The Memorial Tree

Welcome to September! We are delighted to share with you another spectacular group of stories by Alaya Dawn Johnson, Brett Cox, Martin Cahill, and Alexander London. We are also grateful to discover ourselves World Fantasy finalists for The Sunday Morning Transport, which is both stunning, and utterly impossible without our immensely talented authors, dedicated editorial team, and you, our brilliant readers. Thank you all so much.

We hope you love this month’s stories — and all the stories to come — as much as we love bringing them to you on Sundays.

Bringing out great short fiction each Sunday depends on the support of our readers. Our first story each month is free. We hope that you will subscribe to receive all our stories, and support the work of our authors. If you already subscribe — thank you! Please pass on the word, or a gift subscription if you can.

For September’s first, free story, Alaya Dawn Johnson brings us a very unusual and important tree. ~ Julian and Fran, September 1, 2024

---

The Memorial Tree

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

The tree still resembled the cacao of its genetic ancestor, but with larger, smoother pods that cracked open on their own when ripe. The two halves fell to the ground to reveal a singular fruit: two eyes, a nose, a mouth, a chin, firm or soft, sometimes even leading to a neck that would at last trail to pulpy white flesh and dangling ropes of black seeds. The effect, according to witnesses, was at once hypnotic and grotesque, with up to three dozen fruits ripening with the same features on the memorial tree at one time. Then crows would gouge the eyes and turkeys would drag at the dark necklaces of seeds, and the heads, sunken and overripe, would fall to the ground in a massacre of sweet and fermenting juices. The company behind the memorial trees filed for bankruptcy and its executives fled for tax havens amid what might have been the last truly international moral outrage before the wars.

There weren’t many memorial trees left, these decades later. One of them grew in the farmhouse at the edge of Repopulation Zone 2894A. Its presence was not why it had been abandoned.

But it did go a way to explaining why it was the last property available when Kixue and Eko came to the repopulation office for their housing assignment. They were warned: the officers smoking blue cheroots and staring into the dead air of their glass visors laughed when they gave Kixue directions to the place.

“No roof?” she guessed, keeping a firm grip on Eko, who hated it. “No plumbing? Busted solar panels? What?”

They’d been promised a home here in the resettlement territories in exchange for giving up their right to citizenship in any of the New Cities on the arctic circle. Though the ceasefire still held, these lands were technically under dispute and the earth contaminated with fallout. The bombs, nuclear and otherwise, had left their legacy. But Kixue had figured she and Eko had a better chance out here with the other loners and losers of the wars than submitting themselves as two more orphan refugees waiting on some white couple’s pity in New Reykjavik.

That is, they’d have a better chance if these bastard soldiers gave her what was promised.

“Haunted,” a soldier finally said, blowing a blue-bruise puff into her face and pushing up his visor. “Got one of them demented head trees. You’ll see.” He nodded to a wheelbarrow in the corner. “Them’s your supplies. Good luck, kid.”

#

Kixue wasn’t sure what demented head tree meant, but Eko had somehow heard all about them, for all that he was eleven years old and his life had been a small history of war.

“They used the DNA from the dead!” he said, puffing as he pushed the wheelbarrow up the cracked asphalt.

Kixue, whose lungs weren’t what they should be ever since the gas attack that killed their parents, coughed and had to stop for breath. “In the fucking tree? Like, they mixed animal and vegetable?”

He pushed ahead, shouting over his shoulder, “Yeah! All those hanging fruit heads looked pretty wild, but you wouldn’t believe how angry people got! You’d think if they got that mad over real shit like genocide and ice caps, we wouldn’t—”

But either Eko had run out of breath or he had seen his new home, because he fell silent, and Kixue had to force herself around the bend in the road to see him.

The house was on the edge of the woods, with a small creek running behind. An overgrown garden out front still pushed up a tangle of yam stalks and tiny green tomatoes in their paper shells. The thatched roof had fallen in on one side of the one-story house, but Kixue was already imagining how to fix it. Perfect, she was thinking, this place was perfect. Her heart was beating so fast she might faint, but she didn’t notice.

