A Day Before Harvest
From the pages of the Dread Gods: Epistolary on the God-Human Condition
She entered my skin when I visited the farm near the river’s edge.
My father hails from a line of farmers. Our family’s roots down to the days of the ancestors were planted in the ripe wheat fields and glittering orchards down by the river bank. It would have been stupid not to make use of the land. Periodic floods licked up the shores and created soil so fertile you could plant a mother there and she could bear two sons. Even when the world moved with the oncoming slaught of technological advancements and a renaissance of art and writing following history’s period of darkness, we were farming. We had more tools, no more use for scythes or shovels. They were replaced with automatons that are colder than human hands but far more efficient. When I visited the farm back in my younger years, I never saw grandfather or grandmother tending to the field — they let large vehicles plow the land, rip grass from soil and plant seeds of virtue down into the black Earth. Vehicles cannot handle animals so they made do of it themselves, but with recent developments, I was sure that we would have those covered too in the near future.
I had been visiting this spring, when the weather was warm and arid and the riverbed overflowed into cornstalks and bushes of cotton. Our farm’s near an old relic of time — a little altar at the edge of the rolling hills that I used to play by as a toddler. I had found it during my wanderings and had told my parents of it. They didn’t know what it was or who it was for, remnants of a history our people would rather forget, but it’s been on our farm for centuries. They had scolded me, told me to never wander off to it again. Yet I still did, like a moth to a lantern, drawn into the block of ornate material all the way from our abode.
I didn’t know who the people in the etchings engraved into the rock were. All of their faces looked the same. I had noticed one — a woman that I would have called beautiful if she were more than shapes and lines, with thick braided hair coiled down her back, a long dress of white flowing past her ankles. She’s been watching me since I was young, her unmoving eye traced onto my form as I thrashed around in the high grasses. I could hear her laugh when I tripped in the thick underbrush and tangled myself in its branches. Each time I’d leave to make it back for curfew, I could hear her hushes. This is our little secret. Each time the grasses would kiss the soles of my feet, trying to pull me back to play some more.
I visited the altar along with the farm. It stood as old and humble as always, lopsided into the Earth like it was attempting to swallow it. I pressed my hands against its surface, feeling the cool rock beneath my palms, a salve to the stresses of my adulthood. I barely felt the prick of the splinter on the altar, piercing the edge of my finger. I made a small hiss and pulled the splinter out, barely a centimeter long. I chucked it behind me to the grass. Then I went back home by the weekend’s end.
It had started then. When my skin started to itch after I woke within a mangled mess of pillows and blankets. It had started off slightly uncomfortable in the morning, but I thought nothing of it. Then during noon it had become annoying. Then in the evening it became unbearable.
I poured olive oil over myself, practically bathing in it when I showered. I stayed in the water for hours on end — hydration was the only consolation my apartment could muster. My skin turned blotchy and red from invisible spikes digging within my flesh. My body was hot and filthy, like it needed to be cleansed. When I went to sleep that night I tucked a sheep’s wool cardigan around my body, a gift from my great grandmother. I wrapped it around myself like a silk cocoon. It temporarily relieved the itching, soft against my blistering skin, but by the next morning I was scratching all over, teeth gritted with pain as my body was shriveling on itself like failing plantations.
This went on for a week. Then two. I had told my parents that I’ve been feeling under the weather, and assured them not to worry. I didn’t want them to see me like this. I could not work down at the shop I had been volunteering at for the past year, so I went on leave. My body was a wildfire, so red to the point that when I touched upon the surface of my skin it would be left completely white, small pinpricks jutting out beneath. My hair was falling out; curls of auburn that my mother described as the same shade as a sunset lay at my feet on the bathroom floor. I shed at night, waking in the morn with my mouth stuffed full of my locks of hair, even the needles of hair on my arm lost within the long coils of my previous visage. It was like an allergy that kept spreading, worsening with every treatment I took.
My gut twisted, puckering around a single point in my belly. Any food I ate was forced to be the size of breadcrumbs. Sunlight only worsened the pain, as any stream of its solar rays would simmer my skin and grow the affliction within me. I had stopped taking showers even as my body grew starving for it, its past comfort gone. Any water I took caused me feelings of bloatedness, a discomfort as the sickness only grew stronger. Water and sun worsened me. So I deprived myself of their existence, and stuck within my home except for small excursions.
I had gone to several doctors numerous times. All ended in fruitlessness. The most recent ago was with my old pediatrician, who stared upon my swelling countenance and rimmed-red eyes with a desperate horror. He had been inspecting my mouth when he saw something that he should have never seen, and he started squealing like a pig in rut. He tossed around on the ground, biting at the wooden pegs of the nearby chair, making noises incapable of forming from the human tongue.
“Sir!” I called out, my mouth parched from any lubricant, every orifice within my throat squeezed up until I could only manage gasps of air to keep myself from keeling over. Small particles of pollen fell from my lips. “Sir, what have I done!”
“Her roots!” he cried in that strange tongue, before barking like a hound and smashing his face into the cobble floor, breaking his nose. “Her roots are trapped in you! She needs freedom!”
