perennial conception

by Tarah Burrows

Tupelo trees slumber in a stagnant river, sentinels dozing under a net of stars. A portrait of idleness, they loom undisturbed. Stoic. Algae clings in clumps to the stump-ridden trunks, crowns the shoulders of even the tallest warden. Gnats skim slow rolling ripples, dip and dive, hunt for blood. Cricket frogs cry. Eel flick. Occasional burbles pocket the surface, fish darting for dead skin and scales under heavy-wet air. Tendrils of fog finger the banks, wind barked bodies cautioning trespassers.

~~~

Like all the others, I dropped my flashlight.

14,000 Lumens, thermal sensor, cooling fan, grips that molded perfectly to my hand. The Marauder had the works, and it’s unfortunate how little I actually used it. Connie had given it to me for my twenty-eighth birthday. Whatever you do, Leslie, never lose your flashlight.

A few hours later, it was at the bottom of the swamp, flashing with all its brethren like a swarm of fireflies. Blasted batteries lasted for two whole days though, just like it said on the box, the high-intensity beam spotlighting my midnight soiree with mother nature.

So I guess it got good use after all.

Jamie, Justin, Amara, Ollie—our gambit was meant to last several weeks, through several swamps. I was the fresh meat, and Connie was our guide. She’d had that nasty slice up her arm for the three months I’d known her, and my nerves that night were absolutely singing. I’d keep licking my lips or flexing my hands, checking the weight at my hip to make sure the gun was still there. I was itching to curl my finger around the trigger of one, or run my thumb over the serrated blades fixed across my chest and imagine them hacking branches like wheat.

Anyway. Don’t even worry about all those trinkets. Just swallow your pride, slide whatever tech you feel fancy for having back in their holsters, and go home.

Because we’ll smell you from under our bark.

We’ll know how to make you quiet, silence your red little murder song. I hummed it in my own head long enough, a pillager risking capture for skins, torture for bones, purgatory for a single heart. I was ravenous. A handful of raids in these swamps would have set me up for a lifetime. I shot up every weekend, hauling back carcasses. Some kicking, most dead.

So you can trust that I know predators like you. You plunder. You slink.

Think you’re exempt from slaughter. Machetes belted, strapped to backs. Guns cradled. Bullets kept dry for burrowing into breasts. Weapons for carnage. You grease tongues with trophies, mount heads. Clamor for power. You don’t know regret. 

Connie slumbers directly across from me, her glossy foliage skimming the water’s surface. Moss clumps her branches, and her bark is dry. She’s always slower to get started, when the time comes. Hell, it’s the least she deserves, a little bit of rest before the good fight. But one good whiff of your hormonal stench, and there’s no stopping her until she’s sated.

Until you’ve got the same scars she wore, deep and burning.

The rest of my crew is scattered over a hundred-yard radius. I like checking on them when the sun’s resting on the water, when day is melting into dusk. There’s a lot of noise across the network, thousands of synaptic bursts and signals shooting up our veins every minute, and honestly? It’s a bitch to filter. It’s like hundreds of hands roving my body at once, and I have to find the softest or the biggest or the roughest and hold on—hope it’s someone I know.

It didn’t take too long, maybe a few weeks, to learn that Jamie’s in the tree some feet to the left of me, a distance I could cross with a decent branch. He was a chatterbox when I first found him, going on and on about our second chances. I hated him. I thought it would be a comfort, having someone familiar, someone to shoot the shit like old times when we were human. But once we connected, we couldn’t break off, and I had to listen to that bullshit around the clock. We sawed their hearts, he’d say. Gnawed their bones. Why? Atone, Wrecker. Atone, Wrecker. Atone—

I thanked the most high when he moved on to another sucker.

It didn’t hit me, then, that I’d be forever stuck there in the stump of a Tupelo, shouldering everyone, festering until I changed my mind. Until I had some revelation. I thought I could resist on principle. Decompose into the dirt.

So, it was unlucky for Ollie that I, stubborn Leslie, stood on his shoulders with callused, waterlogged feet jammed into the sides of his neck, weighing on his collarbone like a rung on a ladder. He palmed the backs of my calves, fingers embedded in the meat. We fought so hard those first few months, shifting, shoving, screaming at being swallowed. He slapped me once, insisting through tears that I was going to hell. My selfishness had formed a bottle neck in the tree, and we molded there through the summer with every person crammed inside after us. Our collective rot was rancid. The air was tight. Our limbs started to fuse. Ollie argued with me until his voice couldn’t project over the parasites.

At that point, I think our host was a little tired of our shit.

Eventually, we fell still, the heap of us. And all I could do was listen.

You’ll understand.

Amara and Justin—I found them about nine months into my…stay. They were clustered in a tree much further away, in the middle of a dozen others, with seeds ripe and flowering like bruises. When it rains, which is frequently here, those seeds buckle and twitch and fall to the water below us. I like to count, just to see how long before they reappear, but those string bean motherfuckers are buoyant. They rise to the surface in seconds and bob and bob and ride the current until they snag and root miles away. Amara hates giving them up. Grief will thrum through the wood, drum against our bodies, and Justin will be her balm, will send waves of reassurance and love that make me gag.

As a couple, they gave in first, let their blood cycle to a stop like molasses, started breathing tandem with the leaves sucking air. I thought they were batshit crazy to see another side of these deciduous monsters. I mean, wrestling in the stomach of a fucking tree—hard to find a silver lining.

Eventually, though, I warmed to my new symbiotic relationship. It’s a process, yeah? We’re all learning.

After a decade, or maybe two, of soaking in the collective grief plaguing this network, these cells, I couldn’t justify my transgressions. Poaching lives like popping candy, stripping ecosystems to the marrow? I’d trek home smitten with the high of the catch and go out again hours later—a deadly addiction fueled by its ever-increasing frequency.

Sometimes, I’d stay in the woods for days making a trail of my trophies.

But in here, I finally calmed down. It’s like all those raging impulses dissolved, and I became curious. Quiet. That drive to own and master had diffused. I could protect. I could see you and your disease so clearly as you romped through our world, and suddenly, I was hollow—I was a cavern—I could welcome everything violent inside—and then you’d never wreck us again.

Yes, I lost my eyes, but I saw so much. When hordes of you brought your metal and your greed and your short-sighted detachment. You understand where this is going?

You’re wrong, muscle sack. Meat shucker.

You’re here to devastate. But the sour gum are reckoning.

So, yeah, a few of my passionate tendencies reappear here and there. But I have plenty of opportunities to channel that energy in the right direction now. Humans visit us all the time with their new gear and deep-rooted sadism, and well…we stay busy.

For example, a lonely, hulking twenty-something we caught last week is curdled at the stump, solid as a boulder, and like everyone before her, like I once did, she bears the weight of our tree. The bulk of our choices. I can already tell she’ll be a quick convert. She knew what she was doing, that stealing our young was wrong, and honestly, I’m impressed with her progress. Taking responsibility is no easy feat. I give it about two more months. The man folded in half and wedged to the side of her head, whose rage is torrid and unceasing, will need more convincing. More time to see. I wouldn’t be surprised if he held out another few years.

Perhaps they’ll be seeds one day. Or not. The higher I grow, the more I condense. Thoughts recede, and a sensation of rightness takes over. Everything is muscle memory. It’s a release. One that allows me to give myself up to rebirth. With all the perspective I’ve gained, I’ll see the topmost leaves in as little as a week, and if I can help newcomers with a change of heart before I’m out of here? I have the means to do it one more time.

It’s a beautiful cycle—compulsory. I’d like to think that when I’m a ribbed little pit floating downstream, I’ll bring everything you’ve taught me and be good. I’ll be a good monster.

