u/flat_footed_wonder

I was a kid then, so it was only ever a ghost story to me. Just a tale my friends would tell me whenever we went ‘camping’ in our backyard near the firepit.  Something the neighborhood experienced and clammed up about; hints only whispered amongst hushed cookouts and Sunday services.  

Late one Winter evening, the first occurrence happened.  Mr. O’Mell jolted from his armchair by a knock at his front door. In disbelief, he sat listening.  Another knock.  He made his way to the door, the second knock still emanating through his living room.  

Upon the third knock, Mr. O’Mell opened the door, now fully disgruntled.  His irked demeanor vanished in the open doorway.  The descriptions vary depending on which kid at school was relaying the story.  Some say the man stood seven feet tall, with cobwebs covering his face like a mask, as a nest of spiders bloomed across his features.  Others say he wore the face of whoever he had previously visited amongst the neighborhood.  

Three elements of the description remained consistent, no matter who expressed the narrative.  It was a man, well dressed like a salesman.  His voice was deep and melancholic, captivatingly charming, enchanting even.  And lastly, he would tell you how you would die.  

Poor Mr. O’Mell, before even getting a word out, was suddenly bereft by the mysterious figure in his doorway, explaining that he would die in an automobile accident four years from that moment.  “How unfortunate.”  The wandering salesman would say.

Mr. O’Mell was rightly taken aback.  Stunned into stuttering.  The salesman stood silently in the doorway, permitting the poor middle-aged man a moment to digest the news.  Mr. O’Mell, understandably in disbelief, harassed the man in return.  Before he could slam the door, an outstretched hand interrupted his verbal assault.  Confused, Mr. O’Mell looked up at the stranger, who simply said, “Shake my hand, and see.”  

The details blur from the endless game of telephone this story went through on the playground.  Some say he was transported to the scene of his demise.  And others say that he experienced what his death would FEEL like.  One element remains certain: Mr. O’Mell was traumatized enough to listen when the salesman replied: 

“Can I interest you in an alternative?”  

The alternative was simple, and every orator of the account included it:  “Sign here, with a simple pricklet of blood, and this horrible tragedy can be avoided.”  

Needless to say, Mr. O’Mell signed away.  He lived a long silent life.  A ghost of his former self.  Only passing recently.  His family says his last moments were filled with choked sobs and ramblings about a debt to be paid.  

I recall this tale now, sitting here with you so late tonight, this childhood folk story.  And I know why.  There is knocking upon my front door.  Knock. Knock. Knock.  The moral of the story, whispered at the end of every retelling, rings through my mind like a siren:  

“Never answer when he comes knocking.”

I have been divorced for almost a year now.  Marrying in my thirties to a woman I had dated for four years felt like a sure-fire way of ensuring lifelong happiness.  Things have a way of escaping you.  No one can calculate the partnership's strains for the years to come.  And you never expect those minor “tics” to accumulate, highlighting the larger grievances.  Those little grudges and petty annoyances have a way of spiraling out of control, forming into cancerous resentments that spill into your day-to-day interactions with the one you love.  Which, in turn, further speeds that tumbling spiral.  Somehow, despite all that, Dianna got pregnant, and a spark of excitement and anticipation seemed to eclipse all those enriching spites.  

Nine months of rekindled tolerance of one another almost felt like lost love, a love I realized I missed.  There was certainly love for the life forming within my spouse, which remained unshaken as optimism and joy for my impending fatherhood grew within me.  I found myself fantasizing about a life warm with a near-endless source of not just contentment, but happiness.  The lifelong happiness I was promised when I took those vows.  

My wife gave birth to a stillborn at the end of those nine dreamy months.  Shock brutally wracked those fantasies.  Numbed by the desecration, I was useless as my spouse screamed for an explanation from the doctors.  We drove home after a day or two at the hospital, silence piercing my ears the whole way home.  She wept more than I ever could.  Red-eyed and miserable, I attempted to grieve with her.  But what comfort I offered was cold and hollow to her.  The old, commonplace spites and annoyances were now fuel for a wildfire that had exploded through our lives.  They brought out a demon in me. 

I never thought I could be so cruel, until, at our most vulnerable and miserable, I found I was eager to leap for her throat.  I used our collective grief as a weapon while constructing walls around my sorrow.  I’m able to admit that much.  And she deemed this unforgivable. 

Months of solitary mourning and hostility led to the predetermined divorce papers manifesting in the blur of misery I was consumed by.  The proceedings were simple and quiet, to my recollection, neither of us willing to pretend we had the energy to scrape together what cinders of love remained.  

Months of self-indulgence slogged by, the haze of distress intensified by alcohol.  One of those “tics” she saw as an “issue” during the proceedings.  Eventually, I hit the bottom.  Desperate for some form of stability and normality, I decided to make a change.  Late last October, I called my Mom.  I told her I needed to be home for a bit.  That I needed the familiarity and the embrace of an environment I could understand.  

With the grace of a scolded dog, I returned to my parents’ home, dragging a suitcase inside the warm Midwestern cottage.  My Mother gave understanding hugs.  Dad patted my arm, an awkward attempt at affection.  With solemn gratitude, I made my way to the guest room, where I proceeded to sleep for the rest of that early evening.  I could tell Mom wanted to keep an eye on me for those first weeks. Make sure I wasn’t abusing myself.  This strained tension in the house soon melted into a semblance of comfort.  This gave them the freedom to come and go from the house as they needed, unburdened by parental worry.  

Visiting had always been a yearly excursion for me, but living at home, forming a bastardized childhood dynamic with my parents again, brought a bizarre sense of stability I was so desperate for.  At last, I had regained equilibrium.  However, a pit still gaped from within me, leaking its melancholic toxins into my mind.

Until I found it that early November morning.

It was during one of my walks along my family’s extensive property line, trudging through the snow, when I stumbled upon a scattered patch of trees.  Thin, wispy young oaks, splayed in the middle of a field blanketed in snowfall.  When you grow up in the middle of nowhere, you tend to have an accurate map of the nowhere you tread most of your early life.  To be fair, I hadn't visited home in months, but I definitely would have noticed saplings during my last hike across the property.  

I stood there, examining the youthful intruders, when I noticed their layout.  A triangle: the three petite trees formed a triangle.  In the center was the youngest of them, vaguely bigger than a sapling, sprouting with three withering green leaves.  A parental instinct itched into my limbs as I stood over it; winter had desecrated its chance at life.  Kneeling, I gently scraped the snow from around it.  I was shocked to find not soil, but thick sand cradling the sapling's roots.  Removing my gloves, I prodded the loose foundation to discover the winter cold was not enough to harden it.  Expecting resistance, I was further astounded as my fingers effortlessly slid into the sand.  

Adjusting my position, I dug both hands like spades beneath the sapling, determined to rescue it from its bizarre home.  Groping at thin roots for leverage, I was stunned as my finger made contact with a solid, smooth surface.  Jolting my hands out of the shifting sands, I stared, waiting for some woodland creature to come scurrying out from below.  Nothing came.  Daring further exploration, I plunged my hands back in, feeling along the abstract structure I felt beneath the sapling’s roots.  

Its shape was still elusive, round in some spots, and rigid in others.  This mysterious tomb was now my sole focus.  With delicate maneuvering, I attempted to remove the sapling from the sand.  A single root seemed intertwined with its strange bedfellow.  I tore the girthy ligament from out its unknown anchor with a snap and placed the sapling against one of its older brothers.  Heaving and wrestling, I grunted over the pit as I worked the item out.  

A final tug revealed it.  It was a skull.  Empty sockets stared at my shocked face.  Disgust surged through me as I reflexively hurled the decaying cranium.  With a hollow thud, it smacked against the bark of the tree directly in front of me.  

