Young Flame
by Anna Lewis
22/01/2020 | short fiction | 16 minute read | tw: death, suicide
Illustration by Emma Ruskuc
We have always buried our dead among the grave-trees.
We must dig them deep but not too deep. We must rake through the soil on top. We must rustle the branches of nearby trees, such that their seeds fall on the fresh-turned earth like pepper on mashed roots.
We must walk away.
Sometimes we make mistakes. It’s a great tragedy when this happens, for then the leaves of the grave-trees lose their auburn splendour. They fall in their greyness and catch the wind to scatter where our children play and where our fish feed, coming up from the depths of the lake to nibble tidbits on the surface or to be caught in our nets.
When this happens, we must mourn. People die all the time, but we don’t mourn often.
At Bez’s celebration we avoided looking at the glimmering bronze ribbon his mother had tied around his neck to mask the rope marks. Later as we ate roasted meats and performed the intricate series of bows to each other that commemorate our shared love for him, we whispered to each other what a tender boy he’d been, how sweet to share his gangly corpse with the dark-mottled holy ground.
Where we have left him to grow, he will form a tree of the brightest red. The newest trees are the ones of most beauty; they glow exuberantly.
The oldest trees, though, their voices are the loudest. It may be some years before we hear Bez among the whispers, and even then his voice will still be sapling-quiet compared to those elders that sing loud across the forest.
The oldest trees, though, their voices are the loudest. It may be some years before we hear Bez among the whispers, and even then his voice will still be sapling-quiet compared to those elders that sing loud across the forest.
The elders tell us things we have forgotten. They tell us that they love us; that they miss us; that they will see us soon.
When I made my bows to Bez’s mother, she broke ceremony completely. She reached her hands out to tangle in my hair, to run across the corners of my lips where Bez had pressed his so many times.
We disapproved of the terror behind her eyes. He was in the ground; he would come back soon. This was a happy day, as all such days should be. But I leant my head into her touch. It was right that he should find rest there eventually, but it was cruel that his mother should miss him from our dance and song and harvest rather than resting ready and waiting for him in the forest where we knew each tree by name.
I missed him too, the rise and fall of his breaths in the dark, his hand slipping under knotted belt to fumble for my already hard cock. There was a current that passed between our eyes when I made him laugh. For all its peace the grove of singing trees is not a place of sparks.
And yet there was the comfort of knowing we would lie together, and our roots would intertwine, and our branches would shade each other in the sun and brush each other in the wind.
I’d wanted us to commit to each other when we were older, to make the same promise all couples did.
Bez had hated it. I’d woken many mornings when I was still fuzzy with sleep to see him sat on the edge of the bed, staring out into the sunlight with his mouth hanging thoughtfully open. “Come back to bed,” I’d whisper into his back, but instead he’d keep going back and forth on some point that tortured him still.
“When I go, I want to go,” he’d said, and I’d mumbled don’t go so many times that it began to feel pointless.
Those weren’t the days to worry about, anyway. The ones that worried me involved him frenetic in a pulse of directionless energy; found him diving to the lake from ever-higher heights not for bravado nor skill but for, he said, the whistle of air past his ears; cast him pacing the edge of the grave-tree forest with flint and kindling until I found him and could gently take it away from him, saying please, Bez, please, all this love and still you want darkness.
He probably hadn’t been thinking, as he hung, about the burial. Knowing this made it feel like less of a betrayal as we tended to his plot.
We went out in groups to comb the scrubland where mortal soil blended with that on which the singing trees grew. Each new burial heralded a creeping spread in the holy loam, with roots casting out to colonise new dust. The telltale dark tufts that grew on the special soil fingered out onto mortal territory and shaded it a richer hue.
Our ritual each time was to cut the mortal growth back, to hoe and fertilise, to allow the spread to continue. It was a liturgy of necessity. There would always be more trees to come.
Everyone was muted in the weeks after we laid Bez to rest. It was like when from high up on a hill you see dappled patches of shadow fall from the cacophony of clouds above. We could see the shadow that fell on our houses, though we knew it would pass in its own scudding way.
The shadow had fallen long before he’d died, in his household at least. We’d all known he wasn’t well. How unwell was a question of chance and time, one we were unlucky with.
I go to visit him as soon as custom allows it. I meet his mother there and she draws me close to her chest after I’ve scattered the sacred dung for fertiliser.
“Such a shadow-graced boy,” she murmurs in fondness. That was what we had started to call me as my rapidly stretching limbs propelled me towards manhood. Shadow-graced for the length of my stride, the dark tangle of my hair, the deep purple rims under my eyes. Shadow-graced for how I was often encountered at night, my proclivity for haunting the mirrored pondside moon and stars something of a running joke.
