The Boy Who Heard Orchards Breathe

There was an orchard on the edge of Briar Thornmere, so beauteous and so profuse that even strangers, drawn by rumor alone, stood in dumbfounded awe at its threshold. There was no threshold, the Boy Who Heard the Orchards Breathe reminded them, but they were too blind in its beauty to notice. They went as far as to say that the trees surrounding the Orchard bowed under the weight of fruit too sweet to belong to this world; its soil smelled of life so vigorous it seemed to press against the soles of the feet. And yet, the Boy Who Heard the Orchards Breathe could not stand it.

The townsfolk, with their guileless grins and open palms, spoke often of the orchard. Like lunatics, the boy deduced. They talked about how it fed the town in years of lean harvests, how it shielded them from winter’s rage, how it protected them from the summer’s wrath. They worshipped the Orchard as if it were an actual god.

The Boy Who Heard the Orchards Breathe was not born near the Thornmere, but was brought to it by what he called misfortune. He had ton of vanity to the fact that he was from the outside. He swelled his chest whenever he saw the Briar Thornmere villagers, and reminded himself that he was greater. He was better, superior. He was from the place where Orchards really did breathe, where they really did talk to him, and he could not ignore this Orchard’s wrongness. Every Orchard he’d come across had whispered to his ears and gave him a plump fruit to nibble on. This orchard, however, was different. It was lifeless. Where others saw abundance, he saw a gluttony of life that bordered on mockery. Where others breathed gratitude, he tasted something cloying and old. He was different, perhaps because he was from somewhere far, or perhaps he could see the truth better than others.

He first noticed the roots. They clawed out from the earth in odd angles. They were black and cracked. And they oozed a sap thick and iridescent. The Boy mentioned it once to a grocer, she smiled. "Best not dig too deep, dear heart," she said, voice syrupy. But The Boy Who Heard the Orchards Breathe knew better. Roots, he thought, roots. He slowly began to understand that this Orchard was but a palace raised over a grave, a grave of black roots.

He took to walking the Orchard at night, when the town slept. He was different, yes he was, but was he doing something different? Was he progressing towards something, perhaps, towards a holy place that hid something unholy? He would find out, and then he could rest his ego. Righteously so, he would correct the syrupy grocer and tell her "You were wrong! You were wrong when you told me that it was best not to dig too deep!" and perhaps even laugh at her.

In the half-light, he saw things he had not seen in the day: blossoms that opened and closed without breeze, fluctuating every five seconds or so. The blossoms emitted some minor light as they blossomed, and they stopped to when they contracted back. His eyes soon fell on one of the fruits. He remembered that someone from the Briar Thornmere had told him that the fruits, high up on the Orchard, were sacred. He said that the fruits contained the souls of the dead from the Briar Thornmere; everytime a person died, within five days a new fruit would grow on its body. I will have to eat it, he demanded himself, I will eat it. Only one.

The Boy Who Heard the Orchards Breathe looked up at the tree, at the one fruit that hung larger and heavier than the rest. If the Orchard won’t gift him the fruit he deserves, he’d steal it himself. He’d do the job of the Orchard for it. The bark was slick with sap and cold to the touch, but he dug his fingers into it with an inhuman and animal determination. He hoisted himself up, higher and higher, through the lattice of branches that seemed at once to welcome and reject him. Odd, he told himself, I have never seen a duality of thoughts in an Orchard. The tree was not meant to be climbed, he realized. It bent under his weight.

Breathless and sap-streaked, he reached the limb that held the fruit. The Boy swallowed his revulsion. His pride coiled around his throat like a noose. He would taste the truth. He would be right. And he would laugh on the inferior villagers, yet they would cherish the Boy Who Heard the Orchards Breathe. He yanked the fruit from its branch. It tore away with a shudder, and from the ragged stump leaked a dark liquid, heavier than sap. A black-red, viscous, and stinking faintly of iron.

Without giving himself time to doubt, he bit into it. His vanity profoundly increased. The skin was thinner than he expected, almost skin-like in its texture, and his teeth tore easily through it. Instantly, a hot rush of fluid, unmistakably blood, spilled down his chin, his throat, his hands, his chest. It was warm. Too warm.

The taste was wrong, not sweet, not bitter, not sour, but something that rejected the tongue, something that pushed back against being tasted at all. The Boy Who Heard the Orchards Breathe gagged. He clung to the branch his all the might of his legs, his mouth full of the Orchard’s bile, the blood dripping steadily from his chin to the earth below. He wanted to spit it out, to cry out, to undo what he had done, but he did not. The fruit that fled in him was the first reminder that he was wrong. And, he felt himself break.

The thing he had always worn like Kevlar and gauze, the absolute belief that he could see what others could not, buckled under the truth, under his failure. Clinging to the tree, drenched in the Orchard's blood, the Boy Who Heard the Orchards Breathe wept — and, the Orchard wept with him.

The Boy Who Heard the Orchards Breathe no longer moved, he fell from the Orchard, incapable to hold himself longer, but then he didn’t move. Still blood-drenched, he sat slumped against the trunk of the tree, his limbs loose and heavy like a marionette. Nights and days passed.. He ate nothing. Drank nothing. The villagers began to murmur. At first in confusion to the blood on his body. Then in pity, to conclude that perhaps the blood was his own. That perhaps the Orchard had punished him. Even the syrupy grocer, who once laughed off his warnings with honeyed words, watched him from the orchard's edge with worry pinched into the corners of her mouth. She called to him once or twice, but he never answered. In time, they stopped calling. They left offerings of bread and milk at the boundary where the orchard grass grew wild, but no one dared to step past. They expected him to feed on the bread and milk to rejuvenate himself, but he was moveless and sightless.

The Orchard itself seemed to watch him now, its branches twisting subtly when the villagers weren't looking, its fruits drooping low. Almost in mourning, or anticipation.

And then, on a night moonless and black, as the Boy slept a fitful, broken sleep, his back still against the Orchard, one of the fruits detached itself. It dropped onto his lap with a muted thud, splattering dark, blood-red sap across his torn shirt. The Boy woke from his slumber, eyelids fluttering. He cradled the fruit instinctively, half-conscious, and it was then that the tree spoke.

"I was never meant to be worshipped."

The Boy gasped, "I don’t… understand."

The Orchard explained to him, bit by bit, about how it had never asked for their reverence. It had never wanted to be their salvation. It had simply grown, somberly aware with what had been buried beneath it—the roots—heavy with the mistakes, the grief, the sins no one had cared to exhume. The villagers had built their faith on a corpse and called it a god.

And the Boy Who Heard the Orchards Breathe had thought himself above them, immune, chosen. But he was not chosen. He was merely aware — and awareness was not salvation. It was damnation.

He pressed his forehead to the fruit in his lap, its skin warm and damp against his brow, and whispered to the darkness, "I see you now."

"Good," said the Orchard, "Then maybe you are the Boy Who Can Hear the Orchards Breathe."