It lay on a pillow of snow, facing me.  The sun shone its lazy rays through the cloudy sky upon it.  The skull had a tinge of an earthy brown hue, which highlighted the alien crimson around its single gaping nostril hole.  But what drew my attention further was the size of the cranium.  It was almost bulging, ballooning like a pregnant woman’s abdomen. I crawled over to it, brushing off the snow and sand to examine it.  

Kneeling, I dared to place my palm over it.  More surprises piled onto me as I felt a warmth emanating from the skeletal remains.  Cupping the skull in both hands, I lifted it from the snowy embankment, which confirmed the source of the heat.  Rolling it from hand to hand, I noticed the abnormal weight distribution.  The cranium had a disproportionate tonnage, causing me to fumble with it.  

I gave the skull a gentle shake, like it was a Magic 8-Ball, eager to discover a decisive answer.  All I received was a sickening sloshing from inside the cranium.  Liquid.  There was liquid inside.  I gave it another soft cycle.  My palm felt the faintest contact. 

Something had pressed against the inner skeletal wall.  

I quickly spun to the skull's face, eager to examine its eye sockets for an explanation of how the liquid remained inside.  The inner chambers of each hole were walled.  No eyes had ever sprouted from this head; I knew that for certain.  The abnormalities, I cannot lie, were alluring.  A discovery was shaking my life’s mundane, miserable normality.  The nowhere I had lived in all my childhood had gifted me a something from a somewhere.  Foreign and puzzling.  Curiosity drove me to cradle the skull in my jacket as I trudged home.  

With each step, I felt its temperature radiate through me, expanding and contracting, like a pulse.  As I jostled through the snow, that unknown contained within swished with the incubating liquid.  My eagerness to examine it swayed as well.  A pestering anxiety splashed and waned like ocean waves on the shores of my excitement.  

It was not enough to halt me in the end.  I entered my parents’ garage and delicately placed my findings onto the workbench.  Turning on a space heater beside it, I warmed myself as I stared at the archaic mass.  With a click, the overhead light illuminated the skull, its sickly hue coated in blotches of melting snow and clots of sand.  Dragging a damp towel over it, I bathed it—each swipe of my hand confirming the movement from within.  

Now clean, I soaked in the sight.  The near-bursting cranium tilted the hollow face upward toward the swaying lightbulb.  As I stared, admiring the grotesque treasure, I saw it shake.  The subtlety would have been missed if I hadn’t placed it down.  Tiny, a minor shift in position.  A kick from within.  Certainty.  My breath caught as I stood there witnessing a wonder I had no explanation for.  Something was gestating inside the pregnant skull.  

A tremor ran through me as another soft kick jostled the decaying incubator.  Hesitantly, I reached out and gave it a poke, a childish movement reciprocated with a matching wiggle.  Then another.  And another.  Until a sudden crackle followed that wiggle.  I gazed slack-jawed as the engorged cranium shifted and rustled, while an internal pressure seemed to be growing.  Finally, a fracture erupted across the skeletal surface, and bone plates separated from one another.  

My eyes widened.  My heart beat beyond count, as I saw the red, bloody tissue from within the brain cavity, pressing apart the already expansive confines.  The bone remained attached to the sinew, which now hung firm from its bone bason.  Cold sweat was soaking through my coat, while I examined the alien womb spilling its bile across the workbench.  I clearly saw the pulsing uterus, with what few fragments of protection remained clinging to it.  Its contents were growing.  

A strange impulse surged in me.  I ran to the house's entry, locked it, and then ran over to pull down the garage door.  The glum light of the dimming bulb was the only source of light in the room.  I stood a distance away from the bench, catching my breath.  The delicate pulse of the exposed uterus was guttural and desperate, like the dying heartbeat of a wounded animal.  With each quake, its contents seemed to cry out.  Desperate for life.  Pleading for it.  Its incubation was soon to end, but not soon enough.  Its gestation had caused it to break through its only protection.  Fragility and exposure were now threatening it.  

This patheticness stung me. As I clung to the garage door, I could identify why I had acted.  I had saved it and brought it to shelter at the pinnacle of its cycle.  It needed me.  I knew my parents could not see this for what it was—an immaculate conception.  

A paternal instinct I thought dead and buried had driven me to defend and hide this bizarre miracle.  I approached that innocent vessel, throat stinging with emotions I had long suppressed.  I placed my prodding palm over the soft, sticky tissue.  

I felt him kick.  Tears burned down my still frozen face, as I cradled the fractured womb in my hands.  

Removing my coat, I swaddled it in my arms.  Peeking into the house, I confirmed my parents' absence before trotting quickly up the stairwell to the guest room.  Locking the door behind me, I pulled several pillows from my bed, creating a nest in the corner of the room beside the heater.  Wrapping it in a blanket, I placed the pregnant skull into its new home.  I admired my work from the seat of the bedframe, watching in wonder at the life forming in front of my eyes.  

Whatever was growing in there was a gift.  A karmic debt being paid off.  What I was due.  This hope seeped into my brain like a collection of syringes, numbing a once-bellowing voice that had long been screaming.  A knot of anxiety and disgust cried out in collective warning.  I pushed it aside. I would not let them ruin this offering.  This second chance.  A second chance at that elusive happiness I was owed.

I hid it there in my corner as the weeks went by.  I would sit there watching it pulse for hours, those euphoric fantasies returning in waves of ecstasy.  My parents gave little notice of my absence most of the day; they were happy to see me, presumably, sober.  It was also helpful that my mood had improved.  The few afternoons and evenings when I was seen in the kitchen, they couldn't help but notice my beaming.  What they perceived as rejuvenated sobriety, I recognized as paternal excitement.  

An excitement that drove me to text my ex-wife.  

I wanted to share this emotional surge, a spike of hope-laced adrenaline.  I stared at my phone for over an hour, unable to formulate the perfect explanation that would be both intriguing and believable without coming across as insane.  Finally, I decided on simply asking her to visit my parents’ place to “get closure.”  Pacing in the guest room, I waited for her response, which came shortly after:

 “Ok.  I am on a work trip for the next month.  I’ll come sometime in January if that works?”

A date was set.  I giddily planned the revelation of our new son for the rest of the night.  

I expanded his nest as he continued maturing.  The womb was growing rapidly daily. The entire cranium was now scattered into bits of bone clinging to the moist tissue.  Only the skull’s face, with its walled eye sockets and single nostril, remained intact.  

I would spend sleepless nights examining the fetus within, growing and expanding, which allowed me to get clear glimpses of him whenever he pressed up against the uterine walls.  He was strong.  The way he shook that womb as he repositioned himself was incredible to witness. If only I could have seen his face.   Vibrant and warm.  I needed to see it.  I yearned to see it.  

Too long have I been haunted by a cold face.  That lifeless face illuminated in the sickly emergency room lights, so still, tiny, and quaint despite having been robbed of a future it didn’t even get the chance to comprehend.  In my restless dreams, it is always looking down on me, its open eyes beaming that same dank hospital light onto me.  Skin sallow and grey, mouth agape yet motionless.  I can never breathe in those nightmares.  Just stand paralyzed and screaming a soundless scream.  

 Only allowed to awaken when that hollow face begins to wail for its mother.  

I shook the image from my head as I watched my new son roll in his incubator, eager to meet his family.  

The time was coming.  My son was soon to be born, and Dianna would be visiting in a week.  My anticipation flooded as I indulged in those old blissful fantasies I had missed so much.  

I was eager to accept him, no matter how loud the muffled alarms in my head blared.  That fluttering panic was continuously present in me.  It seemed to gestate along with my baby.  My temper flared whenever it seeped into my fantasies, ruining the happiness I KNEW was coming to me.  I just knew it was.  

Then, three days before my wife was to visit, I woke to find the womb still.  Jumping out of bed, I ran over to its nest to examine it.  It was running cold, its pulse marginal and weak.  Horror tore through me.  I ripped all the blankets from my bed, swaddling it in multiple layers.  I held it to my chest, begging my body heat to be enough to revive its warmth.  

