“Thanks be to the Core!” shouted someone down the road.
“Mothers did it! They did it!”
The bookwormholes, you saw now, were everywhere: in the people, in the trees, punching through the lawns and roads every ten or twenty feet. “What happened here?” you shouted.
“You did,” Diane said.
“What do you mean?”
Not a street or page, it seemed, had been spared. Whole houses were burned to the page; some streets were completely gone. The center of town was leveled. Zooming over the high school, you could see the Small Pear up ahead — all of the windows had been smashed; Gilbert’s was covered with plywood; so was the Beagle. You looked to your right. “Look at the Hu Ke Lau!” you hollered. It was just a charred corpse of a restaurant. And many of the pages on the North Side were nearly empty — burned out, and rotted completely through in some places.
“Where are the Mothers?” you shouted.
“Most of them were KIA, some of them maybe captured,” Diane shouted. “The rest are in hiding.”
The mood on the street below, though, was jubilant: people were clapping or hooting, shaking hands, high-fiving, and hugging. Passing over Coventry, a long-haired man shouted up at them. “Beautiful!” He took off his shirt and slammed it to the page. “It’s fucking beautiful!”
Diane turned onto Converse Street. Soon you could see the edge of the worryfields. Even there, though, people were happy: you saw two worriers dancing, another just lying on her back and staring up at the bright sky.
As you approached the fields, you saw a big lump in the far corner of the page. “What’s that?” one of your thoughts said, pointing. Something was moving next to the lump. Was it a machine? No, it was a man in a gray jumpsuit, hunched over the page. He was digging. “Is that Ralph?” you shouted. But you knew it was.
Diane dipped, grazed the surface, and lowered you onto the white soil. Ralph didn’t even look up. Dirt flew over his shoulder.
“Ralph,” Diane lyled.
You were in awe — you’d never seen anyone work so hard. Ralph didn’t even have a shovel — he was scooping the pagesoil with his bare hands.
“Ralph!” Diane shouted again.
Ralph looked up, surprised. “Wha,” he said.
“I need you to stop digging—”
He shook his head. “The page is tough,” he said, “but I’m making progress—”
“I need you to stop that right now and go find someone for me.”
Ralph’s straightened up. “Who?” he said.
The Reader watched Ralph’s truck drive off; then she turned to Diane. “Walk around the page,” the Reader told her. “Start collecting words.”
“What for?”
“As many as you can find.”
“They’re all dead,” said Diane.
“That’s OK,” the Reader said.
Diane went to work on this page and the next, gathering as many words as she could. When her arms were full, she stacked the words next to her son’s grave. Soon, she saw Ralph’s truck drive into the worryfields — he hadn’t been gone long. The passenger’s-side door opened and the Memory of Johnny Appleseed stepped out.
“Oh my Core!” shouted the Memory, hobbling toward you. He held out his ethereal arms. “You came back!”
“Took some convincing,” Diane said.
“Did you hear what happened to 
?” the Memory of Johnny Appleseed asked her.
“Of course she heard,” Diane said.
“I brought something for you,” the Reader told the Memory. She gestured to Diane, who opened the drawer in her skirt.
Ralph studied a pile of words next to the lump. “What are these?” he said.
Diane fished into her skirt, found the bitten-into apple, and held it out to the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.
The Memory’s face bloomed. “What — where did you—” He pointed at the Reader. “Where did you get this?” He took the apple with both hands and held it like an egg.
“Holy shit,” said Ralph. “Is that what I think it is?”
The Reader turned to him. “Let the Memory deal with the story of Appleseed,” she said. “I need you to help Diane pick up as many words as you can find.”
Ralph looked confused. “Why?” he said. “They’re all—”
“She knows that, honey,” said Diane. “Just do what she says.” She led Ralph to an adjacent field to look for sentences. He soon caught on and understood what they were looking for. When he couldn’t find the exact right words, though, he decided to improvise. He selected three words from the page—“junction,” “author,” and “veneer”—and dragged them over to Diane. “Do me a favor and cut these, will you?” he said.
The Mother flipped on her skirtsaw and it whirred to life. “Where?” she said. Ralph pointed, and Diane pulled the blade through the words and gave Ralph the wordparts he needed: the “au,” the “ction” and the “eer.”
Then Diane went back to what she was doing: dislodging a top layer of words—“nuisance,” “selfish,” “brat”—and digging deep. Finally, she found the words that she was looking for — that she’d been trying to find for years: “I was just so scared.” And, “I was angry.” And, “And sad. I didn’t know what to do with it all.”
And then, “You were wonderful the way you were. You didn’t need to be anything, or do anything, or be anyone.”
Ralph and Diane carried their words across the fields and lay them on the ground by the Reader. The Memory of Johnny Appleseed stood by, watching them arrange the words. They didn’t all fit together — some letters were rotted beyond recognition; other phrases were irrelevant or heavy with sorrow — but they did their best to order them so they made new sense. “Put that one there, how about,” said Diane at one point. After watching the Reader work for a few minutes, Ralph knelt next to her and sunk his hands into the page.
“What’s she doing?” the Memory of Johnny Appleseed asked Diane.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Diane said. “She’s revising.”
HONEYCRISP
I. YELLOW TRANSPARENT II
That spring, the Auctioneer reappeared in Appleseed. Her arrival was completely unannounced — one day she was spotted walking over the margin, her arms full of meaningless words and throwaways. She didn’t even go home to Converse Street — instead, she walked directly to the empty Amphitheatre. Then she stepped up onto the bare cement stage, held up an item at random — a jar of hearsay — and began to shout.
“Ourfirstitemladiesandgentsishearsayfineappleseedhearsayyourenotgoingtofindanyrumorsbetterthantheserumorsrightherethishearsayisholyitholdsthebonesoftruthandmemoryletsstartthebiddingathalfaconcept.”
Soon, a numb passerby humbled to the edge of the Amphitheatre. Lulled by the Auctioneer’s call, he blurted out a meaning-bid without even really thinking about it. Just then, a wandering thayer appeared in the opposite corner of the Amphitheatre and shouted out a higher amount. The numb countered; the thayer did, too.
News of the auction rilled through town — it wasn’t long before a crowd had assembled. Someone lent a table; a Cone delivered a pulpit. Appleseedians brought meaningless items to the stage and the Auctioneer held them up, sang of their potential, and made them meaningful. That auction ran for ten hours straight. Looking out at the jam-packed house, the Auctioneer could see off-duty Cones, former Mothers, Muir Drop Forgers. She wondered if Uncle Joump was out there. And how about her father? Or her brother — where was her brother?