The Bone Trees

Marriane woke to the wind whistling through the bone trees.

See when trees died, sometimes they left their skeletons behind, branches reaching into the heavens, paused where they had been when the tree finally gave out. The wind rushing through them made eerie noises as if they spoke through the night.

Sometimes she imagined the scratching noise was water flowing through a river bed or a possum scrabbling up branches, it’s young clinging to its back. But these were silly thoughts. This far out there had not been these things for years.

She had been to the zoo once, when her parents could afford the fee. The butterfly room felt like a VR art exhibition. Their wings fluttering in an exorbitant colourful synchronicity, like pixels floating across the screen of nature. She’d felt special in that moment as if they knew they were putting on their last show, just for her. They begged her to be entranced by them, to study them. Even if they knew days were numbered.

Instead it was the fungi that took her as she walked across raised bridges in old growth forests with walls cradling them in glass. That she could not see them held her interest. That the mycorrhizae held hands beneath the soil and spoke to the forest, it’s network more vast than any computer could dream. That held her.

So when the heat and the cold and the dry, the wet, the raging and the unforgiving came she turned to them.

What they told her had not felt right. Like how her young mind had seen screens in nature and not nature for what it was. Yet the bone trees begged for answers. The choking cities screamed them, as humans have always been the loudest of animals.

So she complied. After all, the carbon trees(TM) did not touch people’s brains in the same way. The artificial green more a hindrance to eyesight than a respite. But they kept the choking at bay. Machines after all fulfil their primary function, and do it well.

What she had made, at the behest of the mycorrhizae seemed neither.

By the time the sun rose, the trees had stopped moaning, leaving silence in the air, as stiff and unforgiving at the soil that held them. She took their silence as knowing what she had in store for them today.

She followed the other scientists through the skeletal forest. After a few kilometres she saw them.

A line of bone trees sat on a raised metal platform, their roots dangling unceremoniously beneath them. There were specks of green scattered across their naked limbs. Stepping up onto the platform she recognised the leaves she'd painstakingly grafted on over hours in the lab. They fluttered only slightly in the breeze, a brief respite from the harsh wind.

The roots of the trees were connected to a series of tubes, twisting and snaking into fluid filled tubs beneath the raised platform. When she looked at it, for the first time out of the lab and against the background of forest and dusty plain, all she could see were human bodies floating in capsules with tubes running out of them like in the old science fiction movies.

Sickened she jumped off the platform and crouched on top of the compacted dirt. She traced its cracks with her finger tip following them until one finger stopped at something shiny. It was half excavated and looked out of place sticking out of the dirt near one of the platform's supports. She tugged it and it came out easy, like the land coughed it up knowing it didn’t belong.

It was a biscuit tin with fading letters written on the front.

TIM AP U E

Smiling she pulled the lid off. Inside was a golden heart-shaped locket and beneath it, a Polaroid. She pulled the picture out, holding it up towards the landscape around her.

Two young girls smiled with giant grins from a treehouse nestled into two gnarled trunks of evergreen trees, their leaves shining a luminescent green despite the fading on the photograph.

"Marriane, you okay?" The scientist, Anita she thought her name was, called to her from above.

She stood giving the picture a last look before pocketing it. "Yes, yes," she nodded and held out her hand for the woman to drag her back onto the platform, "I think I am. What have we got?"

"It's very exciting, come and look."

She led Marriane to the closest tree and pointed to the end of a knobbly branch just overhead. From its tip was an offshoot and on the end something spear-shaped and green.

It was curled in on itself but Marianne knew that when it unfurled, it would be a leaf.