This is Where the Story Begins

Life is something taken rather than gifted in my country. It has stewed in violence and shrapnel for decades, the results evident in the once modern and well-maintained buildings that now crumble and shake at the foundation, full of the diseased and hungry crammed far too close together. The starkest reminder, however, is the massive graves littering the edges of our cities. What were once undisturbed forests now carry bleak meadows near their fringes, the small wooden posts sticking disorganized in the ground are the only indication of the mass grave beneath them.

If it weren't for me, even those wouldn’t be there. It’s not anyone's fault. When you can’t care for yourself and your immediate family, why spend energy on the dead? I have no one except for the forests, so it’s no issue for me.

I make my rounds in the daylight looking for fallen posts, putting back the ones that have fallen and replacing the broken ones with new lumber from the sack I carry on my back. For the ones that need to be replaced, I etch information back onto them, the names dates, and any kind words they might have put. On each of them I leave a small flower, say a prayer, and bless wherever their souls may wander too. 

Once I’ve finished a gravesite, I walk back through the forest. I care for the flora along the way and collect food and flowers before making my way back to my home, a small trailer with a large greenhouse. 

Most of my days are routine, but something recently brought me out of the monotony. I was starting my day per usual, walking the rows of a mass grave, giving flowers, prayers, and repairs when I saw something sprouting near the edge of the mound. A sapling is not an oddity in places where bodies decay, but this one drew me to it. I finished my work on a post and walked over to the sprout. What I found was indeed, very special.

It wasn't a flora I recognized, something very rare considering how thoroughly I have studied and analyzed the ecology of the area. Even stranger, it didn’t seem to have the characteristics of any plant I had ever heard of. It didn’t seem to have a stem, but rather two branches that met up in the middle before splitting apart and leading to five leaves on the end of each branch, long thin tendrils that reached down limply. It had strange markings on it as well, almost like a face twisted and stretched, and the touch of its cuticle felt close to that of flesh, so close that it made my own skin crawl.

I got closer to it when suddenly I heard something that stopped me dead in my tracks. There was a small, high-pitched wheezing. It had a steady familiar rhythm, yet I still was unsure what it reminded me of. I lay on the ground, getting my head closer to it, and touched it again. I was surprised to feel a vibration moving in synchronicity with the wheezing before a cold chill went down my spine. I now recognized the wheezing as the small sound of breathing.

I jumped back in fear, gazing in terror at the strange plant in front of me. Thoughts ricocheted around my head until I saw in it a mirror. It too was gazing upon me in horror. Except it was not just horror with which it gazed on me. In its twisted, contorted, demented features, stretched in an unworldly way across its body, I saw a look of deep, and extreme agony. It was not a monster, but rather a creature in pain. 

I cautioned my way over to it and began to dig around the soil it was rooted in. It was deep in the ground, yet its roots began to change from that of skin to almost that of an organ, a brownish purple that was significantly softer and more fragile. I began to see the remains of a child's chest cavity, and then I found two skeletal hands, both that of adults, clutched around what the thing had been rooted to.

It was a human heart, the child's from what I could gather by the size. It was decaying, gray and yellow and slowly being consumed by maggots. But it was still attached to the sprout, and most miraculously, it was still beating. 

I knew there was only one choice I could make. I pulled out a pot from the sack on my back and began to carefully move the thing into it. I then carried it, slowly and peacefully, back to my trailer in the woods. I found a safe place for it, and planted it, being sure to add some of the good nutritionally rich dirt to it.

I tended it especially carefully, neglecting some of my other plants in favor of pampering it. The results were almost immediate. It began growing rapidly, at an average pace of 1/8th of an inch every day. And soon, it started moving past simply breathing. It began to pick up its arms, and wiggle its finger-like leaves. Its body began to change too, into something far more human looking. Its face grew away from its body, into a head it had begun to develop. 

After about two months of looking after it, it began speaking to me for the first time. Nothing intelligible, but you could decipher what it meant through a combination of playing charades and watching its facial features. I began trying to teach it language, explaining colors and shapes, then names and people and gender.

One day, after explaining the difference between male and female, I showed it a line graph I had made. I had a man on one end, and a woman on the other, and much space between them. The thing had no genitalia, so I wanted to ask it where it stood.

“This end is male, I’ve told you a bit about that, and that end is female, I've told you about that too. The middle is for a bit of both. Where are you?”

It looked at me confused for a little bit, then pointed one of its leaves towards itself.

“Muh…Muhee?” it said, struggling over some of the words I’d taught it to say.

“Yes. If you don't feel like one of these, that's ok. Or if you feel like more than one, that's fine too.”

It looked over the chart, then pointed to the female.

“Female?” I asked her. 

“yuh..Yuhess” 

“Anything else?”