I went back to my bathroom when I got home. I could handle the itching no longer. It was like the doctor had said — something was growing inside me. It was once a sapling that my blood within had cultivated, shaping it within the cornhusk of my figure. It was pressing against my skin, snapping back against my spine. Similar to the stick that holds firm a planted tree did it use my backbone, coiling around it until I couldn’t even bend in labor for my errands. It was pushing down my lungs, through my bloodstream, filling my nostrils with the scent of hibiscus and mint. I stood there, quiet in my dreadful agony, sensing that something was coming.
Water. It needed water.
I whipped open the curtains of my bathroom to let in the sun. I shut the drain on the sink and switched it on, waiting for the entire basin to fill. Then I shoved my face beneath the water, sucking in through my mouth and nose, inhaling it like a vagabond of deadly deserts. When I finally pulled my head out, for a second, that feared feeling of bloatedness and weight was gone, and I felt the most like myself in weeks.
That was when the first bud popped out. The vein on my right hand was bulging from my wrist due to an overdose of medication and the itching of my mortal body. The skin above it burst! Blood spurted against my washroom sink, and out sprouted a little flower, pretty and pink and leafed in jade green. I could only stare, my scream caught in my throat.
But the human body is made of orifices. Resources must enter it and exit. And whatever… whoever was growing inside me needed to exit.
The goosebumps on my arms raised before they too popped like blisters in the simmering heat, blood pouring down as dandelions and orchids the size of coin bags wreathed their way out from under my skin. I felt something squeeze past them and the veins and arteries of my wrists which now sport a bouquet. They made their way down to the tips of my fingers. My nails teetered, before like latches flew open. Vines and branches began to roll out of them, every tug of them as they fought to escape I could feel.
More roots and decorum went away from my body. I felt sharp, painful prods of my stomach as more vegetation moved past, nearly abandoning the sides of my waist until they shriveled in towards my spine. They wound their way down to my toes, bulging my shins and thighs as they slithered down. They completely ripped through my toenails, rooting down through the bathroom tiles into the Earth. All around my blood was pouring, like the rainfall to vineyards and cotton. Bits of green particles glowed within it. Chlorophyll, my mind so rendered from the absolute agony I was facing had thought, a sliver of consciousness amongst the sea of poison-ivy anguish.
I was completely aware the whole time. I could feel her now, the plants making way for someone else to exit. She was trapped in my body, waiting to ripen. Pressing against the shape of my body, making me bloated. Now it is harvest. The corn must be husked.
Something not of the air was wriggling from the tubes connected to my lungs. I began to sneeze, piles of dirt flying from my nose, landing next to the specks of blood along the sink. Dual branches — a mellowed dark brown, with tiny buds at the ends of its spindly crown that blossomed into grapes — ripped its way through my nostrils. My mouth puckered, throat undulating wildly, and barleys of wheat and hay began to overtake my maw, past the lips and sprouting towards the heavens, each individual needle pressing against the back of my throat and my uvula. A small network of twigs wove under the surface of the floor of my mouth to the gums, dislodging my teeth crookedly until they spurt from under them. It clicked them unruly against one another, rivened each individual molar until remnants splayed on my tongue.
My arms spread out from the number of tree branches leaving my fingers, my toes rooted to the ground. I was a crucifix in the middle of my washroom. I had lost the opportunity to wail in my pain with the barleys of wheat lodged in my mouth. Trapped in a body that was no longer my own, held to the punishment for only whatever gods there were to see. My eyes bulged from their sockets before they were overtaken by long stalks of golden sunflower. They stretched far from my face until the thin strands of organic tissue keeping them rooted to my brain was taut, a fishing line waiting to be cut.
For a moment after, no plants grew. I could barely hear my own breaths, each causing the mass of wheat within my lungs to quake. I can’t tell you how I was feeling, If I was scared or relieved. I think the horror was so set deep within me it had already been pouring out with the roots and vines hanging from my person.
Then, a thin tree trunk speared right out from my belly button. Long and brown like a javelin, a twisting mangle of branches at its end peppered with perfect leaves of soft emerald and tiny blossoms of the lightest pink. I finally screamed.
I heard a voice in the back of my head, reminding me of the rustling winds of the farmland back home that made the noises of a python as it tumbled past stalks of grass, whispering to me like how the farmer whispers to his crops to help them grow.
“This one… this one is not ripe yet. This one won’t do.”
Two hands — a juxtaposition of gnarled and dainty, long slender fingers yet worn knuckles, like one who cares for her hands yet still cares for the Earth she tends — grabbed the sides of my mouth from inside me. Then my jaw unhinged impossibly wide, unfurling back like burning paper, and out sprouted a woman from inside my gullet, stepping out into the light of my washroom.
The vegetation spilled out of me with her passing, receding back into the Earth. I crumpled to the tiles, my body shriveled like dried grapes made to breed wine, wrinkles on my skin that desperately clung to my skeleton. My eyeballs — on either side of my head, still attached by the cord — somehow took a gaze at the woman. Long hair the color of starch, her eyes as golden as the scythe my ancestors used to raze.
Her face was pitiful. “I’m sorry. I thought it would have been you.”
Then she left, leaving out the door, her dress of white that coiled around her ankles whisping as she walked out of my bloodied sight. Her body returned to the elements, but mine never did, a mangled mess on the washroom floor as I craved for a freedom that never came.
