Most of the trees have burned down. The remaining ones twist and distort from lack of water and nutrients. Maybe the twisting makes it easier to carry nutrients throughout the body: grow inward rather than upward. Ellie thinks people should learn from trees capable of bending their bodies like pipe cleaners to conserve resources. Things would be so much easier if human bodies were more resilient: they wouldn’t have such a hard time dragging themselves over rocks and mountains, carrying shovels and spades and sheers, wheelbarrowing blackened branches and bark back and forth. Ellie hates the uprooting most, especially when it’s an ancient tree whose roots have grown under abandoned roads and toward town. You’re not allowed to leave a single root because the trees might grow back tougher than before. Ellie struggles with this part because her calluses develop too slowly and when they’ve properly hardened, she picks them off in her sleep. “Not like it’ll matter much anyway,” the others tell her. “They’re just trying to put the remainder of our lives to use so they can tell the public they tried to rehabilitate us.”
Ellie’s execution is scheduled for fifteen years from now. She’s still young so there’s a lot left to squeeze out of her body, and the steady inflow of criminals is the only thing keeping the trees at bay. The Ruling Body had tried scorching out the forests. This was before Ellie was born, before school curriculums were adjusted to emphasize trees as harbingers of death. The fires half-succeeded. The trees grew back warped like their branches were fingers tortured with wrenches and hammers. But Ellie was taught the trees were all dead, and nothing would steal precious water and sunlight from humanity again. But the adults were always cautious, especially those who’d seen the world pre-Scorching, convinced trees threatened to sprout from the ground, plotting to destroy your home, so everyone, even the children, was equipped with Flame Pods to incinerate any tree on sight. Ellie had received five Flame Pods she kept in her pocket and never used. The other kids liked to play with the Pods—burning random bumps in the ground, claiming trees could grow from there.
While the other criminals sit on stumps and joke about mountains shaped like phalluses or middle fingers, Ellie continues to tug at roots, the individual roots loosening slowly but surely like seams. Although she doesn’t have as much arm strength as the convicts who’re here for strangling their wives, she has developed an effective strategy to make up for it: dig her weight into her heels, lean back until she can feel the roots pulling her heels into the dirt, let the pull of her body slowly win out—a slow but effective process. And her wheelbarrow is more full of tree carcasses than anyone else’s. The convicts laugh at her for trying so hard even, but Ellie prefers having something to do. The movement keeps her warm, and she’s saving humanity, kind of. She likes the sense of purpose.
“If you’re over-exposed to those things, they’ll start stealing energy from you too,” Auntie Wei warns while waving a shovel at her. Auntie Wei doesn’t work at all. She was arrested for running a charity to scam rich people out of their jewels. Never caught for twenty years, Auntie Wei claimed. Apparently one of her minions got greedy and bought a book, arousing the suspicion and investigation of the Ruling Body. “Books are evil,” Auntie Wei insists. “They’ll tempt you like nothing else. Especially hollow-headed fools.”
Ellie isn’t too worried about the trees leaching her energy. The prison must’ve already taken this into account when they set her sentence date. She certainly doesn’t feel tired after touching bark or withered twigs, at least no more tired than she gets from speaking to Auntie Wei.
“Well of course you don’t feel tired right now,” Auntie Wei says. “These trees don’t have half the power they used to have. They used to block out the sun before the Scorching. But just you wait, they’re biding their time, and when we’re all dead, who knows what those stuck-up, swimming-in-diamonds folks are going to do.” Auntie Wei hates the Ruling Body because they hoard money, refuse to distribute it to towns without proper air, blame residue trees for tainting the atmosphere. Auntie Wei grew up during the Rationing Years, when the trees grew wherever they pleased and people received tickets to claim their monthly supplies of water, heat and food. “You couldn’t get shit with those tickets. During winters, we lived on the Napa cabbages we buried under the ground,” Auntie Wei had told Ellie while they waited in line for their meals.
Auntie Wei feels like a mother, if nagging is what a mother is supposed to do. Ellie doesn’t quite remember since her real mother disappeared soon after Ellie’s birth. A lot of folks disappeared during that time, the year after the Scorching. Father said mother dabbled in taboo things, like trying to communicate with evil, sacrificing personal virtue in exchange for power from the ashen forests. Some crazies who worshiped the forests: a lunatic cult, a violent and disruptive force, a group Ellie had learned acted as mediums to the devil trees and thus threatened the survival of humanity. Father didn’t speak much of mother beyond warning Ellie not to “do evil.”
Too late for that, Ellie thinks.
When they are done working for the day, Auntie Wei insists on performing Tai chi to improve their blood flow, clear their meridians, and calm their minds. As much as she likes to complain, Auntie Wei seems to value inner peace more than she does a warm meal. She moves her arms and legs like they’re knives in the wind while everyone else rushes to the front of the line to snag soup while it’s still hot. “You’ve got to be ready for death at all times,” she says. Ellie doesn’t argue. The Tai chi prevents Ellie’s muscles from aching in the mornings, so she follows along, and no one cares about what you do with your free time because there’s no way to escape. Between the prison lands and the rest of civilization, the Ruling Body had a wall built tall enough to cover the view of the snow-capped mountains where Ice Hawks are said to hunt. And even if you got through the wall, you’d have to travel for who-knows-how-long in Savage Territory.
“You’ve never seen the Bearing Trees, I’m sure,” Auntie Wei tells Ellie while they’re balancing on one leg and bending the other to their kneecaps.
“Never,” Ellie confirms. But she has heard of them. Mother left a bag of seeds from a Bearing Tree, sandwiched between pictures of tall, far-reaching canopies with bright green leaves and giant, red-orange orbs dangling from the branches. The orbs looked big enough they’d need two hands to hold them stable. Ellie wondered how they managed to stay afloat, how they didn’t snap the branches and plummet to the ground.
