Pollination of A Fig

The dense forest gives way to a circle-stage of open meadow. Yellow sunrays flood the grass before her like a spotlight. Her air leaves in a whoosh and she folds hands-to-knees, her dirt-streaked palms brace on red and wounded legs. She winces with a sting of pain.

A stranger stands in the meadow’s distant garden, amid a bustling audience of foliage and wildflowers, all gasping. They catch sight of her across the yard, folded over between a gap in the trees, forest parting like a curtain around her. Two tentative, disbelieving steps, then a clamber through the garden patch as they hurry to her. When they see her cuts and scrapes, they stop in place, their face a broken grimace.

“I am okay,” she assures them, without knowing so herself. She waves the worry away, watches the pain wipe from their features.

Brows furrowed and wondrous, eyes scanning, this stranger meets her gaze looking something like a toddler just told there is a small-scale ocean growling inside every conch shell—a mixture of awe and having been betrayed by their reality.

“How are you here?” they ask slowly.

I made a deal with The Gods, is the answer.

“The sky told me where to turn,” is what she says, and shrugs.

They reach for her like they need to know that she is real.

She yields to their reach, and touch has never felt like such an alive thing—their hands leaving hot shadows on her skin as they sweep from shoulders to wrists. Their fingers land laced between hers, and she is so close to pulling this stranger into her and kissing them until her breath dies out.

She takes her wrists back.

***

She is led to a nearby river and left alone to bathe.

The grass is downy and lavish. The sky, a bright cerulean. The brook’s babbling calm croons under twinkling birdsong.

The water is unfairly cool. Crystalline and clean.

She gorges herself on it—shovels it to her mouth and gulps it feverishly. Slathers it over her dirt-smothered skin. Scrubs rough until the mess is gone, skin raw and fresh red, chest breathless.

The Stranger is so blessed here, she sighs. Is this how they have lived? Twiddling their thumbs while I was lost to the dark and haunted forest….

She reaches into the stream and asks it to wash the jealousy from her hands.

***

The music finds her on her journey back to the meadow.

Woodpecker taps on trees, cricket chirps and cicada calls, rolling through the breeze.

Drawing closer, she hears a curious, percussive rustling.

She spots The Stranger battering a stick of dried leaves against their leg, spinning with the meadow’s song.

Warmth spreads across her. She holds the feeling like a bird to her chest and calls it Fondness.

They catch her watching and they pause, stone-frozen but for the blush flushing their cheeks.

“Keep playing.” She smiles, waving them on.

Their shyness shakes slowly away as they fall back into rhythm, the rattle-branch leaves fluttering to the ground.

She sneaks forward, reaches down, collecting what has fallen in the closed cups of her palms, and shakes them like maracas, hopping awkwardly from foot to foot. The wind-and-bird-and-bug-music slows to pin-drop silence. The Stranger stops their rattle-branching and a tear-tide pours into their eyes.

Oh. They have not been twiddling their thumbs, she sees. They have been rolling their loneliness between them.

***

When the concert is long over, she is led through the meadow, shown by The Stranger where they sleep, told how many times they have been blanketed and uncovered by stars before she burst from the forest.

She is shown all the sweetest berry bushes, taught the best type of stones to smoosh the fruit between, and the quickest way to lap every morsel of jam from her fingers.

She is taken to the shallow thicket, introduced to every animal by name, who extend their paws to shake and offer tours around their woodland homes.

"Don't trust the toads with any secrets," the mice and sparrows whisper. "They're wonderful company, but known to gossip."

Panic zips through her, fists clenching. Why would they mention secrets to me? What do they know of mine?

The forest seems to swell and wobble, looming over her. She sees it viewing her through this new lens: The trees, the sun, the dirt, the creatures, all know what she has done.

***

“Let me show you where I came from.”

She leads The Stranger to the shadows of the forest to name, for them, every unearthed root that tripped her.

To point out every crooked branch that ever groped or stabbed.