Rocking it, minutes passed, and no signs of hope emerged.  It only got colder.  The moist, fleshy uterus stained my shirt with bile and mucus as I desperately examined it for the source of withering.  The skull's face stared at me as I scanned it, before I poked a prodding finger into the gaping nostril.  A slimy rope greeted my touch.  Grappling it with the two fingers I could fit, I pulled it, revealing a damp umbilical cord.  

The tip was stained with crusted blood and viscera, severed from whatever biome brought him to be—brought him into my life.  My mind raced; confusion and desperation to save the life I was promised stunned me.  For well over a week, my son had been growing rapidly, so why now was he suffering?  What changed since I discovered him?  Retracing my steps of the last weeks, the only cause I could nail down was me.  I was what was suffocating this miracle.  

I had torn a source of nutrients from it.  The image of that limp sapling’s thick root I had ripped from the pit of sand flashed into my head.  A quivering pulse in my arms brought my attention back to him.  He was getting colder, life ebbing away by the minute.  I trembled as the weight of my actions caved in on me.  I shot up off the floor, the womb clutched in my arms, and bolted for the door.  I ran out of the house, stopping quickly for my phone.  

A field of snow slowed my pace, and a soft blizzard was just starting.  Shielding the skull in my arms, I trudged with heavy steps to the location of the three trees.  I could not feel the cold.  Only a bitterness burned inside me.  Not again.  

I arrived winded at the triad of trees and began sifting through the piling snow for the sapling I had separated from its skull.  First, I came into contact with the pit of sand.  Then, nearby, against one of its brothers, I found the nearly decayed sapling.  Its sad, small presence was highlighted by that elongated cord of a root.  The tip still crusted with the life it once produced.  

Pleadingly, I crammed the root into the skull’s nostril, begging for some form of connection to be enough.  Enough to sustain the obscured life within.  The dead plant lay there, its withered state mocking me as I pathetically tied the cords together with torn bits of blanket.  Rocking him in my arms, I waited for signs of revitalization.  

None came.  The biting winter wind diminished the fading heartbeat of my boy, whose chamber’s temperature was dropping rapidly.  In frustration, I struck at the dead sapling.  Its lifeless, frozen limbs cracked under my fist; bits of wood pierced my knuckles.  The sharp pain pushed my fist away, and I saw a thick bit of shrapnel sticking from between my knuckles.  

Through clenched teeth, I tore it from my hand, unclogging a soft stream of blood.  I cursed as tears accumulated in my eyes, watching as the crimson flowed down my forearm before coating over the exposed womb.  My mind blared one thought, screaming over and over.  Not again, not again, not again, not again.  That cold, dead face resurfaced in my memory, like bile rising atop a river of scum.  Its beaming eyes weeping, wailing for its mother.  

I hugged the uterus, its mucous membrane soaked with my blood.  Shaking, I prayed harder than I had ever done before, words choking my throat as I begged God to allow this second chance-  that I would do anything for this second chance.  Just not again.  

I pulled away from the pregnant skull to gaze upon the dying happiness that would once again elude me.  Only to be greeted with a strange glow emanating from within the womb.  It pulsed softly, but notably stronger than before.  Its chilled interior was beginning to warm.  Unsure of what miracle had occurred, I noticed my spilled blood.

The blood that coated the exterior of the uterus was being absorbed.  

Like a living sponge, it hungrily sopped up my dwindling flow of liquid gore.  Another spark of hope.  Taking that same stick that had pierced my knuckle, I stabbed my palm.  Blood spilled freely as I held my hand over the skull.  The thirsty incubator absorbed it all.  With each splash across the sinewy flesh, his pulse steadied.  The throbbing uterus was regaining its composure.  I gasped in relief, tears stinging my eyes.  I had found my son a new source of sustenance.  

The internal sirens I had been muffling for days suddenly burst through my euphoria.  How much more will IT need?  I choked the traitorous thought out.  As much as HE needs, was my answer.  

I must have sat in that blizzard for most of the afternoon.  Lying there in a pile of blankets, I cradled the pregnant skull through the passing storm, bleeding all the while, feeding it.  With each splash of my vitals, his pulse returned, still faint, but there. I was light-headed by the time I had to wrap my hand up and staunch the bleeding.  The wind broke across my smiling face, content with the secret being revealed, the secret I needed to ensure my son's birth.  

The winter evening was teasing the horizon, and the snowfall remained heavy but tempered.  With unsteady legs, I trudged back home, the knee-deep snow sapping my energy.  I returned to an empty house, my parents having left for a family trip, leaving me to house-sit.  I gratefully tore off my boots and coat before crawling upstairs.  Barely making it to my bed, I slept deeply and dreamlessly.  Holding tight to the pregnant skull under the thick blankets. 

A text from my mother assured me that the rest of the week I would be alone, as they were going to be out of town visiting her relatives.  Thankful for the privacy, I would spend the following day feeding the womb.  

Placing the uterus in the kitchen sink, I held my hand over it while it bled onto the sac of meat protruding from the back of the skull.  I was rewarded with only hints of regeneration, as the uterine wall weakly pulsed and glowed.  The petite sign of improvement crushed my morale.  I was just barely enough to stabilize him.  He needed more than this to THRIVE.  He needed more than I could give.  

The alarm in my head was ringing, unable to be ignored.  How much more will it take?  My mind was too shaken to respond this time.  Until my phone rang.  Until I saw my ex-wife calling.  Tomorrow.  She’ll be here tomorrow to see him.  A seed was planted in the bile of my heart in that moment, as I stared at the drip feed of my blood trickling onto the pregnant skull.  The question arose of my own accord: How much more will it take?  The response came before I answered her call: As much as he needs. 

“Hello?” 

“Hi, it's me, are you still free tomorrow?”  She asked.

“Yes, all day.  My parents won’t be here, but they give their love and apologies for missing your visit.”  

“Oh,” the line went quiet.  

“Something wrong?”  I followed up.

“So, we are going to be alone the whole time?” Hesitancy laced her voice. “I don’t know if I am comfortable with that.”  

My plans quaked; a tinge of desperation erupted from me. “Well, yeah, but it’ll be a short visit I promise!  I don’t want to ambush you, only to talk things out for clarity's sake.  Please.”  

Another long pause. “What even is there to talk about?” she responded, a sense of realization emanating from her. “We are divorced, and I don’t really see the point in hashing out a dead relationship.  I’m sorry, I just, I don’t see what good could come of it.”  

A familiar rage burned in my chest.  How dare she act like the way things ended was anything but hurtful?  My lure may have had ulterior motives, but I did desire that clarity, confirmation on how she viewed me and the marriage as a whole.  I wanted her to say it with her own mouth, not just vaguely gesture at issues, all of which were fodder for the real reason.  The grave we both stood over.  

Trying to remain composed, I replied through gritted teeth, “It's been rough for me.  I just feel like I need this to move past it all.  Even if you FEEL as though we have ‘hashed’ it all out, it clearly wasn’t good enough for me.  I NEED clarity, stability, something to make this whole horrid situation seem less like a blur of vague slights and more like genuine disconnection between us, y’know?”  

My tone was revealing.  Her defensiveness kicked in. “Wait, wait, I think you made it pretty clear how you felt about me when we broke off, both verbally and physically.  I needed YOU, yet there I was catering to your pathetic drunken self-indulgence, always crying about the happiness YOU were ‘owed’ and all the while spiting me, like I was some incubator that failed its primary directive!  You made me feel AWFUL, and I think we made that clear in the courtroom.”  She took a breath.  I was shaking as she continued with a softness in her voice, “We both lost something we desperately wanted.  Nothing can change that.  That hurt was made worse by your behavior, and I made that clear in the proceedings.  Just because you were drunk during them does not mean it did not happen.”