“Oh, those were the most delicious. Sweet, crisp, juicy. Like nothing you’ve ever tasted,” Auntie Wei continues. “It’s a shame we’ve gotten rid of them. But I suppose it’s for the best.”
Yes, for the best, Ellie thinks. She wonders if the sprouted seeds she’d left hidden in the yard are still there, or if father burned the entire home. Probably the safest move for father, who remained silent when she was taken away for keeping a sprouted seedling in her pocket. She had watched him flinch when the Peace Force told him “you’re lucky we’re not burning you.” Hopefully father burned everything. She’d rather he move to a shelter than get caught for harvesting seeds—an almost guaranteed incineration sentence for adults.
“Come on, they’ve started putting away the meal stations,” Auntie Wei says, already walking toward the now empty line. “If they told me prison would keep my stomach full, I wouldn’t have bothered with conning rich bastards.”
Auntie Wei’s sentence is scheduled for next month even though she’s still strong and spry. Ellie thinks it’s because Auntie Wei hardly works, and the Peace Force moves up the sentences of slackers to make room for more productive inmates. Like Ellie.
After they’ve eaten and Auntie Wei leaves to take her nap, Ellie resumes hacking at trunks and stripping roots from the ground. She has made it further than anyone else, so it takes her an hour to walk back to the incinerators where ash and branches lay in a heap. No one remembers to turn on the incinerators so the branches accumulate like corpses. Ellie pulls the lever and tosses in kindling, scorching her knuckles in the process. Before she sets the plants ablaze, she rummages through the heap in search of the red orbs she’d seen in mother’s pictures—a fleeting pastime, she has to sort through the tree cadavers anyway to tally the day’s elimination count. The Peace Force reports these numbers so the Ruling Body can reassure its citizens that the trees are as good as gone. They like their bureaucratic nonsense and treat reports like gospel even though Ellie loses track of the number of trees quickly and ends up eyeballing them anyway.
A week before Auntie Wei’s execution, Ellie insists they both try to clear the entire forest even though neither of them knows where it ends. It’s a last-ditch effort to prove Auntie Wei’s utility to the Peace Force, to convince them to extend her stay. “Don’t you want to keep freeloading meals?” Ellie asks.
“I know when enough is enough and there’s not much meaning to sticking around,” Auntie Wei chortles. “Now tell me what you really want me there for.”
“I’m searching for the red orbs. The apples,” Ellie confesses. It always ends up like this: Auntie Wei finagles the truth out of her while pretending like it’s nothing, like everything in prison—death, executions, murderer inmates—is trivial bathroom reading material compared to whatever she’s been through. Which is a lot, Auntie Wei insists. She’d had an IUD forcibly inserted after her first child to control population growth. At the time, resources were scarce due to trees sucking them up, and they couldn’t afford enough food or medicine. Auntie Wei’s son died from pneumonia and her husband forcibly removed the IUD to get her to conceive a replacement child. She quickly became pregnant. Except the baby was a daughter, not a son, and so Auntie Wei vanished with the child because staying meant certain doom: the Peace Force would demolish their house, confiscate their property, terminate her pregnancy and demand a remuneration as much as an entire lifetime’s worth of savings (although she felt no regret for saddling her husband with the fine.)
“Oh but there were great things too,” Auntie Wei insists. “My daughter turned out to be such a beauty. It’s because I ate all those fruits from the Bearing Trees. What I would do to have one again. You’d never taste anything so sweet, seen anything so tempting.”
In the end, Auntie Wei doesn’t join Ellie to hack down more trees. Auntie Wei is dead set on relaxing until her last day: lying face-up on the uneven ground composed of gravel and loose dirt, breathing in dust and ash, mumbling about Peaches of Immortality—immortality is nothing much to brag about, but imagine eternal youth, when you’re young and pretty, you can get away with anything. “Won’t you get this old lady her meal?” Auntie Wei asks even though she’s plenty strong enough to walk over and pick up a tray. This must be what happens after you’ve been alive for too long: you careen off the rails. Like what happened with Ellie’s mother, although Ellie isn’t certain when mother discarded her Flame Pods and began to hoard seeds that threatened civilization—surely not too long after Ellie was born. Maybe you start going off-kilter once you’ve birthed children.
On the day of Auntie Wei’s execution, Ellie buries one of the remaining seeds she’d stolen from mother’s stash. It’s the best she can do as a substitute grave since the Peace Force burns all the bodies. She snaps a supple but robust branch from the piles and stabs it into the ground, a makeshift tombstone and marker so she can find her way back. According to mother’s notes, seeds can stay viable for thousands of years, self-protecting until they’re ready to germinate although Ellie has a hard time believing in such a regenerative capability. Life isn’t supposed to be like that. It’s supposed to disappear in an instant.
“Hah, you think the Scorching will hold them back? Maybe for a generation, but one hundred years is nothing to the forest,” Auntie Wei had said. “We’re living on borrowed time.”
The day after Auntie Wei’s execution, Ellie sets out to the outskirts of the forests. It’s nearly evening by the time she makes it past where she typically works. It’s a bit harder to see now that the sun has dimmed to a red glow. The foliage seems tinted green possibly due to optical trickery, a key characteristic of devil trees according to the Ruling Body. The leaves seem slightly less crumbly, like maybe they’d hold up while clenched in a human fist. Ellie stands on her toes and reaches upward.
Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Fireside Magazine, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbooks HOLLOWED (Thirty West Publishing, 2022) and ABSORPTION (Harbor Review, 2022). Find her at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.
