoned his affections for the sought of another’s. And also maybe hit that other younger piece of scum with his car while he’s at it.

But now, however, things have changed. After months of tracking her, months of witnessing her betrayal day after day, a different setting after another, his ripped-open wound accelerated into a scab instead of healing into a non visible scar. 

His heart had hardened, seeing the sheer audacity of his wife being happy and glowing by another man’s side besides his. She was not an innocent party of this. And maybe she too deserved a car quickly running over her. But he quickly then shook that thought off his mind.

Or so he thought.

Day after day did the thought start to creep back into his mind. It lurked way back in the depths of his consciousness, until slowly, it had caught up with him. Started domineering his every day thought and activity.

What if he had shown her how his pain feels like? How her actions had led to the streaming metaphorical blood pouring from his beating pained heart. He could slice her up, or maybe stab her in the back when she doesn’t know it. Maybe then she’ll feel the very same knife she had struck him first with.

But no. He couldn’t. 

He loved his wife. He couldn’t afford losing her.

But he already did. To another man. When he wasn’t even aware he was put in a trial of yearning her affections.

And so, he didn’t mind entertaining the ideas in his head. 

And slowly, one idea after another, unfolding in a snowball effect, John came to a conclusion. 

He wasn’t mad at the young fellow anymore. He was the one that fell trapped into the wicked charms of his wife. The one who truly deserved his vengeance, his wrath, was the woman who turned his love into bad blood.

She, and she alone, would get the worst of it. He would be ridding the world of her evil, of her swindling charms. He would be purging for the benefit of all the other men remaining in the world.

And so, he had begun his plan. His dwindling ride to insanity and actually plotting against his wife.

Plotting for her murder.

Her death shouldn’t be easy. That he knew.

He also knew that he couldn’t risk it being so obvious. She was an experienced criminal defense lawyer, she’d sense the alter in him and his intentions. Furthermore, he needed something to clear him away. Land him a strong alibi. Something happening to her so deadly, yet so inconspicuous and unassuming to the brightest minds for him to get away with it. 

He wasn’t about to teach his wife a lesson for his pains then be dragged down for it as well. He’d been falsely punished with pain he never invited in the first place. 

So no. He didn’t deserve consequences for what he was about to do.

And so he started planning. Then it had struck him. The perfect decoy. The deadly plot. He knew how to get away with her murder. 

So he bought a house. A mansion more specifically. 

It was at the farthest outskirts of the city they lived in, and it was center home for a vast, interminable land of trees that stretched and stretched endlessly to the horizons beyond. It wasn’t for the heavy trees that he thought might offer the perfect obscurity for a stashed body. Or bodies.

No. It was, more precisely, for the fruits that these trees beared. The fruits that his wife had been obsessively, over the years, begging to drag him along to so that they could pluck them and enjoy their aroma and flavors. He’d never wanted to drive miles away to go on an apple picking event, but it was soon now autumn, and the annual dreaded event he’d always worked hard on avoiding, was now his jail-free ticket to his vengeance plan.

They were going apple picking; not to enjoy the fruits, but ultimately to taste their deaths. A literal forbidden, fatal fruit.

He knew she would go. He was sure of it.

Once she’d receive the apple picking event tickets, she’d insist for them to go. He’d refuse begrudgingly, like how oh so much he wanted to accompany her, which would be exactly what she’d hope for him to say. When John refuses, she’d take her young lover and clutch his arm so lovingly as they drove up to the countryside mansion with its own apple farm.

There, they’d find the wonderful array of tall, thick trees, with bright red apples adorning their leaves. And there, they would pluck the apples and then—

John couldn’t delay it any longer. He thrilled at the images in his head, their convulsing bodies silently shrieking for help. If he was buzzing already from the images in his head, what would the real, live rotten traces of their bodies do to him?

And so, one month later from his epiphany, John had started the plan. 

It was most windy of days, and as John lounged on the spacious roof of his mansion, overlooking the incredible estate of apple trees, he sipped on a freshly squeezed juice as he fixed the binoculars over his eyes. 

Their car had just parked over. The soon to be deceased had just arrived, and John couldn’t have been at any more peace. 

She’d reacted exactly as he planned. Hopped up and down, right and left from ecstasy. Even when he refused the tickets, she didn’t stop. Her smile did not dim a watt. Instead, she’d draped on her lover’s arms. 

Back when he used to own a beating heart, he would’ve felt rage. But the only thing he was feeling right now was static and complete indifference. 

She was just a stranger that he’d witness, in live action, die.

And so the apple picking event starts. 