My head hurt, my heart was pounding.  With great restraint, I asked again, “Please, just come see me tomorrow; there is something I need to show you.”  

“What?”

“Something that will help m- us, this whole mess, please, just promise you will come tomorrow.”

“...Ok… But only for lunch. I can’t stay long.”

“Thank you, yes, that’s fine, perfect even.  Ok, see you tomorrow then.  You remember how to get to my parents?”

“...Yes.”  She replied.  With that, the call ended.  My pounding brain swam with emotions.  Anger, resentment.  An old familiar bitterness.  But, above all of that, was jubilation.  She was coming.  She was to see my son.  My plan would go through.  No matter how loud the sirens in my mind got.    

​

Long have I enjoyed its fruits.  The sensation of each bite was as invigorating as the first I ever took.  The taste is still a blissful, potent, intoxicating explosion.  That horrified shame I once experienced has been long dead and buried in some crevice of my eternal soul, lost in the infiniti I surrendered for the pleasures of extended mortality. 

It's been my life partner for nearly a century.  Born in 1934, I have enjoyed the bounty of youth well into my early hundreds.  My skin supple, my flesh strong, my mind sharp.  This plot of land has been my home ever since I discovered it, and I have never yearned for anything different.  An ecstasy permeates the very air around it, and every day, I get to wake and inhale its gifts.  How could I yearn for anything else?  How could I have known?

I remember that first day vividly on the cusp of the Smoky Mountains, beyond the East Coast.  I was a desperate man, looking for cheap land and distance from people I had little patience for.  On the brink of burning the last of my fuel, I pulled off the main road, down a dirt path.  Trees soon encompassed my beater vehicle, and the road continued down a sudden, side-winding cliffside.  Running on fumes, I let my curiosity follow the dirtway, no point in stopping while I can still go.

The barren drive gave way to a field, the road ended, but I let my car drift through the brush with its final burst of gas.  The gravity of my life must have been weighing my mind down somewhat, for I was numbly bursting through bushes and tall grass for a handful of minutes before I regained concern for my well-being.  In the nick of time, I swerved around a tree and skidded to a halt just past the treeline.  

Shaking my head in self-disgust, I looked at the odometer to confirm I had just burned the last ounce of fuel in my car.  Disgust was soon wiped from my thoughts as I looked up out my windshield.  

A graveyard stared right back at me.  A humble stone fence guarded its small perimeter.  The canopy of trees leered over the petite guard, but dared not cross it, leaving the bed of the dead open to enjoy the sun unmolested by shadow.  Scattered headstones poked out of the thick grass blanket, appearing as aged pillows stained by past eons known only by those silent few who slept within.  

In the midst of this archaic landscape, sat a single tree.  Young, yet to bear fruit, but straight and strong of trunk.  From it sprout nine branches, each identical in girth and extension.  All arched upward, before slanting sharply down, as if recolied fingers.  

The bizarre scene was captivating.  I had never seen anything like it.  Exiting my car, I walked to the fence and peered over it, like a child daring to wander onto an adult’s property to retrieve a ball. Mesmerized, I stared at it unblinking.  Before I realized it, I was standing under it.  Its shade was more than cooling; it was blissful, like a blanket of soft, liquid flesh massaging every inch of me in a loving embrace.  

I came to my senses after my foot hit a hard block just at the foot of the tree.  The roots had grown over most of it, but I made out what it was nonetheless.  A headstone peeked from under the magnificent plant.  Wooden tendrils had consumed most of it, but I could still examine the last name and date of death: 

*Handstern* 

*- 1924*

The tree had grown from his very resting place.  At the time, I simply thought it was poetically beautiful.  Evening was fast approaching, and the solitude, along with the gravitational force of the bizarre tree, was convincing enough for me to camp out in the graveyard.  

The night sky was vivid and bright, and the cold wind was shielded by the tree under which I slept.  My dreams were filled with orgasmic sensations and vibrant warmth.  Never had I slept so soundly and yet experienced so much while doing so.  When I woke, the faint kiss of those dreams was imprinted on my mind.  At first, I was oblivious to the trees' influence and chalked it up to the peaceful, scenic bedroom I found myself in.  

Stretching and breathing in the morning air, I realized I was atop an incredible overlook, something the night and forest had hidden from me.  Just past the graveyard was the cliff edge, looking over the immense forest valley below.  I was completely floored by the wonder this location seemed to spring on me from moment to moment.  What are the chances?

I sat there for most of the morning, legs dangling off the rocky overhang.  Existential contentment was an abnormality for me at that time; never had I felt, not just at peace, but aroused by life.  Breathing was invigorating, silence was enchanting, my body pulsed with energy, and my mind was sharp and heightened.  I had never felt more alive, more human, until that first moment here. 

Bolting to my feet, pounding my chest in elated joviality, I turned back to my car to assess my supplies, determined to camp here as long as my luggage would allow.  Hopping over the compact fence, I came to a halt beside one of the nine, finger-like branches of the great tree.  I was shocked to discover, upon the very tip of this wooden appendage, a blooming bud of some sort.  A bud I was certain was not there the night before.  Flabbergasted by the speed of this eruption of life, I shook it off as yet another mystery of this oddity of botany.  

I decided then and there that, no matter how scarce my supplies were, this was a sign to camp here a few more days.  My rationale at the time was simple: I desperately needed this cleansing of body and spirit before venturing back to the “real world”.  The sluggish banality, quiet desperation, and sullen patheticness of searching for work, let alone the haunting possibility of actually succeeding this hunt, was an experience I was eager to put off.  

So, I spent the remainder of the day strolling the vicinity, picnicking under the tree, and occasionally by the cliff edge.  I cannot lie, the natural silence was beautiful, but there were moments where, even in that paradise, my thoughts wandered to places I was uncomfortable with.  At the time.  

The first was of my family.  What little family I had was scattered across the continent, but I was leaving a sister and a younger brother up in New England.  Not to mention a potential sweetheart whom I had unsuccessfully and sporadically courted on and off throughout my years in our small town. 

 

I was thinking how pleasant it would be to share this place with them, when I realized I was having a difficult time remembering their faces.  Vague whispers of shapes and skin tones seemed to intermingle and morph in my mind's eye the harder I concentrated.  Alarmed and distraught, I jogged to my disabled vehicle and shuffled through the glove compartment.  Stashed haphazardly under a pack of cigarettes lay the few pictures of home I had bothered to hold on to.  Lifting one of them, I absorbed their faces.  My brother and sister were on either side of me, humble smiles radiating off them.  

This reassurance was soon met with a bizarre sense of detachment.  I could see their faces, but I could not retain them.  A smog would obscure their faces the very moment I blinked.  Any mortal man would’ve been shaken by this rapid onset of dementia; however, I was pulled away from these worries by the First Sign.  

A rustling from behind me drew my attention.  As I turned, heavy clouds blew across the vibrant sky, shading the graveyard in immense darkness.  Wind raced through the branches and grass, spattering dew onto my face.  Despite the buffeting, my eyes remained unblinking as I witnessed it.  

The recoiled branch of the bud creaked and groaned as it adjusted its arm, like stiffened bones being torn from their crypt.  Now arched like a lure, this single branch remained bare, except for its very tip, which bulged with a new, throbbing appendage.  The bud was now a moist, crimson sac, like an over-ripened apple made of flesh, dangled from its wooden umbilical cord.  

With a sudden burst, it ejaculated a flash of leaves and flowers.  A rainbow of archaic foliage sprouted its strange patterns, itself in its collective bunches in the shape of a flower.  At the center of which hung the First Sign, and the first of my holy fruit.  

