Lotus with eye in a radiating circle

Everyone in Tallow Hollow knew the pond at the bottom of the orchard had a lily in it that did not belong to the water. It opened in the heat of August, white and close as a fist unclenching, and at its heart was a single dark eye. The miller's wife said the eye counted every apple taken without asking. Old Hesketh had cut a ring of rays round the gatepost to keep it from wandering, and the marks beneath, which the miller swore were only numbers, were there to tally what was owed.

The boy looked anyway. From the top rung he saw the eye open wider when the sun came off the hill, and the ripples round the stem spread out in fine straight lines, like the spokes of a wheel turning slowly on the water. He had three apples stuffed inside his shirt. He took them out one at a time and set them back under the trees, bruised side down, the way his mother had taught him to lay a sleeping child.

When the last one was returned the lily began to close, petal by petal, until only the eye was left looking up at him through the green. Mabry found him sitting in the grass with empty hands. She did not scold him. The next morning every tree in the north row had dropped its fruit at the foot of the ladder, ripe and unbruised, as though someone had come round in the night and asked for it.