He’d written in the letter that accompanied the tickets that it was an event held by an important client of her law firm, and that for his gratitude, he’d invite the company for such an event. Of course, no one else was showing.

There was no important client owning a mansion and estate of apple trees. Nor were there any other invitees. 

As the doomed couple started plucking their apples, John had abandoned the roof, and descended to the gates of the estate’s greenery. There, the true gates of hell were unleashing.

He was not about to let them die without knowing why. He was not about to let them die without feeling his pain. More importantly, seeing them ache. 

He would rip the knife from his back and stab it to her front. Before her eyes.

She needed to know who was ending her.

And so, as the ending was nearing, John stopped short of them, after having trudged the whole length of the garden. He was closing in on them just as they munched on their first bites of their picked apples. A hum inside of him came to life.

He was right on time. And now, he wanted his presence known. So once the crunches of his further steps were sensed, the couple that stood before him whirled around. 

They had seen a ghost. Or at least they looked like they did. 

His wife had gaped, letting go of her lover’s arm in a whiplash. 

“John!” She’d gasped. “You made it!” 

John did nothing but crookedly smile. “Oh yes, I very well did.”

For obvious reasons, she acted like her lover wasn’t just standing beside her. She did not pass him any acknowledgments, nor did she remotely move to introduce him. He was conveniently invisible to her, but visible to him. To John.

“Don’t you want to taste one of the apples I’d just picked, darling?”

“Which darling of us are you directing your words to?” John’s eyes were sparkling as his tone took a manically sweet tone.

That, however, had stopped his wife short. Then she looked, for the first time, directly over to her lover. Then back to John.

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean?” John inhaled sharply. “What do I mean??!”

“How many times have you courted him, darling? How many times have you slept with him?! How many times have you screamed his name instead of mine?!”

John bellowed. With every step he took towards them in hot, blinding rage, his wife and her lover took back, in complete and utter bewilderment.

“J-John? What’s going on with you? You’re s-scaring me-e—,”

“Shut up! Just shut the hell up, you treacherous woman! I have done nothing but love you, and how do you return it back? By giving it to someone else?!”

“John! You have it all wrong!! This is just my—“

Suddenly, she stops. His wife ceases movement for a moment, and a complete silence took over the field. John then knew.

It was starting to sink in.

Both, the poison and her treachery. She was realizing something was wrong and tried to utter it. But just as she attempted to convey it, both her lover and her body had dropped to the floor in a heap, a wave of raking, aggressive convulsions taking over her body.

“J-Joh-hnn!” She sputters, heaving her body across the ground of the field, fingers wiggling in reach for her husband’s feet. 

John does take a step forward, but only to step on the very same fingers reaching him for help. 

“You don’t deserve to live when all you will keep doing is deceiving the kind likes of me.”

“H-He’s ju-ust-t m-my int-terrn, Joh-nn!” She finally wheezes her last breath.

But at what cost. She had just turned John’s world upside down. 

Or that’s what she wants him to believe.

Even if she had just uttered the truth, that didn’t mean she didn’t fool around with her intern. Naming the position of the ashen piece of youth lying beside her on the floor did not make any of a difference.

Yet.

A whimper in John’s mind nagged him, and as it nagged longer, it only grew louder.

Check her phone, John. Check her phone. 

You’d find the evidence to incriminate her and validate you there. Check her phone, John.

And so he did. He’d unlocked her phone, and swiped through everything. Her notes, her pictures, her chats, her emails. And the nagging roared. 

It did not only shriek at him that he was wrong, but it also sent him into a state of fever, one so close to one of the poison’s.

He was wrong. John was wrong. 

She hadn’t been cheating on him. She was only mentoring the young lad.

The late nights in the office, the late dinners in fancy restaurants and coffee shops. It was all for mentoring the intern so that he could quickly catch up and take a load off her shoulders. So that she could quickly return back to John in earlier hours. Spend more time with him. It was all lying evident in her chats with the intern and friends.

Only thing was, there was no returning back. Not to him, not to their home, not to her work. Not to anyone.

And he made that. He made that happen. His insecurities were at the core of him.

This wasn’t the first time. What had happened to his first wife was similar to this.

He had promised to stop. He had believed things were different this time around with his latest wife.

Now, all his haunted mind was left with was the whispers of death of a second wife, her poor intern, and the ugly truth swirling in his mind. They weren’t whispers. They were deafening booms. Deafening shrieks of disbelief and utter horror.

John was quickly succumbing to these whispers, to these shrieks.

In one swift step, he’d plucked an apple and bit into it. Then, he’d lied on the floor, next to the unmoving body of his wife.

The poison took over him faster than it did his wife.