It comes to me waking and in dreams: both an image, and a vision. In it I lay down and watch the tilt of the trees turn upward as my head rests to soft earth. Down here it smells sweeter. The soil is rich, fills up my nose, my ears, my mouth. It smells of cranberries rotting in rain. Of egg-shells in the garden. Of crushed wheat-stalks damp underfoot.
I cross my arms against my chest and all I can see is sky. Only sky and the strange stop-motion of the folding; the crawl of mulch and rock and sand across my trunk, my stem, my stomach. It tickles as it consumes, but does not prey; this grave can only cocoon, and is not where I shall sleep forever.
I am quiet as earth enters my blood, my bones, my marrow. It is not heavy, it does not harm. I fold until it is all I’ve ever been, lower and lower into the ground, deep into the dark safety of it: a net that does not catch but cradles. I feel it from the inside, and all around. Like water it laughs. Like a pickpocket it steals me away, spreads me out, travels me along from this place to another…and for a moment it’s as if I can see it all at once. The fullness of it; all our complexity.
I am among them. We are among, and together we hum beneath the surface.
Hmmmm.
…
My hands have turned to earth—my wrists, my arms, my elbows. My bones are thick – tough as stone – and soon these fall away, too. It’s always the heart that lasts the longest.
That’s all of me that’s left: calcified, mineral crystals, spawned, piercing through, and growing from and into each other again and again, unnatural, the stalactites sharp, frozen, encasing… These are the meals I could never break down. Marks that I was digesting it all on the inside. I am gone now except this last thing: this pretty, silent, indigestible stone.
I watch as mould scans it’s vitamin surface. Here, the fear sets in. With no arms, I want to unearth myself, can feel the ghost-scratch of soil beneath fingernails long gone. If any of it comes loose, if a splinter should break, it will poison this place. Poison it with things better left alone.
And still they hum; we hum. We are here, and here, and here. We can carry it, they say.
Coaxing, patient. It all takes time. Millennia. There is no rush to soften, moisten, decompose.
Finally, a shard comes loose. Dulled fear returns full swing as from behind the first bleed, a trickle, a creek of partially digested what-things stems, unrecognizable and ugly. And then more, with forms I do know: the people and places and things I’d hidden, pouring forth and catching up the same earth that holds me dear.
Blood memories swirl and empty veins boil. All the things I struggled to take in – up there, where the wind will sweep you without warning – are here: too close. All around the soil turns black. Empty space penetrates until I cannot see, or smell, or touch…
Then:
Bah-bum.
A single, solitary beat, quickly lost again in silence. In the black chaos of it, a tug. A pull.
Soon, in the endlessness of it, our hum picks up the call.
Rise and fall, big with it, and then small:
Bah-bum, hmmmmm. Bah-bum, hmmmmmm.
Between each beat, something rises: reformed. Black mould turns to green. All of it…digested, digesting…is lost between the folds of stomach lining and acid: is broken down in the belly of the earth.
Still the beating goes on: echoes up through rock and root, displacing the earth that held us. I catch hold of it, let it pull me upward. I split the surface, new fruit. Cut me open to find the meat. Splay me alive, dig out the root, and you’ll find me here once again, far from where I started.
At the end fold me into soil.
I will become the forest you seek.
This original work was first published in my short story
and poetry collection Brittle Leaves and Broken Eaves
—now available for only $12 online!
Jessica Barratt 