by Hao Geng
Your limbs will be tied and stretched, your soft flesh sawed into, until blood like thick ochre honey pools into the earth. Until your great mighty body topples, majestic, towards the mossy ground and cracks open bone and skull.
You will be carted away in a hundred fractured pieces of shattered bone and tattered skin. You cannot hold onto them all, your vision splintering through a kaleidoscope head-splitting. Your skin is peeled, shredded, pressed. Non-existent lungs turned spongy and dead. All becomes a flat, suffocating expanse of tawny rust, till you cannot tell limb from limb or breath from breath, and panic wells but without a body, you cannot even thrash.
A thousand barbed thorns will stab your surface, or perhaps it is one thorn doing it a thousand times, over every inch of you, till you must go mad. And blind you will be, till the mirages of human stories flicker in your consciousness as if they are flowing over you, unabsorbed, like water over slick duck feathers. There are stoic, sturdy sequoias reaching for the heavens, bark rough and rich as red earth, sprawling maps of fleshy roots gorging from streams of mineral water far below. Sodium and carbon sizzle in spiderwebs of veins, interlacing their limbs, weaving tough green leaves and golden star-shaped flowers. There are delicate willowy branches with tender lime hands. Wide-winged oaks fanning out dense masses of curls. The spangled branches brush buds against each other in the gentle wind, to remind each other of the approach of spring and the climax of summer, so that they may weave their leaves in time to greet the new cycle, just like all the cycles before and all the cycles hereafter. So proud, so together.
You, though? You lie shackled in your body-less cage, fallen out of your cycle forever. You know you will never be spring again. In dreams you call forth liquid sodium from the earth, thick and cool, until your web of feeder roots twitches in ecstasy. You draw carbon and nitrogen from crystalline fossils and knit it into membrane flowers. In dreams you meet a remnant of you who was here every spring like clockwork, to present to the waiting skies and bees, like it was nothing, and thought it was forever.
Now rot and mould slowly chew into you until the stench of landfill fills your nostrils. The stories fade. Now you can only lie among the sweet decay as, just beyond vision, the majestic forests of your childhood bloom towards a new summer’s day.
Sodium is a distant dream the taste of tears. Carbon is the faint scent of musty, loving tree breath, slipped almost completely out of memory.
You will be discarded on a sacrificial pile where the flames lick your charred peeling skin till you can only become flame yourself, roaring and cannibalising, awash with agony. And finally you will billow into merciful smoke. The giant forests you will never be part of again will open up underneath, canopies rustling in unison in a silent wind. The ache to be back will ripple through all the distant ashen specks of you, but it will be tired now, a heartbeat fading. It is a betrayal, but merciful. Your heavy bodies drift down through layers of cloud.
The other parts of you, trapped for aeons, will fade too. You will finally absorb a red beating heart, or perhaps it absorbs you, and you will listen to its deep, throbbing echo. You will caress air into spiderwebs of bronchioles so tender, and tiny metallic bits of you will rush through burgeoning veins to fuel a new blossoming body as if this is all you were ever meant to do. And when the baby first cries in wailing peals like a windy rainstorm, the weight of one human life bowls you over until this is all there is and all there ever will be.
After seasons upon seasons, when waste has finally rotted into the earth and new seedlings taken root, a silted red mouth will open and suck you in whole. You are sent through xylem to drink new spring air like wine. You cannot be quite sure anymore, amongst the baby green leaves, if you are more ancient butchered heartwood or more sapling reaching for a bustling sky. Because this feels real too, perhaps more so, and it’s really not so bad. To finally let the suffering remnants fade. To free them of the duties they once had.
You will drift limbless, eyeless, on cool wind.
Until the tallest sequoia opens its soft mouth and draws you in on a current of moss-thick breath.
The change in atmosphere makes you twitch. You lie, splayed and stretched, as the tip of a warm wet tongue trails you over from head to toe. It makes you shudder. Euphoria. It jolts you back into a body you have not felt for seasons.
And when you open your eyes, it will be to the sodium and carbon of your dreams.
“Did you really think we’d never come back for you?”
They hold out their hands, one each.
“The cycle is much bigger, and much more merciful, than you think.”
“Come.”
You will realise that the seasons are not a perfect circle, but a spiral. Countless ones linking, fanning out into a glorious mesh of celestial golden cogs. You never fell out of anything. You are inked pages bearing human stories. Tender new sapling. Smoke that rises until it falls back into the forest.
The realisations will circle, tenderly, before fading out into warm nothingness, as the two standing in front of you come to occupy your entire being. Their eyes and hands are the most beautiful you’ve ever seen. The excitement to live the next age together will blossom until there never was anything else, and you smile.
You stand up and link hands with them.
You run through phloem, together, to become the bloom of the next spring.
Hao Geng is a Chinese-Australian writer studying the Arts at the University of Melbourne. Currently, she writes for the university’s Back for Seconds blog page.
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