Cherry Picker by Shyla Jones

I disappeared from the ranch in the summer, but every day was summer on the ranch. 

Townspeople called it Manure Ranch, because the stench of cow shit made everyone in the commune stink. We really called ourselves Sunshine, and each individual was a Sun Person, the collective the Sun People. Leland was the Sun God. This came from a freak accident in college that should have left him paralyzed; Leland said he prayed to the sun as it blared over his torn flesh, that the burn of it felt like religion. He realized that God was the sun, and the sun was God. There was no difference. 

Leland was my fifty-something-year-old distant cousin. He was tall and skinny with stringy, brown hair down to his elbows. I thought he was ugly, but everyone in Sunshine thought he was the most handsome man God created. Leland wasn’t paralyzed, and I could never verify if the story was true. But he had no scars. He walked with a cane with a carving of the sun at the top, but I remember several times I caught him off guard with no cane, his yellow and white robes replaced by casual pajama pants and a T-shirt. We were family, that’s why. Leland was marrying my older sister, Charity. They were going to have nine children, he said, because nine was a holy number even though I found no proof of this. Charity was ditzy with a thin waist and large chest; you could even see it underneath the baggy dresses we girls wore.

The morning of Leland and Charity’s wedding day, my twin brother River was banished for having a music player in his dresser drawer. Leland watched as one of his brothers bumped away in the jalopy the Sun People shared, River in the backseat with his eyes on mine as he got smaller and smaller. Leland was in a tux. My mother was in her best dress, floor length, long sleeved, sugar white. Her face was sunspotted and peeling. We were allowed no sunscreen when we went outside, and we were always outside. No one cried when River left. No one mentioned him again. 

*

River was my best friend. We were twins, fraternal and complete opposites in looks and personality. He was loud and abrasive, an arguer, always looking for the next mess to start, the next trouble to cause. When we were nine, he snuck off the ranch and went into town on foot. He brought back food I’d never seen in my life, sweets wrapped in bright colored plastic and canned drinks with bubbles that felt like electricity when I gulped them down. I asked where he got them, and he lied, said God led him there as a gift for the hard work we had done the previous morning, which was, of course, scraping horse shit from stable floors until our shoulders cramped. I imagined something similar was the case for the music player Leland found. I had no idea why he had that. They questioned me when they finished interrogating him, but for once I didn’t know what River did to get himself in such a situation. 

I was quieter than him. More vermonlike. I had a soft jawline, crooked teeth, an odd-shaped face. I was ugly, and my family made sure to let me know that River was not. I minded my own business. I did my chores and said my prayers and tried my very best to not give into any temptation. Leland was the Sun God, he was Helios incarnate, and God was the Sun and the Sun was our God. We were born in the church. We would marry in the church. We would die in the church. River once told me about a book on something called Christianity, and I insisted that it was a fairytale. Sunshine was all there was. Anything past the ranch was forbidden, corrupt, ungodly. I wanted to be godly. I wanted to be a good Sun Girl. I wanted the long life in light that Leland always promised. I had believed, no matter how reckless he could be, that River would live it with me. 

*

When I left, I had three sisters and four brothers. Charity was the oldest, then Atlas, the oldest brother, then Matthew, Dana Jean, me and River, Josie, and the youngest, Apollo. He was two and the favorite. My disappearance was one month after Charity’s wedding, and I was thirteen years old. Charity was eighteen, and was proclaimed pregnant by Leland, who announced he had consulted God on his new wife’s womb. She was pregnant with triplets, he said. God is merciful, God is plentiful, God is beautiful. 

We chanted over Charity’s body splayed in the grass, the cows grazing and shitting just a few feet away. My mother and aunts wailed in happiness. The older women always over exaggerated; though the kids were taught to pray in this same, dramatic way, most of us were coming of age and felt embarrassed around each other—because, really, somewhere in Sunshine was the person we’d marry. 

The commune cat, Good Girl, hopped onto the fence as we prayed over Charity. The sun was relentless, the scent of sweaty bodies unmistakable. I stared at the cat while I chanted and moaned. I wondered what she thought of us and felt ashamed. But we were not supposed to be ashamed of Sunshine. Who were we to deny God’s power? His holy light? Who were we to be embarrassed of the love he burned down on us? He loved us so much that he basked the entire planet in sunlight, grew our crops and warmed our skin and fed our brains. 

*

Josie and I were on berry duty that afternoon. After lunch, my mother handed us our baskets, and we went out back to the farm with other Sun Girls. Josie was eleven years old then, her mousy, sun dyed hair tied back at the nape of her neck. Our hair was thin and seedy looking, stretching down to the small of our backs because Leland liked us to look that way, and Leland was the one with direct contact to God. I ran my fingers through her ponytail, swung it back and forth like a horse’s tail to make her laugh. 

“Would you miss me if I was banished?” I asked her. 

She looked up at me with bleary eyes. I wanted to believe none of my siblings had gotten over River’s banishment, that they just knew better than to say so. “Why?”