Bez, I think, would have been addle-thumbed or sweet-dawned or song-frenzied, for his dancing and laughter and so many other things we cannot name. He slipped so sun-bright through our rituals that few of us knew how he struggled with them; if we had called him wild-danced it would have been a compliment.
I don’t talk about this to his mother.
Thick roots run through the grove, where other trees have made their rest. Where Bez lies they loop back in and around themselves to afford his nascent tendrils some space. I see them peeking up all white and tumescent when I first arrive.
On my second visit I swear I can see one move. I put it down to the vagaries of nature and my own emotional eyes.
On the third I hear a creaking. The branches on the older trees must weigh heavy.
I lose coordination with his mother. She goes when she’s done pulling strings of fish from the river or pounding down beans for the soporific drinks she steeps. I go in the hollowest parts of the night, when I would have been alone even back when Bez was with us. I used to wander to the lake. Now I wander here.
Alone in the dark I hear a ragged, pained moaning.
It is too soon for Bez to speak but I sink my hands into the warm earth in the light of a glowing lantern. I’m ready to feel any minute vibrations from his root-knot. I know I must be imagining it, but I want the sound echoing in my brain to be made loud and real.
Instead of vibrations I feel something more wrong. His roots are shifting and shaking. They are lashing around under the earth. This moaning is the groan of soil moving past soil.
I stumble to my feet. Struggle to find a solid place to put them down as the ground churns.
We do not account for this. Nobody who is laid beneath the surface comes back up again from their rest. One comes into the fullness of one’s growth, or one decays before the seedling roots can knot in, but this is not a place where one breaks the surface and comes back up. This is a place where one sinks.
We do not account for this. Nobody who is laid beneath the surface comes back up again from their rest. One comes into the fullness of one’s growth, or one decays before the seedling roots can knot in, but this is not a place where one breaks the surface and comes back up. This is a place where one sinks.
Emerging he looks like a whirlpool standing up. Like a tree vomiting. Like mud desperate to breathe.
We have no songs for people who rise from beneath the ground.
I run. As I go, leaves shake from him and slither to the floor.
I stay away, but not for long. I tell no-one else. I return armed with the need to find out what he wants.
It takes some time to find him, because he’s moved. I have to follow a trail of broken things across the otherwise pristine forest floor. I don’t think he’s trying to hide, specifically, but it occurs to me that I could be wrong. It’s been a while since I could read everything he was thinking in his face.
When I reach him he is slumped with his head in his hands. All around him are great gouges in the soil. The sharp sting of ammonia floats in the air, and pale uncovered roots loop out from the earth.
“Dig. Dig, dig,” he grumbles. His voice sounds just like I remember it. It is wrong.
I approach slowly, unsure how to be gentle.
He looks up at me, and I see clearly his beautiful flesh-face pieced and pocked and wound through with greenery. Where his mouth must open to speak there is some blood, and it’s clear the vines had clamped his lips shut until he tugged them away. One errant branch plunges through his left eye, its small diameter stopping his lids from closing completely so that he blinks furiously with discomfort.
“Bez,” I say, “Bez, you need to lie still.”
He shakes all over, an angry flinging of his foliage. “The roots. Unroot uproot me. Send me elsewhere plant me elsewhere. Let me wilt.”
He moved as soon as he had the strength, I can see. The effort must have been immense. His roots have churned a path through the forest, but even now as he throws his body into it he cannot break them apart.
“Bring knives,” he says, his eyes latching onto me. “Bring fire.”
So he means to cut his tether. So he means to desecrate.
“I won’t be trapped in this,” he says.
In all the growth, his ribbon has slipped. I can see the purple-black bruise on his neck. I still don’t know what he’s so desperate to wind free of, but I was never good at holding him here.
“Go to sleep,” I say. “Sink down.”
“I’m not ready to.”
“You can’t come home,” I tell him.
He frowns, a furrow I’ve seen haunt his face too frequently. “I wouldn’t want to.”
He is close to me now, and he moves forwards to press his lips against mine. He tastes stagnant. I kiss him back. He bites hard, like he always has before, and I sigh against his skin.
I know next time I come will be with sharp blades and matches.
We have always buried our dead here, in the grove of trees that sing. But I will take this bruised boy out and wander with him through the wild.
about Anna (she/her/hers)
not yet ossified. Writes stories about yearning, power and magic. Works in health or science or something. Likes asking questions, less keen on answering them.
twitter: @aigroe