To show them every nest of every crow that cawed and swooped in for her hair.

But at a quarter-way into the shadows, The Stranger trembles, starts to cry, like the crows have cawed and swooped in for their heart.

“It is awful here.”

She kneels and fills her cupped hands with warm mud-puddle, offering a drink to soothe them.

The Stranger takes a sip—lips brush palms, shockwaves up her arms—and coughs it out. The sound rumbles around them like menacing laughter from the pines.

A rough swipe at their mouth with the back of their hand. Flinging the mud-water remains with a snarled look. “You will never have to survive again.”

***

Time turns, cartwheeling morning over into later-day.

Back in the meadow, they weave weed-stalks into baskets and wildflowers into blankets. They forage the skirt of the forest for berries, mushrooms, and nuts, packing their baskets full.

Wandering merrily across the meadow with The Stranger by her side, she decides that she could stay there, comfortably, forever.

But, as if struck, she is plunged into a memory of her last day in the woods:

___

“Are you there, Gods?” she shouted, willing her voice to reach beyond the branches of the forest’s canopy. “I cannot handle this anymore—this place is crooked, dense, and unrelenting. I cannot run another step. Where am I meant to be going? I am afraid everyday. I am tired of the cold. I want out of the dark. I want warmth on my skin. I want to see a sunset blush across the sky.”

If the sun is setting at your heels, walk backward until you are home.

She startled. Her voice had never garnered a response before—typically her shouts were lost, blurring out into the wind. But, blasting through her chest, frustration overtook her surprise.

“Your suggestion is to walk backward? Look at this woven root floor. I fall everyday walking forward! And what of the cold? Please, I am so tired of survival. Is there not somewhere beautiful I am meant to live, at peace? Someone there that I was built to love?”

Yes. The Gods’ words rippled across the leaves. In time.

She growled. “But was I not given free will?”

The ground beneath her quaked as The Gods boomed, insulted. Your journey was not written with a twig in wet mud! Your story was written by stars.

No part of her cared—she simply and so bitterly wanted.

Puffing her chest. “I am finished with this place!” Stomping, thrashing fists, knuckles popping. “I want out of here!”

And so, The Gods conceded. All right. If desire is what tarnishes this life, to leap after your wants will be your undoing—do you understand?

The ground rustled behind her.

Her shoulders tightened, breath halted.

A twig snapped.

She whipped toward the sound, eyes breaking, chin puckered and wobbling.

“Who’s there?”

A crow, inky and irate, with eyes locked on her.

Its talons twitched.

Before the crow could charge, she bolted.

The sky opened up, telling her where to turn, and she sprint-twisted down mazed paths, the forest blurring past her—midnight dark relented to muddy brown to muted greens. And before she could fathom, she reached a clearing.

Peering into the idyllic scene, her fate played out before her: Granted everything that she has ever wished and more. Relief, and warmth, and fondness, and rest. Love, on the precipice, tumbling into ruin.

The Gods’ voices found her again. Softer now.

Do not imagine that you will fight it. Once you step through, you may not change course.

Yours will not be the only heart to break.

They were offering an out. They were saying: You could stay.

Her voice rattled with defeat. “But what will life be, if I stay? More of the same?”

Their lack of response was a response all its own.

And so the decision to step through the clearing was not a decision at all. She simply stepped.

___

Somewhere up beyond the sky, The Gods sit in palaces, in plentifully-cushioned thrones, sipping regal wine, watching the two below share their gathered feast.

“Their picnicking is such a bore,” one God whines, collapsed in their seat.

“Agreed,” another groans. “When will we get to the devouring?”

They huff a collective chorus of huffs. They trill their restless fingers atop their velvet armrests, and the meadow breaks into a mist of gentle rain.

As the first sprinkles drizzle down, The Stranger leaps into action. They empty their picnic basket and offer it to her upside down, as a hat to shield the rain.