“Oh damn, they were right. Look, Kixue, they’re like little dolls!”

She turned, unseeing, to her brother’s voice, her eyes so filled with home it took her full seconds to realize that he was holding a half dozen tiny fruits, oblong and dented like misshapen heads. He popped one into his mouth, grimaced, and spit out the seeds.

#

The tree, planted by the entrance to the house, had withered over seasons of neglect. Its broad oval leaves had paled to a sickly light green that cast yellow in the sun; its stubborn fruits had shrunk as small as sea grapes. The features of the fruit’s faces were, thankfully, difficult to distinguish. Dark skin like hers and Eko’s was all she could tell; the eyes were sunken smudges and the mouth most often had a seed in it. The seeds were sterile, thank the gods of commerce. Kixue thought they should put it out of its misery once and for all—she was shocked that no one else had done so before now—but Eko howled when she suggested it.

“It’s one of the last of its kind!” he said, his back to the trunk like he would use his body to shield it from her axe.

She left it alone. Eko had taken a year to speak again after their parents died. A year more to interest himself in anything beyond food and shelter. If he liked the demented head tree, she would give it to him, and count herself lucky to clean the occasional massacre from their front porch.

So long as he was with her.

Kixue breathed. Her mom had taught her that. Four in, hold for five, out for six. There had been a time before the wars. Eko had been a baby, so he didn’t remember, but Kixue did. She remembered their garden, how her mom would show her every fruit and vegetable, every wild and cultivated plant. Mom knew that war was coming, even if it came as a surprise to everyone else. Mom had been prepared. It still hadn’t saved her.

“But I’ve kept Eko alive, Mom,” she told the earth as she dug at the roots of a spiky weed with her spade. “I kept us both alive, just like I promised.” Of course, her lungs were shit and Eko still wet the bed at least once a week, but that’s what she hoped a home in the resettlement territory would give them. The stability they needed to heal. Well. As stable as life could be in a radioactive fallout zone without a binding peace treaty. She bit her lip. It had to be here. Anywhere else, and they’d have taken him from her.

Kixue wrapped a rag around her hand and yanked at the weed. It barely moved.

“Kixue?” Eko called from the house. She’d put him on sorting duty: everything useful on one side, and trash on another.

She gritted her teeth and gripped the weed with her other hand, thorns and all. “What is it?”

“I think I found the boy in the tree.”

The weed, at last, lost its death grip on the earth. She tipped backward into the yams.

Eko started laughing. “You all right there, big sis?”

“Shut up,” she said, smiling, spitting out dirt. She sat up in the disarticulated garden. Eko was standing under the eaves of the porch, holding something she couldn’t make out for the contrast of the shadows and the afternoon sun.

“Come inside,” he said in tones of wonder. “The filter they gave us works, can you believe it? No contaminants and the water’s cold.”

#

They ate boiled yams for dinner with a tin of sardines from their resettlement supplies. Eko had rustled up some tiny orange chiles growing wild by the stream, so they ate with their mouths burning, laughing, by the light of their peat fire and the stars that arced above. The solar panels were relics from the last century, the plumbing was home to at least four kinds of rodents, the roof had to be replaced, and she wasn’t at all sure about the floorboards, but this last resort might not have been such a terrible idea. She might have found a home for them after all. So what if the yams and the chiles in their stomachs were spitting DNA-mutating bursts of radioactivity? Nanotech treatments had effectively cured cancer—if you could afford them.

Something fell into her lap and she jerked upright, dropping her last bite of yam into the dirt.

“Goddamn it, Eko!”

“Sheesh, sis, it’s just a fruit,” he said, but he looked away and stuffed the rest of his yam into his mouth. He knew they both startled easily.