“Nuh…Nuhoh”

From that point on, I began calling her Acacia, due to the fact she grew like a tree. She began moving more flexibly and with more strength as a human child might. However, she was still rooted to the ground. Her legs were splitting more prominently, and one day, she began scratching at the dirt in her pot. I began to help her, and soon she had dug straight into her heart, which to my surprise, was starting to split. A protective barrier of bone was growing around it, like roots imprisoning a rock. And she began to hold tightly to the edges of her pot, and then tug forcefully until she had freed herself from the soil. She began jumping around in her pot, a large smile painted across her face as she moved for the first time. I ecstatically cheered her on, supporting her whenever she felt off balance and helping her back up whenever she proudly refused my help before falling.

 Acacia was hopping confidently around on her own before I knew it. And shortly after that, she was doing even more. By now, her heart had fully split, leaving her legs to their independence. It was a goal she had been striving toward for a long time, almost like how most children react to having one of their teeth fall out, the long anticipation as her legs grew loosely away from each other, the pieces of her heart slowly being held only by little frayed tendrils, as she painfully tried to rush it by pulling them more and more, only to stop when she realized they weren't ready to break. When they finally did separate, she was as happy as could be, wiggling them around and trying (unsuccessfully) to sit cross-legged.

It had been close to a year since I’d found her, and she’d grown to about 3 feet tall. She no longer grew in height as quickly as before, but she had begun developing more human features. Hair had begun growing from her head, her hand began to solidify and become less leaf-like, her skin changed from the dark green hue it had previously held into a faint and pale yellow with spots of more human brown skin, and the bone around her heart had begun developing flesh, with only small pockets of her heart still poking through. Still, I forced her to wear shoes whenever we left the trailer. 

I began taking her with me on trips through the forests and into the cemeteries. I would teach her about the common and scientific names of all the trees, shrubs, and flowers in the forest, and all their herbal and medicinal uses. And when we’d go to the graveyards, she’d lay the flowers on their graves. Her hands were still too limp and weak to handle any tools, so she stuck to that for quite a while. 

One day, while we were on one of our daily rounds to a grave, she stopped suddenly. Something was sparking in her face, something she wasn’t sure how to express. I was confused until I looked around and realized where we were standing. It was the gravesite I’d found her in. 

She was standing in the same place I’d found her all those years ago. She took a seat down on the ground and sat on the place where her old body was buried with her parents. She touched the dirt, and you could tell she was feeling something too extreme for her to truly understand.

“This is where you're from,” I told her. “I found you growing here, this is where you were born, in a way. Your family is here too.”

“Family?” she asked.

”Yeah, like we talked about. Family. The people who made you, well, you.”

She stopped to look back at the ground, and she let the dirt sift through her fingers. There was a deep, thoughtful, intense look on her face. Then a look of understanding lit up her face, and she began to smile.

“No. Not family.” She lifted her hand and poked a finger to my chest. “Family. Family made me, me,”

I took a second to process what she said and began to laugh as well. I pointed back to her. 

“Yeah, family. You make me, me, too.”

We hugged each other, then began the walk through the forest back home.

*************************************************************************************************************

Ten years later, I was organizing some plants in the greenhouse when I heard acacia yelling.

“Papa! Papa!” 

I nearly broke the plant I was holding in my rush to go see what was going on. When I did finally get out there, she was running up to me (utterly fine) with her hands cupped around something.

“Good god Acacia, you scared the hell out of me, I thought you were hurt.”

She took a second to catch her breath. Did she run the entire way here?

Finally, her breathing steadied, and she said, “Papa, look.”

She opened her palms to reveal something that took my breath away. In her hands was a strange plant. A plant I recognized, but that I had only seen once before, years ago. It had strange markings like a face, and a texture eerily like human skin. And most importantly, down at the bottom of its root system, was a still beating heart.

“It was just like you told me. I was out fixing grave markers when I saw it out of the corner of my eye and felt something drawing it to me. Then when I got close to it, I could hear its wheezing breath, and that's when I knew! I dug it up and rushed it back as fast as I could.”

She handed it to me, carefully shifting it into my hands. Suddenly, I was transported back to that day all those years ago. Acacia had come so far since then. Her hair was long, and her arms and legs sturdy and strong. The only thing indicating where she’d come from was the little patches of green scattered around her body. Even her feet had solidified, so you could barely tell what they had once held. She was a grown, fully developed person. And someday, so would this little sprout.

“We need to go plant this,” I said to her. “Go grab some of the special dirt, and a good-sized pot, we’ll keep it in the house.”

She nodded and rushed into the greenhouse, while I walked into the trailer. She was in with me within a minute, almost dropping all the things in her hand as she rushed in.

“Careful, Acacia. It’s better to be slow and steady than rushed and haphazard.” She nodded, then added a little bit of the dirt to the pot. 

I carefully placed it in there, and she began to add more dirt. We made sure to pack it in well and ensure it was as safe as possible. 

As I and Acacia began planting this sapling, I realized something. The story of my country, of our world, of everything really, didn’t start with the war and death. It starts right here, in our cooperation. In the children we raise, and the ones they raise. It’s in the plants we grow, and the things they give. The story of our species, starts with a sapling, and it starts right here.