I must admit, even with the fragrance of that blooming majesty, it was not enough, at the time, to disway my initial shock and disgust.  From the kaleidoscope of color and leaves, a raw, human head, devoid of skin, hung.  Its mesh of dripping, bloody muscle fibers hung loosely off the skull, barely gripping the agape jaw as it dangled in the wind.  Eyeless sockets dripped crimson, coating the white teeth in a thin red paint.  

Long, clumpy hair draped from its cap, with a flimsy braid holding the locks in place, a stream of texture.  What strands weren’t glued together by chunks of wet sinew showed a lush brown color.  Given the head's ravaged state, the hair was the sole indicator of its distant humanity.  A desperate clasp on what individuality one retains before death wipes clean the slate of our flesh.  

And clasp it did, for I recognized that color.  Its hints of amber, its braid, even in the dimmed atmosphere, rang an alarm of familiarity throughout my body.  With a shaking hand, I raised the picture I had fished from my car.  My sister, smiling in that eternal capsule, had flung over her shoulder, cascading down her torso, that very braid.  

The coincidence was unbelievable.  I examined that clotted, mutilated fruit, only to discover more similarities.  The high cheekbones, the teeth, what features there were, retained an uncanny resemblance to her.  Suddenly, I found myself under the tree, gazing up at the pod, mouth agape.  That fragrance permeated, like the pulse of a beating heart.  And I had locked onto its source.  The hair was dangling just inches from my mouth.  Its scent was ecstasy. 

 

I gasped as I realized I was sliding the moist mane down my throat, hand outstretched, plucking the fruit free.  The taste erased any moral repulsion or instinct of disgust from my mind.  What was perceived as coagulated blood tasted of the richest butter; what was perceived as rotting follicles tasted of the richest pastry; what was perceived as oozing muscle tasted of the rarest poultry; what was once my sister was now a rejuvenating sustenance of celestial origin.   

Each crunching bite was a burst of flavor my tongue has never and could never enjoy from the natural world.  The fragments of cranium complemented the chunks of grey matter, both intensified by the flood of blood, which was riddled with the pulp of rotted arteries.  Each gulp, warm and titillating, filled me with radiant vitality.  

Lips coated in its juices, I looked down at my hands, stained red and sticky.  Not a seed remained of that abnormality.  A perfect calm filled me; never had I been so satisfied.  I was shaken from my trance by the retracting branch.  Like a withered arm, it coiled into a spiral, bark blackening and tearing. With that, the First Sign had come and gone.  Horrified that I had killed this holiest of holies, I feverishly began wrapping its limb in torn fabric, hauling water over to hydrate it, and doing what little else I could think of.  

I was interrupted by a rapid migraine that coursed violently from my spine to my frontal lobe.  Its sharpness knocked me to my knees.  I dropped my bucket, splashing water over myself, only stopping my fall by supporting myself against the tree. It was gone as soon as it came.  Gasping, I collected myself, carefully stretching my neck and back, testing for the source of the pain.  With no signs of returning, relief flooded me.  I examined my soaked pants before fishing out their contents to examine the damage.  My photo was moist, but remained intact.  Flapping it in the air to help it dry, I looked up at the branches, all eight others still intact, no sign of similar wilting. 

Content with my efforts, I paused my drying of the print and looked down at the photo.  For the last time, I believe. The migraine returned with a soft wrapping up my spinal column, into my eyes as I gazed at my sister's face.  I forced myself to continue looking despite the pain, for a new terror revealed itself to me.  I could not recognize her face.  An insistent blur seemed to be mutilating her features, obscuring them in both mind and vision. The migraine grew in intensity the longer I stared.  For a minute, I resisted, cold sweat coating my forehead as I churned my brain, trying to recall her.  

At last, the pain searing and sharp, like hot nails being driven into my eyes, I turned away.  Distress riddled my stomach, anxiety coated my throat, and a terror of my actions replaced the drumming in my skull.  

I’ve come a long way since.  Such troubles are a distant ache.  But even then, all that turmoil I felt was dashed away by the enticing scent of the timber.  It seemed to sense my distress and exuded a fragrance that filled my lungs with fresh joy and my mind with calming comforts comparable only to the warm swaddling of a loving mother.  

With a sigh of relief, I crumpled the picture in my fist.  No longer would it distract me from my bliss.  No familiar bond, no loving friend, no caring mother, could ever fill me with the euphoric contentment I feel here, in my garden of graves.  The fog filled my mind’s eye as countless faces began to dissipate like a thin mist.  I inhaled deeply and accepted their departure.  

Before I knew it, I lived under the tree.  The surrounding forest supplied me with the material to construct a humble log cabin, on the cusp of the graveyard's fence.  Every morning since, I sat under my tree to await another Sign. Once every decade, one would appear.  The Second Sign was my brother; he bloomed like my sister, a gnarled, ghastly skull, dripping with his liquefied muscles, like the juices of the ripest fruit.  What apprehensions I had were dashed upon that first, delectable bite.  The skull gave way to my teeth, like the skin of a dried mango, the gush of blood filled my mouth, paired with the tenderness of the muscles as I chewed, all cascaded down my throat like a river of divine mana.  

Like the first, the branch withered into its spiral of rot, signaling seven Signs yet to come.  Like the first, what remaining aspects of my brother’s face I could recall were liquidated.  Like the first, my conscience was suffocated by the ethereal peace.  

Only after the Third Sign did I realize my extended youth, my aptitude, and my overall health.  That one was my mother, I believe.  She was especially ripe.  Dense with flesh, that first crunch resonated among the tombstones like the echoes of a barren cave.  A waterfall of thick veins and brain matter poured over my face.  No longer did her face haunt my dreams; her voice no longer badgered me for the sins I had supposedly committed. 

 

By the Fourth Sign, I could no longer even guess who I was consuming.  The past and future seemed equal in obscurity, both unknowable concepts, capable merely of prediction by analyzing the present.  However, my longevity and radical health dissuaded any such analysis.  The present was where I lived, where I flourished, where I was safe.  No work to distract me, no relations to challenge me, no ailments to hurt me.  The tree sheltered me.  For a price I thought fair, no matter what sliver of shame and anxiety would sliver out from the cravacesess of my soul.    

These pathetic episodes were short-lived in an otherwise bountiful blur of happiness.  Decades of extended, youthful mortality have a way of swaying one’s moral considerations.  At least, until the Eighth Sign.  

Strange, it was only a decade ago, yet it feels so distant.  It bore its fruit, and I sat patiently waiting for its full bloom.  Another faceless head, its limited features no longer affecting me.  No longer drawing out memories of whoever was about to be consumed.  Upon the final gulp, the final sigh of bliss, I felt it.  It rushed, no, sprouted from my stomach lining, a shoot, piercing up my esophagus.  

It was the first time I had felt pain in half a century.  Long gone were the days of piercing migraines; my secluded paradise softened me to the slightest irritations.  Even without this factor, the pain would have keeled over a marine.  Hunched, howling into the dirt, I felt as the finger of something growing trickled up my innards, choking me all the way.  It halted about a third of the way up my throat.  Its girth was not enough to suffocate me, but each breath felt like sucking down razor blades.  

I lay there trembling, miserable, confused, and bitter at the brutal interruption of my heavenly delights.  Risking additional pain, I adjusted myself onto my elbows, only to feel the spear drag across my lower esophagus, slicing and splintering along the tender lining.  I gasped in pain, but I was satisfied with the experiment.  I now knew what was growing inside me.  

  A sapling.  

Denial plagued much of the following weeks.  It was soon replaced entirely by misery.  The pain never dissipated.   Like a slug, I crawled along the tombstone garden, a trail of coughed-up blood trailing behind me.  With each month, I felt it grow.  Leaves would bloom, tickling my lungs at first, before causing a rash that spread throughout my insides.  The torment was unbearable.  Pain that only grew, paired with an intense itch that flared in every crevice of my torso.  

