Apple Sn — Check

You hold it in your palm like a foundling. The skin is the color of a sunset bruise—deep crimson bleeding into yellow-green. Your thumb finds the stem, a dry parenthesis.

You realize you were never checking the apple’s provenance. You were checking your own: Are you still the kind of person who eats an apple down to the stem? Who reads a serial number like a poem? Who breaks something open just to hear it speak? apple sn check

The sticker is still there. Tiny type: . You hold it in your palm like a foundling

The scent rises first—sharp, mineral, the ghost of rain on concrete. You lift the broken hemisphere to your ear. Listen. That’s the real check: the small, wet crackle of cells tearing, the sound of a thing ending so that another thing can begin. You realize you were never checking the apple’s provenance

Pass. Fail. Neither.