The old crabapple tree was little more than a shrub, but every fall it dropped bushels of the sour little fruits.
As a child, he had always disliked the tree. It made skeletal, grasping shadows in the walls of his bedroom, and it was always his job to gather up the rotting fruit before they damaged the lawn.
There was a bad winter the year he went away to college. He came home to find a jagged stump where the crabapple tree had been.
He searched for hours until he found a single looked-over fruit and carefully saved the seeds.

“Crabapple in Fresh Snow” by XXPepper is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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Everyday Drabbles © 2025 by Hugh J. O’Donnell is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0