After a year, I would have ended it if I could have moved.  Instead, I lay against my beloved tree, a statue of flesh positioned upright by the sapling sprouting from my torn, bloody throat.  Nine branches had pierced through my chest cavity, their leaves stained red, decorated with my innards dangling from them, like Christmas ornaments.  Endless tortures vandalized my once youthful appearance as it germinated within me.  My strength was stolen, nutrients for my seed.  The only thing that remained was my life.  No matter the blood loss, the hollowing hunger, the eternal fatigue of muscle, I would not die.  

A decade passed by like seven eternities, the time I had so gleefully last track of, now pestered my every thought, like a mocking jester to his dying king.  Each moment a bastard of itself: every second felt like an hour, every hour, a year, every year, a decade.  The only perceivable hope was now the one thing I had spent decades dancing from.  Decay.  

Long was his shadow, its cooling shade the only remedy for my wailing existence.  My mind was now wiped of not only the memory of people, but of memory entirely.  Sapped away along with my vitality.  The fog had replaced my mind, festering and darkening each day, fueled by the agony I endured.  Like an animal, only the present was conceivable to me.  Despite my prayers to be free of its torturous aura.  

At last, the Ninth Sign came.  

The eight withered spirals above my imprisoned living corpse exploded with life, extending straight and upright like the prongs of a crown.  The ninth branch, in the middle of its brothers and sisters, remained fixated, the tip of its retracted finger blooming more brilliantly than any other Sign.  Like an encrusted gem, its foliage gleamed and shone, brighter than any star.  I strained my eyes upward, the searing pain radiating through my body, for a moment, forgotten.  

An oozing bud, blazing like the sun, appeared, like the head of an infant being pushed out of its mother.  Unraveling itself, its fruit began to appear, as hot afterbirth dripped over me.  This fruit maintained its face, its flesh covered in supple skin, hair, vibrant and healthy.  

As it grew and formed, I could not help but weep as I stared into my own face.  

Fully sprouted, it hung over me, its closed eyelids quivering for a moment before opening.  I stared into myself, a new agony burning through my body and soul.  It began to lower, a moist umbilical cord pulsing from the branch, extending it closer and closer to me.  My eyes stung as I attempted to cry out, gagged by the sapling buried in my throat.  Anchored at the foot of this majestic tree, I sat with my mouth forced agape, while the Ninth Sign slid down my gullet.  

Its size unhinged my jaw and tore my esophagus as it crawled its way down.  Each hair atop its head dug into new internal gashes and old wounds, stinging like a horde of wasps.  The sapling within me seemed to guide the fruit deeper and deeper, until at last, with a plop, it splashed into my stomach.  Bile quickly boiled over, gushing up my shredded, bloodied throat, like lava.  I erupted, red vomit exploded from my shattered jaws, shooting violent convulsions down my spine.

Exhausted and miserable, I leaned my head back against the tree I had so loved all these passing decades.  Its ninth branch, now nothing more than a withered spiral, joined its decayed fellowship, resuming their silent prayer.  The blackness of the branches spread to the trunk, rotting its bark and suffocating its moisture.  The stench of rotting flesh replaced its once enchanting fragrance.  Like a cripple’s hand, the tree shrank into itself.  Nothing more than a decaying stump, it resembled a tombstone more than a tree.  

There I lay, tears running freely down my battered face, staring up into the glum, dark sky, eager for my final moments to arrive.  Contemplating solely on a past pillaged from my mind, a present I could not endure, and a future I was desperate to escape.  My stomach, eviscerated and ravaged, pulsated as the fruit fertilized the sapling.  My living corpse no longer enough, the crop certified the saplings' final nutrition.  

My sight grew hazy, my limbs numb, my heart weak.  The tree within me began to expand, its trunk bursting through my stomach lining, tearing me in two, yet held together by its roots entangled in my spinal column as they burrowed into the earth.  

I was the Final Sign.  I stared up at the young, proud tree, still growing over me, from me.  Its nine branches, poised like retracted fingers, encircled its trunk.  All pain was gone, my nerves, whether consumed or ruined, no longer screamed out.  

There I lay, my final moments here at last.  A strange parental affection filled me, and was soon ratified by the entrancing fragrance of the newly enshrined tree.  With my last breath, I drew in the fruits of my labor, and as I exhaled, I wept with joy.  The tree blessed me with a gift of passing, and with it, all regrets melted away, as I slipped into oblivion. 

Long have I enjoyed its fruits.  The sensation of each bite was as invigorating as the first I ever took.  The taste is still a blissful, potent, intoxicating explosion.  That horrified shame I once experienced has been long dead and buried in some crevice of my eternal soul, lost in the infiniti I surrendered for the pleasures of extended mortality. 

It's been my life partner for nearly a century.  Born in 1934, I have enjoyed the bounty of youth well into my early hundreds.  My skin supple, my flesh strong, my mind sharp.  This plot of land has been my home ever since I discovered it, and I have never yearned for anything different.  An ecstasy permeates the very air around it, and every day, I get to wake and inhale its gifts.  How could I yearn for anything else?  How could I have known?

I remember that first day vividly on the cusp of the Smoky Mountains, beyond the East Coast.  I was a desperate man, looking for cheap land and distance from people I had little patience for.  On the brink of burning the last of my fuel, I pulled off the main road, down a dirt path.  Trees soon encompassed my beater vehicle, and the road continued down a sudden, side-winding cliffside.  Running on fumes, I let my curiosity follow the dirtway, no point in stopping while I can still go.

The barren drive gave way to a field, the road ended, but I let my car drift through the brush with its final burst of gas.  The gravity of my life must have been weighing my mind down somewhat, for I was numbly bursting through bushes and tall grass for a handful of minutes before I regained concern for my well-being.  In the nick of time, I swerved around a tree and skidded to a halt just past the treeline.  

Shaking my head in self-disgust, I looked at the odometer to confirm I had just burned the last ounce of fuel in my car.  Disgust was soon wiped from my thoughts as I looked up out my windshield.  

A graveyard stared right back at me.  A humble stone fence guarded its small perimeter.  The canopy of trees leered over the petite guard, but dared not cross it, leaving the bed of the dead open to enjoy the sun unmolested by shadow.  Scattered headstones poked out of the thick grass blanket, appearing as aged pillows stained by past eons known only by those silent few who slept within.  

In the midst of this archaic landscape, sat a single tree.  Young, yet to bear fruit, but straight and strong of trunk.  From it sprout nine branches, each identical in girth and extension.  All arched upward, before slanting sharply down, as if recolied fingers.  

The bizarre scene was captivating.  I had never seen anything like it.  Exiting my car, I walked to the fence and peered over it, like a child daring to wander onto an adult’s property to retrieve a ball. Mesmerized, I stared at it unblinking.  Before I realized it, I was standing under it.  Its shade was more than cooling; it was blissful, like a blanket of soft, liquid flesh massaging every inch of me in a loving embrace.  

I came to my senses after my foot hit a hard block just at the foot of the tree.  The roots had grown over most of it, but I made out what it was nonetheless.  A headstone peeked from under the magnificent plant.  Wooden tendrils had consumed most of it, but I could still examine the last name and date of death: 
Handstern 
- 1924

The tree had grown from his very resting place.  At the time, I simply thought it was poetically beautiful.  Evening was fast approaching, and the solitude, along with the gravitational force of the bizarre tree, was convincing enough for me to camp out in the graveyard.  

The night sky was vivid and bright, and the cold wind was shielded by the tree under which I slept.  My dreams were filled with orgasmic sensations and vibrant warmth.  Never had I slept so soundly and yet experienced so much while doing so.  When I woke, the faint kiss of those dreams was imprinted on my mind.  At first, I was oblivious to the trees' influence and chalked it up to the peaceful, scenic bedroom I found myself in.  