This fruit was twice the size of the others, large enough to show some features in more detail, though they still looked squashed and off-kilter in a way that made her swallow the remains of her dinner. A boy’s face, that much was clear now, around the same age as Eko, with smooth sable skin and thick eyebrows. The eyes were lopsided and yellow, but she could almost imagine the real boy’s high cheekbones beneath her thumbs, his full cheeks, his wide mouth. The fruit collapsed beneath her touch.

Eko jumped up and cleared it away. “It’s got worms,” he said.

“Maggots,” Kixue said, picking a straggler from her pants and tossing it into the fire. “You mean maggots.” She smelled like spoiled guava.

“I just wanted you to see. It’s the best one I could find. Now look at this.”

With exaggerated movements that made Kixue roll her eyes, he pulled an object from the porch and handed it to her. A picture frame. Nothing digital about it: just some wood and some glass and photographic paper beneath it. How old was this? A family in the frame, and for a second her world narrowed and she gasped, thinking that he had somehow found a photo of them as they had never been—Mom and Dad healthy and alive with Kixue and Eko in the garden—

Eko clapped her on the back until her cough subsided.

“No, no,” he said. “I thought so too at first, but it’s not some weird space-time continuum thing. Look closer.”

In for four, hold for five, out for six. Kixue steadied and looked again. They could have been related, this family and hers, long-lost cousins from across the ocean. A mom and a dad, a daughter and a son. Their clothes were old-fashioned: polyesters stamped with old brands that no one remembered anymore. But their faces! Hadn’t Mom looked just like that, the laughter in her eyes, the protective hand on Kixue’s shoulder? And Dad had been dreamy, filled with other worlds, with everything he wanted for his children. This house was behind them, old even then, but cared for and filled with light. The only thing missing was the memorial tree.

That was when she saw it. The boy wrapped in his dad’s arms. The boy Eko’s age. The boy whose face had collapsed in her lap, eaten from the inside by maggots.

Kixue looked up at Eko. She was shaking so hard, the picture fell into the dirt. It was happening again: the dead magpies sliding down the faded green canvas of their refugee tent; the sharp fear in her mother’s eyes. Their parents were dead because they hadn’t heeded the omen; they hadn’t left. She couldn’t make the same mistake with her brother.

“We can’t stay.”

#

Eko fought with her all the way to the repopulation office.

“All the places you’ve made me go, I finally find one I like and now we have to move again? Because you’re scared of some fucking fruit?”

“It’s not the fruit,” she said, for no less than the fortieth time that morning.

“That kid died like fifty years ago. Everyone in that photo is dead. Everyone who lived in this whole town is dead. You signed a bunch of papers just to have the right to live in a dead people’s house! How is this a problem now?”

There was a line outside the office this time, and their neighbors turned to stare at them. Kixue tried to smile and call a greeting, but no one responded.

“Eko,” she said through gritted teeth. “Could we discuss this later?”

“Am I going to have my home later?”

One of the cheroot-smoking soldiers approached them, visor down. “You two aren’t up for health inspection yet.”

Eko grabbed her hand. “Okay, we’re going—”

“We’d like to apply for relocation.” She cleared her throat. “Urgently.” Maybe it was the effort to keep her voice steady or the lingering cloud of the soldier’s smoke, but her cough knocked against her chest like a heavy fist on a door and she couldn’t pull in enough air to compensate. She dropped to her knees in the dirt. Her vision popped with starbursts; her lungs burned.

Eko and the officer between them hauled her into the building. Someone put something cool on her neck and a mask on her face. She struggled. The bombs in the city. Then the hiss of gas canisters. Screams, her dad falling behind, shot. Her mom’s gasping breaths. Mom had worried about the omen the night before, the glassy eyes and sky-blue feathers of the two magpies on their tent, but Dad had insisted it didn’t mean anything—

She heard Eko’s voice as though from a distance, saying her name, telling her they were helping, that everything would be okay. He sounded terrified. She wanted to tell him that he didn’t have to be scared, that she’d figure it out the way she always did, but she was slipping into something sideways to sleep, slipping like dew from a leaf into the earth.

#

Her new home. Not as it was now, but as it had once been.