“Let’s take cover.” They wave her forward, leading her to one tree amid the many. Not far up from the ground, its trunk veers in two directions. The Stranger steps and hoists up into the junction of the tree, settles, and lends their hand as she makes the short climb to join them.

Once they are both secure—perched and crouching, sheltered from the rain—The Stranger reaches up into the canopy and tugs a fig down from its branch. They offer it over and she places it delicately in the basket. The two continue this way for a while, one snatching figs off branches, the other storing them for later feasting. She notices The Stranger regard the figs with gradually growing concern, their eyes brimming with the quiet promise of a story.

“What are you thinking?” she asks.

The Stranger’s mouth tugs to one side, a quick attempt at reassurance, but their gloom leaks through the gesture. They hand their latest fig over and she cradles it carefully.

When they speak, their voice is tender and measured. “I’ve lain in this spot for days on end, watching the nature of the tree move over time. I’ve seen leaves change and fall. I’ve seen bugs become butterflies. And I’ve seen wasps disappear into figs.”

They explain to her that a wasp does not crawl into a fig, lay her many eggs, and emerge a mother, with a flock-swarm of things to love, in tow.

The wasp loses her wings to the fruit. Becomes trapped and dies alone. Her body is digested.

It pollinates the fig.

Her eggs hatch. The young emerge from the fig, motherless.

The Stranger wipes their eyes, sniffles. “Isn’t it nature’s most tragic fable? But even so, isn’t there some beauty in it…?”

Fury coils inside her. She's crushed the fig in her grip.

That is a cruel and unnecessary joke, she tells The Gods, who must be smirking.

Sucking fig-mush off her fingers extinguishes the anger in her chest with a satisfying sizzle and steam.

“I want you to know…” The Stranger begins, and with vulnerability in their tone, guilt-laced like a lump in the throat, “I tried to stop it.”

Her heart thrums. They tried to stop what? My reaching the meadow? Have they known all along about our fates?

They continue. “After I learned the wasps would die, I’d try and try to warn them. They didn’t know what they were getting into—all that would happen to them. I guarded the tree, always on watch. I’d swat at them, shoo them away, and they would sting.”

She longs to hold The Stranger’s hands, check them over for sting-marks and kiss their every one.

Eyes holding a sorrowful warmth, they add, “I don’t blame them for stinging. They thought the fig would house the life that they desired, and I was in the way.”

She softens further. “Have I told you, yet, that you are precious?” she asks. And, oh, how badly she wants to trace the lines of the face before her while she asks.

She sits on her hands instead.

***

Rain rustles steadily around them, kissing the soft ground.

The Stranger smiles, soft as a lamb, cheeks quickly pinkening. “I have been thinking… Sharing this meadow and our feast, sharing our stories… Could we call this a date?”

She stiffens. She wants to grab this chance to warn The Stranger, but knows she cannot mention the curse in plainspeak—that is The Gods’ rule.

The rain now sounds, to her, a little bit like wasp-wings, slowing every moment.

So, she says: “Close your eyes. Listen to those leaves, pattering beneath the rainfall. How does it sound?”

The Stranger obliges, smiling whimsically. And after a thoughtful moment: “Sounds a little like applause.”

She deflates. They do not understand.

How can she tell them that her soul will not belong to her much longer?

This is not a date, she longs to admit. This is a fig.

***

The rain quiets, petering out to a stop.

The Stranger drops fluidly out of the tree. She fumbles her way down.

Back in the open meadow, she passes the evening watching the skychange dance in The Stranger’s eyes. The sun sweeps their skin as it fades.

With sky ticking further toward darkness, the meadow’s night-music rises and echoes around them—faraway chirps and trilling, owls hoo-ing.

Soon after dotting the sky, the stars tuck them in, kissing their foreheads, and send them into night wrapped in their wildflower blankets.

“Goodnight,” The Strangers yawns.

She remains awake.

When tranquil snores start swirling with the meadow’s quiet symphony, she studies The Stranger’s face—mild features, brow soft—like if she looks long enough, maybe she can satiate her wildcat of an appetite.