Stretching and breathing in the morning air, I realized I was atop an incredible overlook, something the night and forest had hidden from me.  Just past the graveyard was the cliff edge, looking over the immense forest valley below.  I was completely floored by the wonder this location seemed to spring on me from moment to moment.  What are the chances?

I sat there for most of the morning, legs dangling off the rocky overhang.  Existential contentment was an abnormality for me at that time; never had I felt, not just at peace, but aroused by life.  Breathing was invigorating, silence was enchanting, my body pulsed with energy, and my mind was sharp and heightened.  I had never felt more alive, more human, until that first moment here. 

Bolting to my feet, pounding my chest in elated joviality, I turned back to my car to assess my supplies, determined to camp here as long as my luggage would allow.  Hopping over the compact fence, I came to a halt beside one of the nine, finger-like branches of the great tree.  I was shocked to discover, upon the very tip of this wooden appendage, a blooming bud of some sort.  A bud I was certain was not there the night before.  Flabbergasted by the speed of this eruption of life, I shook it off as yet another mystery of this oddity of botany.  

I decided then and there that, no matter how scarce my supplies were, this was a sign to camp here a few more days.  My rationale at the time was simple: I desperately needed this cleansing of body and spirit before venturing back to the “real world”.  The sluggish banality, quiet desperation, and sullen patheticness of searching for work, let alone the haunting possibility of actually succeeding this hunt, was an experience I was eager to put off.  

So, I spent the remainder of the day strolling the vicinity, picnicking under the tree, and occasionally by the cliff edge.  I cannot lie, the natural silence was beautiful, but there were moments where, even in that paradise, my thoughts wandered to places I was uncomfortable with.  At the time.  

The first was of my family.  What little family I had was scattered across the continent, but I was leaving a sister and a younger brother up in New England.  Not to mention a potential sweetheart whom I had unsuccessfully and sporadically courted on and off throughout my years in our small town. 

 
I was thinking how pleasant it would be to share this place with them, when I realized I was having a difficult time remembering their faces.  Vague whispers of shapes and skin tones seemed to intermingle and morph in my mind's eye the harder I concentrated.  Alarmed and distraught, I jogged to my disabled vehicle and shuffled through the glove compartment.  Stashed haphazardly under a pack of cigarettes lay the few pictures of home I had bothered to hold on to.  Lifting one of them, I absorbed their faces.  My brother and sister were on either side of me, humble smiles radiating off them.  

This reassurance was soon met with a bizarre sense of detachment.  I could see their faces, but I could not retain them.  A smog would obscure their faces the very moment I blinked.  Any mortal man would’ve been shaken by this rapid onset of dementia; however, I was pulled away from these worries by the First Sign.  

A rustling from behind me drew my attention.  As I turned, heavy clouds blew across the vibrant sky, shading the graveyard in immense darkness.  Wind raced through the branches and grass, spattering dew onto my face.  Despite the buffeting, my eyes remained unblinking as I witnessed it.  

The recoiled branch of the bud creaked and groaned as it adjusted its arm, like stiffened bones being torn from their crypt.  Now arched like a lure, this single branch remained bare, except for its very tip, which bulged with a new, throbbing appendage.  The bud was now a moist, crimson sac, like an over-ripened apple made of flesh, dangled from its wooden umbilical cord.  

With a sudden burst, it ejaculated a flash of leaves and flowers.  A rainbow of archaic foliage sprouted its strange patterns, itself in its collective bunches in the shape of a flower.  At the center of which hung the First Sign, and the first of my holy fruit.  

I must admit, even with the fragrance of that blooming majesty, it was not enough, at the time, to disway my initial shock and disgust.  From the kaleidoscope of color and leaves, a raw, human head, devoid of skin, hung.  Its mesh of dripping, bloody muscle fibers hung loosely off the skull, barely gripping the agape jaw as it dangled in the wind.  Eyeless sockets dripped crimson, coating the white teeth in a thin red paint.  

Long, clumpy hair draped from its cap, with a flimsy braid holding the locks in place, a stream of texture.  What strands weren’t glued together by chunks of wet sinew showed a lush brown color.  Given the head's ravaged state, the hair was the sole indicator of its distant humanity.  A desperate clasp on what individuality one retains before death wipes clean the slate of our flesh.  

And clasp it did, for I recognized that color.  Its hints of amber, its braid, even in the dimmed atmosphere, rang an alarm of familiarity throughout my body.  With a shaking hand, I raised the picture I had fished from my car.  My sister, smiling in that eternal capsule, had flung over her shoulder, cascading down her torso, that very braid.  

The coincidence was unbelievable.  I examined that clotted, mutilated fruit, only to discover more similarities.  The high cheekbones, the teeth, what features there were, retained an uncanny resemblance to her.  Suddenly, I found myself under the tree, gazing up at the pod, mouth agape.  That fragrance permeated, like the pulse of a beating heart.  And I had locked onto its source.  The hair was dangling just inches from my mouth.  Its scent was ecstasy. 

 
I gasped as I realized I was sliding the moist mane down my throat, hand outstretched, plucking the fruit free.  The taste erased any moral repulsion or instinct of disgust from my mind.  What was perceived as coagulated blood tasted of the richest butter; what was perceived as rotting follicles tasted of the richest pastry; what was perceived as oozing muscle tasted of the rarest poultry; what was once my sister was now a rejuvenating sustenance of celestial origin.   

Each crunching bite was a burst of flavor my tongue has never and could never enjoy from the natural world.  The fragments of cranium complemented the chunks of grey matter, both intensified by the flood of blood, which was riddled with the pulp of rotted arteries.  Each gulp, warm and titillating, filled me with radiant vitality.  

Lips coated in its juices, I looked down at my hands, stained red and sticky.  Not a seed remained of that abnormality.  A perfect calm filled me; never had I been so satisfied.  I was shaken from my trance by the retracting branch.  Like a withered arm, it coiled into a spiral, bark blackening and tearing. With that, the First Sign had come and gone.  Horrified that I had killed this holiest of holies, I feverishly began wrapping its limb in torn fabric, hauling water over to hydrate it, and doing what little else I could think of.  

I was interrupted by a rapid migraine that coursed violently from my spine to my frontal lobe.  Its sharpness knocked me to my knees.  I dropped my bucket, splashing water over myself, only stopping my fall by supporting myself against the tree. It was gone as soon as it came.  Gasping, I collected myself, carefully stretching my neck and back, testing for the source of the pain.  With no signs of returning, relief flooded me.  I examined my soaked pants before fishing out their contents to examine the damage.  My photo was moist, but remained intact.  Flapping it in the air to help it dry, I looked up at the branches, all eight others still intact, no sign of similar wilting. 

Content with my efforts, I paused my drying of the print and looked down at the photo.  For the last time, I believe. The migraine returned with a soft wrapping up my spinal column, into my eyes as I gazed at my sister's face.  I forced myself to continue looking despite the pain, for a new terror revealed itself to me.  I could not recognize her face.  An insistent blur seemed to be mutilating her features, obscuring them in both mind and vision. The migraine grew in intensity the longer I stared.  For a minute, I resisted, cold sweat coating my forehead as I churned my brain, trying to recall her.  

At last, the pain searing and sharp, like hot nails being driven into my eyes, I turned away.  Distress riddled my stomach, anxiety coated my throat, and a terror of my actions replaced the drumming in my skull.  

I’ve come a long way since.  Such troubles are a distant ache.  But even then, all that turmoil I felt was dashed away by the enticing scent of the timber.  It seemed to sense my distress and exuded a fragrance that filled my lungs with fresh joy and my mind with calming comforts comparable only to the warm swaddling of a loving mother.  

With a sigh of relief, I crumpled the picture in my fist.  No longer would it distract me from my bliss.  No familiar bond, no loving friend, no caring mother, could ever fill me with the euphoric contentment I feel here, in my garden of graves.  The fog filled my mind’s eye as countless faces began to dissipate like a thin mist.  I inhaled deeply and accepted their departure.  

