What's Beyond the Fig Trees?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve not been allowed beyond the fig trees. Heck, I’ve not been allowed around them. Every harvesting season, I watch our people pluck the big, purple beads all the way from my window. Dad says I’ve called them that ever since my first vision. I was six when it happened, and it was fig-induced. Mary says my eyes turn purple when I eat them. Like twinkling gemstones, she says. I wouldn’t know. Dad doesn’t allow mirrors in the prophecy room. Something about light refraction. Not that I’d be able to see myself, anyway. During a vision, I’m elsewhere.

It’s late spring, and I know my freedom is short-lived. No more playing Knights, no more Latin declensions, no more fishing in the stream with Mary. She taught me how to build a stone dam, but when that monster of a fish (only a trout, she said) thrashed about in my arms, I lost grip and it slipped free.

Mary says we can fashion spears out of tree branches—she stole a knife from the kitchen—but I don’t want to stab the poor things. I still remember that big, cloudy eye gawping at me.

Anyway, Dad doesn’t like when I return home all wet and muddy, so we lay out in the sun instead. It took an hour for my dress to dry, and this time I’d had the sense to wear a brown-red floral design. He wouldn’t notice the mud upon first glance: enough time for me to race upstairs and change.

“Your dad will kill me,” said Mary.

“He doesn’t need to know.”

The stream is right by the fig trees. The big, purple beads. I could see them ripening on the branches, swelling like teardrops. They’ll plop off any day now, surely, like tears running down one’s cheeks.

Mary says I’m pretty when I cry. She’s the only other girl, besides the oracle, allowed in the prophecy room. I asked her what I say, what I do. I asked her why I’m different.

“My parents,” she said once, “say you’re not from here.”

It was a secret. She didn’t have to say so. I could feel it. The stream quietened, the birds swallowed back their songs, and anyone, any man, would have suspected the presence of a predator – but there wasn’t one, it was the silence of a dangerous truth lurking in the air, and it rustled the leaves above us, it stirred our still hearts, and then moved on.

The birdsongs resumed, the stream gurgled, and an invisible mist, heavy like a blanket, was lifted from the forest.

I am not from here.

“They say,” whispered Mary, “that you’re from beyond the fig trees.”

Beyond the fig trees… where a purple aura sometimes glows. Only I can see it. That means danger, says Dad. That means something, says Mary.

Anyway, it’s late spring, and my freedom is short-lived. The harvesting of figs means confinement in that dark, dark room. The fruit is always brought to me, and I bite into their supple skin. I eat and eat and eat until my tummy could burst; I eat and eat and eat until I see.

And I see more than anyone should ever see. I see treason, I see blood, I see everything. I think, once, I saw my mother.

Sometimes, I dream of gouging out my eyes with Mary’s knife, but it wouldn’t stop the visions.

Do it for the greater good, Dad always says. He mustn’t know the extent of my pain; if he did, he wouldn’t subject me to it. It’s the old woman who makes him do it, the oracle and her bag of divination bones. She smiled at me once. All four of her teeth were brown.

Mary says that from the outside looking in, I appear at peace, that the tears I shed are mesmerising.

She doesn’t know where I go when I close my eyes. If she did, she wouldn’t say that.

*

I spent three consecutive days in the prophecy room for the greater good. Dad says we resume at sunrise, but I have other plans. Mary lent me the kitchen knife, just in case. I untuck it from beneath my pillow, and the shy blade glints under the moonlight.

Mary said I wouldn’t see a thing, but beyond my billowing curtains, beyond the fig trees, that familiar aura throbs, beckoning. The floorboards creak as I step into the corridor, and candlelight trickles out from beneath Dad’s door.

I descend the stairs and freeze as he clears his throat. My hair stands on end, my heart thuds, but in vain. I continue down the stairs—they croak like toads—and out the backdoor which shuts with a click.

Relief.

Darkness reigns here and the wind snatches at my dress, tangles my hair, caresses my cheeks with cold fingertips. Mary said she’d come with me if I wished it, but the vision didn’t include her. Just me, here, and the palpitation of the purple aura beating like a heart.

I follow it into the dark, the dew of grass kicked onto my calves. The stars above wink as if to say it’s alright. What do you think you’ll find? asked Mary.

During my last vision, I saw that same woman with purple eyes, who I can only presume is my mother. It is the vision that carries me across this moonlit clearing, it is the vision that calms the nerves. The fig trees grow with every eager step, and soon I’m standing at the edge of the orchard, on the border where moonlight meets darkness. My grip tightens around the kitchen knife, knuckles white, I’m sure.

It’s quiet in here. The silence swells with the dull thump of my footsteps as I chase the dimming aura; it flickers and fades like a lamp out of kerosene.

I pause, alone with the sonorous thud of my racing pulse.

Surely, the aura will return.

I prowl the orchard like a cat, hair on end, jerking at every rustling leaf, every chirr, every hoot, and every wallop of bats’ wings unfurled and filled with wind like sails. I make it through the nocturnal orchestra and its many glowing eyes to the next moonlit demarcation line. I step into the clearing.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve not been allowed beyond the fig trees.

But here I am at last.

And I wait.