How many moments throughout the day did she find herself so smitten and so nearly melted that she needed to remind her muscles to be muscles? How many times did she feel her eyes trailing over The Stranger, a voice inside her urging: Let’s not speak, just kiss me here, and here, and here, and here. How much of their time did she spend half-present, half-swallowing-down-these-jaguar-roars?

Hair draped across their skin. Eyelids gently drawn and glistening. Mouth parted.

Never has she fussed much over skin-on-skin, but now, this jaguar paces the length of her lungs, grumbling about the uselessness of lips, if not to kiss.

The clack of claws on her ribcage sounds something like the ticking of a bomb.

***

What is a fig before the wasp dies? Is it plush inside? Or lumped and seedy, with walls pruned?

What plagues the wasp in the fig as it withers and starves? Does it dig at the hole it entered through and pray for passage back home? Or does it revel in its capture—the days alone, the sweet juices and smells?

As it dies, is it lulled, or does it writhe? Is the fig something suffocating? Or a hammock, and swaying summer breeze?

***

She is stolen from her slumber by a slap of wind.

With night relenting to morning, the sky has become a strange, tawny beige. She takes it as an ominous sign.

The Gods have soured restless. They gulp their wine from gold and ornate goblets. They slam their fists to red throne arms.

It sounds like thunder when they demand.

The Stranger sleeps, undisturbed. She hurries to them and shoves them. They squirm under her efforts but do not rouse.

In an urgent stage-whisper: “Wake up! I need to tell you something!”

The Stranger’s brows scrunch. They groan.

And again: “I need to tell you—"

The sky intervenes with a terrible rumble. Lightning strikes, burning a small circle of grass beside her.

The black singe reads like a warning.

She goes alone into the forest shadows to scream.

***

“Gods, I have made a horrible mistake! I want to hear another rattle-branch song. I want to be fed again by gathered picnic. I want to count the meadow’s wildflowers. I want a cup of tea steeped in river water. I want the owls and the fireflies and the loon calls to lull me to sleep again. I want to stay with The Stranger.”

Thunder barks and shakes the forest.

“Fine! I will go back to the woods. I understand, now, the purpose of timing. I am sorry I tried to weasel out from under my strife. I am sorry, I am sorry, I am so, so, sorry. I will return to my life in the forest and survive until the time is right. I have learned my lesson. I will stay in the forest. I will do whatever you need!”

The Earth rumbles and a sharp crack sounds in the near distance. This is The Gods saying: Impossible!

Her ribcage has already been promised away. Wasps are waiting for their place to die.

***

Her body crumbles at the border of meadow and forest.

The sky, half-covered by pine, is pale swirls of butterscotch, with luminous fog descending.

“There you are!” A voice like chimes and hurried footsteps. “I’ve never seen the sky this way!”

Her view is eclipsed as The Stranger looms over her.

“Oh, what happened? Why are you crying and alone on the ground?”

She does not speak—the words live down, too far, inside her. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry.

She is lifted. And held like something precious. And carried away from the forest’s edge.

***

The sky is heavy now, and dirty-golden.

“What do you think it means?” The Stranger asks from half-across the meadow, eyes squinted at the clouds.

And from her seat in the grass, she’s desperate to answer, to tell her truth. She tenses her hands, collects her breath, and—

The sky cracks.

Leaves quivering beneath rain, it begins.

The Stranger sighs dramatically and opens to the rain—arms out, head back, tongue cupped skyward.

“Taste it!” they call to her, smiling bewildered. “You will not believe it!”

She lifts her chin and follows suit. Droplet after droplet falling into her mouth.

Pear. Honey and warm spice.

“The sky is raining wine!” The Stranger laughs, and it is a gorgeous sound, its echo jaunting through the grass.

But her taste of the rain tells her there is no cloud in the sky who wants any part of this storm. They are as much at the mercy of The Gods as she is. There are only those who have succumbed, and those that soon will—and they each are so, so sorry.