~~~

Tonight, under a mourning moon, you’ve chosen to churn the soil and traipse through brackish water. Carve up roots and bag bodies. You and your pack wade and pilfer, knee-deep, with sweat glazing your faces, and we are so damn thirsty.

Cicadas sing. Our tongues break their suctions, and yellow caterpillars squirm from their nests in our trunks. We can already taste the new wave of hot air and condensation your bodies will bring when you thrash and breathe and cry in our stomachs, and it will be so warm and right.

We remember the pride we once felt when we had bodies to use for taking.

Now, understand, we’re made for giving.

Giving you knowledge. Inviting you to fuse.

See, and be welcomed to our perennial accumulation, child.

Or rot and nurture the rest of us.

Either way, we’ll have you.

As you approach, our trunks swell and prime. We stave off our thirst with a crunch of our toes, roots buried in sediment and soaked in carnivorous intrigue.

When the lot of you halts and hesitates, when your barrels tremble, when you realize you’re all wreckers who have never atoned, the constellated network of us spikes with exhilaration. It’s time, perhaps, to give you a push.

You rally, and you cry into the night—the first of many on your journey to rebirth, and our bellies have swollen to accommodate you.

Scraps of bark crack like bone, bits spraying the air as our trunks cinch and release. We conform, lovingly, like a diaphragm. We breathe with the squeeze. Deep, exaggerated breaths that only a mother in labor could understand.

Then, a slim branch whips the water’s surface. The splash is a gunshot. Your flashlights burn through the water and light the path to miracles.

Together, we stalk.

Every jagged limb drags up through sludge. We marvel at the ferocity of our love, giant timbers trailing prey across the marsh. We snap our kneecaps in zeal, untether our roots, rove the land for the most perfect child.

The umbilical veins looped around our necks crave the curves of another.

Bullets spray. Shouts arc over treetops. Metal hacking wood. Tantrums tempered with ease. We stifle your cries with a kind hush, a leafy limb tracing the sharp angles of your face, the angles that will soften with time.

Trunks splitting, we welcome you inside. We make room, crumble you neatly into our stomachs and feel whole. You are the reason we fight.

In a sparkling display at the end of the night, your lights pepper the water settling around us, and trunks across the marsh are swollen with little marvels. We re-root as our babies kick and moan, rebel against us. We love them, anyway. We consider how long we fought when we were first conceived.

We can’t wait to show our children what we’ve learned.

Photo of Tarah Burrows

BIO: Tarah Burrows is an emerging speculative writer and poet from Mississippi. She’s obsessed with everything cyber, fairy, swamp, and galactic. Currently, she's earning her MFA in Creative Writing at The University of Alabama and is working on her first punk fantasy novel. Her work appears in fifth wheel press and The Streetcar.