Before I knew it, I lived under the tree.  The surrounding forest supplied me with the material to construct a humble log cabin, on the cusp of the graveyard's fence.  Every morning since, I sat under my tree to await another Sign. Once every decade, one would appear.  The Second Sign was my brother; he bloomed like my sister, a gnarled, ghastly skull, dripping with his liquefied muscles, like the juices of the ripest fruit.  What apprehensions I had were dashed upon that first, delectable bite.  The skull gave way to my teeth, like the skin of a dried mango, the gush of blood filled my mouth, paired with the tenderness of the muscles as I chewed, all cascaded down my throat like a river of divine mana.  

Like the first, the branch withered into its spiral of rot, signaling seven Signs yet to come.  Like the first, what remaining aspects of my brother’s face I could recall were liquidated.  Like the first, my conscience was suffocated by the ethereal peace.  

Only after the Third Sign did I realize my extended youth, my aptitude, and my overall health.  That one was my mother, I believe.  She was especially ripe.  Dense with flesh, that first crunch resonated among the tombstones like the echoes of a barren cave.  A waterfall of thick veins and brain matter poured over my face.  No longer did her face haunt my dreams; her voice no longer badgered me for the sins I had supposedly committed. 

 
By the Fourth Sign, I could no longer even guess who I was consuming.  The past and future seemed equal in obscurity, both unknowable concepts, capable merely of prediction by analyzing the present.  However, my longevity and radical health dissuaded any such analysis.  The present was where I lived, where I flourished, where I was safe.  No work to distract me, no relations to challenge me, no ailments to hurt me.  The tree sheltered me.  For a price I thought fair, no matter what sliver of shame and anxiety would sliver out from the cravacesess of my soul.    

These pathetic episodes were short-lived in an otherwise bountiful blur of happiness.  Decades of extended, youthful mortality have a way of swaying one’s moral considerations.  At least, until the Eighth Sign.  

Strange, it was only a decade ago, yet it feels so distant.  It bore its fruit, and I sat patiently waiting for its full bloom.  Another faceless head, its limited features no longer affecting me.  No longer drawing out memories of whoever was about to be consumed.  Upon the final gulp, the final sigh of bliss, I felt it.  It rushed, no, sprouted from my stomach lining, a shoot, piercing up my esophagus.  

It was the first time I had felt pain in half a century.  Long gone were the days of piercing migraines; my secluded paradise softened me to the slightest irritations.  Even without this factor, the pain would have keeled over a marine.  Hunched, howling into the dirt, I felt as the finger of something growing trickled up my innards, choking me all the way.  It halted about a third of the way up my throat.  Its girth was not enough to suffocate me, but each breath felt like sucking down razor blades.  

I lay there trembling, miserable, confused, and bitter at the brutal interruption of my heavenly delights.  Risking additional pain, I adjusted myself onto my elbows, only to feel the spear drag across my lower esophagus, slicing and splintering along the tender lining.  I gasped in pain, but I was satisfied with the experiment.  I now knew what was growing inside me.  
   
  A sapling.  

Denial plagued much of the following weeks.  It was soon replaced entirely by misery.  The pain never dissipated.   Like a slug, I crawled along the tombstone garden, a trail of coughed-up blood trailing behind me.  With each month, I felt it grow.  Leaves would bloom, tickling my lungs at first, before causing a rash that spread throughout my insides.  The torment was unbearable.  Pain that only grew, paired with an intense itch that flared in every crevice of my torso.  

After a year, I would have ended it if I could have moved.  Instead, I lay against my beloved tree, a statue of flesh positioned upright by the sapling sprouting from my torn, bloody throat.  Nine branches had pierced through my chest cavity, their leaves stained red, decorated with my innards dangling from them, like Christmas ornaments.  Endless tortures vandalized my once youthful appearance as it germinated within me.  My strength was stolen, nutrients for my seed.  The only thing that remained was my life.  No matter the blood loss, the hollowing hunger, the eternal fatigue of muscle, I would not die.  

A decade passed by like seven eternities, the time I had so gleefully last track of, now pestered my every thought, like a mocking jester to his dying king.  Each moment a bastard of itself: every second felt like an hour, every hour, a year, every year, a decade.  The only perceivable hope was now the one thing I had spent decades dancing from.  Decay.  

Long was his shadow, its cooling shade the only remedy for my wailing existence.  My mind was now wiped of not only the memory of people, but of memory entirely.  Sapped away along with my vitality.  The fog had replaced my mind, festering and darkening each day, fueled by the agony I endured.  Like an animal, only the present was conceivable to me.  Despite my prayers to be free of its torturous aura.  

At last, the Ninth Sign came.  

The eight withered spirals above my imprisoned living corpse exploded with life, extending straight and upright like the prongs of a crown.  The ninth branch, in the middle of its brothers and sisters, remained fixated, the tip of its retracted finger blooming more brilliantly than any other Sign.  Like an encrusted gem, its foliage gleamed and shone, brighter than any star.  I strained my eyes upward, the searing pain radiating through my body, for a moment, forgotten.  

An oozing bud, blazing like the sun, appeared, like the head of an infant being pushed out of its mother.  Unraveling itself, its fruit began to appear, as hot afterbirth dripped over me.  This fruit maintained its face, its flesh covered in supple skin, hair, vibrant and healthy.  

As it grew and formed, I could not help but weep as I stared into my own face.  

Fully sprouted, it hung over me, its closed eyelids quivering for a moment before opening.  I stared into myself, a new agony burning through my body and soul.  It began to lower, a moist umbilical cord pulsing from the branch, extending it closer and closer to me.  My eyes stung as I attempted to cry out, gagged by the sapling buried in my throat.  Anchored at the foot of this majestic tree, I sat with my mouth forced agape, while the Ninth Sign slid down my gullet.  

Its size unhinged my jaw and tore my esophagus as it crawled its way down.  Each hair atop its head dug into new internal gashes and old wounds, stinging like a horde of wasps.  The sapling within me seemed to guide the fruit deeper and deeper, until at last, with a plop, it splashed into my stomach.  Bile quickly boiled over, gushing up my shredded, bloodied throat, like lava.  I erupted, red vomit exploded from my shattered jaws, shooting violent convulsions down my spine.

Exhausted and miserable, I leaned my head back against the tree I had so loved all these passing decades.  Its ninth branch, now nothing more than a withered spiral, joined its decayed fellowship, resuming their silent prayer.  The blackness of the branches spread to the trunk, rotting its bark and suffocating its moisture.  The stench of rotting flesh replaced its once enchanting fragrance.  Like a cripple’s hand, the tree shrank into itself.  Nothing more than a decaying stump, it resembled a tombstone more than a tree.  

There I lay, tears running freely down my battered face, staring up into the glum, dark sky, eager for my final moments to arrive.  Contemplating solely on a past pillaged from my mind, a present I could not endure, and a future I was desperate to escape.  My stomach, eviscerated and ravaged, pulsated as the fruit fertilized the sapling.  My living corpse no longer enough, the crop certified the saplings' final nutrition.  

My sight grew hazy, my limbs numb, my heart weak.  The tree within me began to expand, its trunk bursting through my stomach lining, tearing me in two, yet held together by its roots entangled in my spinal column as they burrowed into the earth.  

I was the Final Sign.  I stared up at the young, proud tree, still growing over me, from me.  Its nine branches, poised like retracted fingers, encircled its trunk.  All pain was gone, my nerves, whether consumed or ruined, no longer screamed out.  

There I lay, my final moments here at last.  A strange parental affection filled me, and was soon ratified by the entrancing fragrance of the newly enshrined tree.  With my last breath, I drew in the fruits of my labor, and as I exhaled, I wept with joy.  The tree blessed me with a gift of passing, and with it, all regrets melted away, as I slipped into oblivion.