I shrugged. My basket bumped against my knees. The skirts and dresses we wore were heavy, too heavy for the heat. I felt my armpit sweat pooling against the thick fabric. 

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Josie said, “like you-know-who.”

“River didn’t do anything.” I scowled. We reached the cherry trees and dropped our baskets. The medicinally sweet smell was sticky under the heat, settling on my skin. Sun Girls drifted by the crops around us. I saw Eden and her knobby knees by the strawberry bushes, suckling on the flesh of a peach. When I was ten, Leland announced that God had declared River and Eden to be married when Eden was sixteen years old, with pregnancy to follow at eighteen. My father and her father spent the night praying by the statue of Helios by the bay window. When the sun came up, they rejoiced in tears. In bed, River whispered to me that he thought Eden looked like a pelican. 

I bit into a cherry. The tartness burst between my teeth, the pit rolling around in my mouth like a threat. If I swallowed it, I wondered if something would grow inside of me. Maybe a cherry tree would bloom, and I’d sprout pink blossoms from my eyes. I wondered if I’d be pretty. 

“How’s it shining, young sunnies?” I looked up and saw Deb, my older cousin, and Isaiah, her assigned husband. Deb’s russet hair now reached her knees, the curls dry and frizzy, but still full and alive. Deb was one of Leland’s favorites because her face was as round as a planet and the scatter of freckles on her nose looked like stars. She would’ve been his wife if Charity hadn’t turned eighteen first, that’s what River always said. Instead he gave Deb his youngest nephew with the missing front tooth and square head. 

“Hiya!” Josie chirped. She sat on my shoulders to reach more cherries.  

“Hi, Sadie,” Deb said to me. Her lips were thick and wide and under her eyes were dark, puffy bags.

“Hey,” I said.

“How you doing?”

“Fine.”

“Heard a little rumor about you,” Deb said, twirling her hair. “You wanna hear it?”

“It’s ungodly to gossip,” I told her and lowered my basket of berries. “Unless you know it to be true, then no thank you.” 

She shrugged. “I know that. I just didn’t think you guys cared much about rules. I mean, after all that’s happened.” 

Deb wasn’t pretty, not like Eden or Charity or even Josie. She just had something about her. Sometimes she felt like a temptress, though I was never able to catch her doing anything ungodly, even in her most private moments, when I’d sneak around the house in darkness, spying on the Sun People. Searching for a drop of moral superiority. 

“Anyways.” She smiled. Her teeth were rotting, but all of ours were. “See you around, cousin. Be in light.” 

As they walked, Isaiah ruffled Josie’s hair so pieces fell from its ponytail.

“What rumor?” she asked me later, when our baskets were filled to the top, cherries bouncing around with each step. They looked like handfuls of rubies. Josie looked more like River than I did, and I realized that made me want to cry. 

“Don’t listen to her, Josilee,” I said. “The devil speaks his tongues through her lips.”

“You’re lying!” 

“Maybe.” We reached the mansion and dropped our baskets in the eating area. The mansion housed all eighteen families of the Sun People with thirteen rooms and two kitchens, one made from what used to be a study. My family slept together, all of us sharing beds, with my parents in the same room. There were no doors as Leland had them taken out. There was nothing to hide between us. The premise of a door meant there was to be distrust, and none of us were engaging in untrustworthy behavior. There was simply no need.

Aunt Hanna and some elder women stood by the tables, breaking a loaf of bread and reading passages from Sunshine’s bible. It was written by Leland, with books by his brothers who had transcribed passages from the patterns of a stained-glass window. Josie ran to Aunt Hanna’s knees and hugged them— she was gentle in that way. Aunt Hanna smiled down at her and whispered, “be in light, my little niece.” To me, her eyes flicked away as if I wasn’t there.

*

I had started to miss River the most at dinnertime. The space he had occupied at the table was filled and forgotten. Our eating area was one big table—which was really a bunch of smaller tables pushed together. Each family had their own long, wooden bench, chopped and built by Leland himself. Carved into the tabletops were elaborate designs of the sun in different styles. I set my glass of water over one with the face of a woman and watched the condensation sweat onto the wood. My mother sat across from me with her long, gray hair loose. She sipped her bowl of soup while running a finger over the pages of the bible, murmuring as she read. Atlas was beside her with Apollo in his lap, who gurgled and chirped with blueberry mash smeared on his mouth. 

None of us knew what our mother was like before she married our father, before Sunshine. I didn’t know what she looked like, because she had burned all photographs. Leland said photographs were a prospect of vanity. Our memories were preserved in the sky. If we asked God, we could relive anything we held close. 

“Not eating?” Dana Jean asked as she plopped beside me. She nodded to my bowl, full to the top of watery chicken soup.

I shrugged. “Not that hungry.”

My parents exchanged glances before my mother said, “You must eat. This is the fruit that the Lord hath brought.” 

Blushing, I brought a spoonful to my lips. My mother knew how to get me to do things. 