The house had not just been filled with light; it had been filled with sound. Music of a genre Kixue didn’t know but that sounded like jazz with more drums, or bhangra with horns. The kids were whooping and dancing to it on the porch and the garden. The girl, heedless in white, was a little younger, Kixue saw that now, sixteen or seventeen, with a trust in the world that Kixue wondered if she’d ever had.

The boy—not Eko, never her beloved younger brother, the one she’d held in her arms when he was just a baby and promised to care for—but a boy who could be his twin, sprinted barefoot past her into the garden, opened his arms wide to the night sky, and shouted, “I am the mountain king!”

He did not shout it in Kixue’s language, or in Eko’s voice, but she understood him all the same.

A woman—his mother—came onto the porch. She was also in white, and smiling. “You are a spark of God. Now come in and help me with the altar.”

The boy put his arms down immediately and followed his mother inside. Definitely not Eko. She heard the mother’s voice hollering, “Will you turn that racket down!” and the volume lessened.

The girl, alone now in the garden, stopped spinning in her white dress. She gazed at the house.

“What happened to them?” Kixue whispered, and then shivered, startled that she could speak.

But the girl looked straight at her. Her eyes were older now, more like Kixue’s. “There was a shooter at church the next day,” she said. “I didn’t go because I was on my period. They said I was dirty. Mama said men didn’t understand some things, but she still followed that preacher. So they died and I lived.”

“And the tree?”

They both turned to look at the space where it would grow one day, a cold ghost of the future here in the warmth of the past.

“It deserves to live, this place. It deserves to live, like he didn’t get to live. Let him live, do you understand? Let us all live.”

#

They sent her back with an inhaler and ten different pills. She was wary of rumors of experimental nanotech drugs getting tested on refugees, but the inhaler released the vise on her lungs for the first time in three years. Eko treated her like blown glass for the first few days, bringing her teas boiled with medicinal herbs brought by helpful neighbors, and insisting she stay on the porch while he cleared the garden. He glanced at her every few minutes, sweat rolling into his eyes, as though to make sure she was still there. Whenever she coughed, he flinched.

It was strange, Kixue thought, head tilted to the light filtering down through the greening leaves of an ancient memorial, how little she had taken into account his love for her. As though her care had been the only one that mattered. She had been ready to die for him, but she had never considered who he’d be after her death. Alone in the world, would his grief make even an abomination of a tree, some demented mixture of capitalism and grief, seem like a good idea, growing her face over and over so that at least someone would know it?

Let him live, the girl in her dream had said. Had that been real? Had she somehow talked to the spirit of this place? Did it mean they would be safe here? That history wouldn’t repeat itself with the one child in all the world she had sworn to protect?

Eko called from the garden. “Look! Kixue, look!” He held up a pair of parsnips by their stems. “Can you believe these were still growing?”

Let us all live.

“Want to use the oil from our supplies tonight? Fried parsnips and onions, like Dad used to make. It could be a kind of . . . housewarming.”

Eko jumped up, the parsnips still swinging, eyes bright. “I know where to get the onions.”

That night, they put the photo and one of the tiny fruits from the memorial tree on the old plank balanced between two bricks that served as their dinner table. It was Eko’s idea, and Kixue didn’t object. It was hard to love somebody, and harder still to accept the equality of their love.

She looked at the girl in the photo, fifty years gone, and closed her eyes in thanks.

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

---

Alaya Dawn Johnson is an award-winning short story writer and the author of eight novels for adults and young adults. Her novel Trouble the Saints won the 2021 World Fantasy Award for best novel. Her debut short story collection, Reconstruction, was an Ignyte Award and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist. Her most recent YA novel, The Library of Broken Worlds, is a finalist for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. Her short stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, most notably the title story in The Memory Librarian, in collaboration with Janelle Monáe.

“The Memorial Tree,” © Alaya Dawn Johnson, 2024.

The Sunday Morning Transport: Selected Stories 2022 is now available at Weightless Books!