CHARLOTTE AWAKES in an unknown house, in an unknown bed, and wearing someone else's clothes. Sliding out from the covers, she feels the unfamiliar floor beneath her feet, and finds her balance by placing her palm on a table she has never seen. The window, the tree outside it, the bird singing in the branches of the tree. Even the smell of her own skin is foreign: pungent, and dark, and reminiscent of wine.
The kitchen she wanders through is deserted, the chairs in disarray, but the fire is still smoking, and the pot still warm. What is inside the pot she cannot tell; she lifts the lid and sniffs, takes a spoon from the table and stirs. I will have to try it, she decides, but the taste in her mouth is neither savory nor sweet; it tastes somewhat of apples but also of lamb.
And entering the yard she sees that it, too, has been abandoned, though only minutes ago, for the grass is still trampled underfoot and the cows in the pasture are lowing. From the empty yard, she passes through the garden and into the overgrown orchard.
She is not surprised when she fails to recognize the fruit: discolored, misshapen, not quite resembling one kind or another. But it is here, in the orchard, that she sees at last a thing that is familiar to her, leaning up against a tree, as if having waited a lifetime for her to appear. Charlotte takes it in her arms, sits down on a stump, and, embracing it between her legs, begins to play.