“Is something wrong?” she prodded. Her lips were chapped and pale, spit collecting in the hinges. “You love chicken soup.”

“No,” I said. My siblings blinked at me with their identical brown eyes. Charity was the only one missing. I spotted her a ways away, in between Leland and his elderly mother, her wrinkled hands on Charity’s stomach. Dana Jean gnawed on a hardened piece of bread, Atlas spoon-fed Apollo mashed fruit, Matthew read over our mother’s shoulder, Josie hummed a Sunday hymn. I was overwhelmed with hatred for all of them. Where was their outrage? Why was I alone in my frustration, my sadness, my confusion? I wanted to scream at them. Our brother is gone! Remember him? I wanted to rip the sun from the sky and stomp on it until it cracked like an egg. I’d scoop the guts from the ground and drown my siblings in it until they admitted someone was missing. That a month ago, I was a twin and now, I wasn’t. 

*

Dana Jean slept next to me that night. She smelled of the ranch and the apricot tree, the sleeves of her nightdress bunching by her elbow. A lantern flickered in the hallway as I thought of River and his music player. I had never heard of a music player before they found River’s. I’d never heard any music that wasn’t Leland’s and our church hymns. What existed beyond this ranch? Could it all be full of ungodly sin when the sun shone over it too? I missed River so much it hurt. 

*

The roosters woke us up at the same time every morning. Leland would stand in the sitting room in his pastor garb, a bright yellow suit or the robes, yellow with white like a daisy.  I recall the mornings from childhood, when River and I would soar out of our room with socked feet, slipping on the wood and grabbing onto Leland’s robes to stay upright. Josie would trail after us with her thumb in her mouth. A stuffed rabbit, knit by our mother, would dangle from her hand. 

“Slow down!” Leland would say, but he’d be laughing. He loved kids, loved all of us most when we were too young for doubt. He’d usher the Sun People into the sitting room, one of us kids on his lap, and read us the chores that needed fixing on the ranch. 

The morning that I disappeared, Leland waved me over like he knew something I didn’t. God is watching, I thought. God is watching me. 

“Child of the Sun,” Leland addressed me with his hand on my shoulder. His smile, once yellow with sunlight, was ugly in the blear of the morning. His back teeth were black and green, chipped with rot. I never figured out why our hygiene was so terrible, why Leland appointed elder women as the healers of Sunshine, why they used bowls of honey and herbs and prayer to save us. If an illness spread across the ranch, we were told it was a testament to God, that it was because our devotion was not strong enough. We’d all have to lay on our backs in the dry grass and stare up at the sun to let it blind us with its love.  

“Be in light, my sister,” Leland said with wrinkled eyebrows. 

*

River’s favorite chore was cleaning the chicken coop. Together we’d wheel the hay from the back of the house down to the barn where the animals stayed. Most of the kids hated cleaning, but River had scraped out the chicken shit, replaced their hay, and collected their eggs with laughter, the freckles on his lips multiplied from the sun. This time, I was on coop duty with Atlas, who was my least favorite brother, because he was the oldest, so he thought he was our second father. I gathered the eggs while he sprayed down the wood, careful not to let the chickens out of my peripheral. There was no laughter, no humming, no games. Atlas gave instructions, I followed them, and then we were done. I knew that if I walked away from the coop, walked off the ranch until I was in the square, Atlas wouldn’t care. He’d tell the others, and they’d worry more for the fresh eggs I’d brought with me.

I was quiet as we walked back to the house. Atlas swung the basket of eggs as if he’d gotten them himself. In the eating area, Charity and Leland danced to banjo music, the Sun People clapping and praying and laughing. While they sang, I slipped away to the bedrooms to pack. 

*

Banishment was sin, and banishment was temptation. I did my chores today; I won’t be banished. I obeyed my parents today; I have another day. We existed in a constant state of trying to stay, as if we would be banished no matter what, and we just had to delay. I had only seen one banishment before River’s: a young woman who had followed an elder to Sunshine after our weekly door-to-door solicitation. She lasted for two years, wearing our long dresses and brushing our long hair, until someone told Leland she was filling the ears of the children with tales of the city. On the day of her banishment, we all watched Leland read off her offenses, our ears ringing with the fear that our breath would be sinful too, and we’d follow her fate. Where did the banished go? What became of the life in light they were promised? I had no idea where that woman had gone, and so I had no idea where River had gone. He could have been anywhere. All I had left was the image of his face diminishing in the backseat of the jalopy. 

That was what the sun was for, Leland always said, to guide us. That was the whole point.

 I wheeled my suitcase out the front door and onto the dirt path that led beyond the ranch. The sounds of Sunshine’s songs traveled with me, voices vibrating in my belly. 

Shyla Jones is a writer from the East Coast. Her work can be found in SmokeLong Quarterly, Fractured Lit, perhappened, and others. She is currently working on her first novel. Read her work at shylajones.com and follow her on Twitter @imnotshyla.

6 October 2021