Her resolve evaporates as the storm cries over her. She sobs into her knees.

A number of moments, then flames lick the skin on her arms. She recoils.

The Stranger is kneeling, their hand hovering where it had just been placed, features wound into a question mark. “Why are you crying?”

Her heart bangs at their proximity.

Distance, she thinks. We need space between us. But can’t bring herself to stand. You are not safe here, near me. But can’t bring herself to speak.

Thunder growls, forewarning.

The Stranger softens. “It is only a storm.”

She tracks one single drop of wine on its fall from The Stranger’s wet-darkened hair. It drips down their cheek in a delicate sweep, drawing a damp trail over their skin. It leaps off their jaw and slips beneath their collar.

And she has never been so envious of rain.

As The Stranger sees her watching—sees her simple, brutal wanting—realization tints their features. The two meet eyes and The Stranger’s chest heaves, sharp, and in agreement.

Rain turns to downpour as if a faucet has been opened.

And so the decision to reach for The Stranger and leap into their arms is not a decision at all.

She simply leaps.

And they catch her, like this is natural, like it is muscle memory, like they’ve been there together a thousand times before. They find each other’s eyes, fresh like the first ever time, but with a whole story between them now, and they do nothing but stay and look and breathe, understanding.

This alone could be heaven. This could be her eternity, wrapped in arms and grabbing back, and she would never grow tired, never wanting any more or any less.

The hands tangled in her hair are nothing like the talons of crows. They hold her—not ripping and shredding and taking. They plant seeds, instead.

She is unafraid. She is not cold, or damp under the rain. For all her warmth, they could be sunlit.

But they are not.

Thunder roils. The rain becomes torrential.

And she is slammed with the daunting understanding that these are her final moments. That fate will have its way with her. That she is mercilessly and unyieldingly mortal.

Time slows.

She grips The Stranger tighter, praying to The Gods in silent screams, asking if she could have, please, just a little more time.

With a huff of thunder, they remind her how gracious they have been to allow her this ecstasy, once, before her bones are left behind.

She savours the silk of The Stranger's breath on hers, and The Gods suggest that she should feel blessed.

But what she has is a war in her chest—her desire fighting with her need to tear herself away and warn The Stranger, now.

Their lips land finally on hers.

Time shatters.

And there is no language—only sighs, and just the storm, whipping wild at their hair.

***

All her life she pictured love as something swaying, like a slowdance. But the kiss they share is not a soft or lilting thing—it is a forest fire, blazing, and immediate, and inescapable.

Her body falls.

She billows up and out as smoke and acquiescence, desire dissolving into ruin.

***

With her body left behind, the seeds The Stranger planted in her hair burrow deep into the meadow ground.

The rain melts her skin as it fades. She pollinates the sprouting seeds as she decays.

***

Landing somewhere up inside the sky, she sees the storm’s relent from above—dark clouds parting like show curtains.

Something bangs inside her.

There is no meadow. Only forest.

Trees are hatching from the seeds she left behind. Their roots splay out a deadly weave, their branches twist-reach to grab and grope. The fresh forest’s crows ready their voices and talons.

The Stranger’s heart clamors in their chest as they sob—not for the death of their meadow, but over her forsaken bones.

***

Sunset. Beauty’s last rattling effort before the dark night.

She finds the angel who paints the sky and taps them on the shoulder.

“May I paint the sunset-sky tonight?” she asks.

And so she does. But on the ground, The Stranger’s missing it—tree-shrouded and still crying.

She makes the gold-veined sunrays say: Look at what I’ve left for you—you can use those ravaged bones for broth or divination.

Please, she says, through the orange clouds, please don’t cry for long.

In the pink ribbons of light, she scrawls: There must be some beauty in knowing your company was worth dying in.

She waits for their response. But there is no language under forest-cover—only wails, spinning out into the wind.

I understand, she paints into the purple of the sky. And I am sorry. Cry as long as you need.