Eat and Be Eaten

By J.L. Akagi

As the nurse leads me through the gardens, she chatters about the bravery of my decision. Maybe she thinks she’s distracting me from the burn of the serum injected under my skin —a hot thrum in syncopation with my heartbeat. My insides are stirring. Organs palpably shifting. Maybe she’s trying to divert my attention away from my changing body.

“Evan, is it? You want to transplant into a peach tree?” The nurse checks the form, just glancing over the first five lines. “You know, most men choose trees, but I’ve never met one that wants to turn into a peach tree!”

She notices my hesitance to reply and misinterprets the silence. Humans do that a lot. There always has to be a meaning to quiet. It’s a symptom of being so social.

“Unless you’ve always considered yourself a plant and you’re not turning into it, you’re just—” She falters, re-checking the form again. “You’re making your body reflect your —your plant-y-ness— your botanical essence—.”

“How much time do I have left?” I interrupt mercifully.

“Long enough to get you situated.” She tucks the form back under her arm. “Which is good because I don’t know where the peach trees are planted. If we even have peach trees. Let’s see...”

She leads me to a stone-walled garden, explaining what I’ve read in the brochure before coming here: that the transplantation gardens are protected by walls to ensure peaceful rest; that the plants are tended by gardeners who live onsite for our longevity.

We walk through an apple orchard, about twenty trees. Near the corner stands a crabapple tree, already riddled with budding green apples. I always liked the taste of the under-grown apples. Bitter and dusty with pollen. But I assume it would be wrong to eat from this tree. Sexually perverse, somehow.

“See, lots of apple trees,” she says as we walk through another, walled, section of the garden. “And so many cherry trees.”

This section of the garden is much bigger. It’s late-January, so the cherry trees are just black, twisting boughs. Dead-seeming, if it weren’t for the tight green buds clustered along the branches. I squeeze a flowering nub between my forefinger and thumb, and it gives like flesh would. Playful, almost.

If this is the last sensation for this body, I would be glad for it.

The burning under my skin shifts into prickling ambivalence. No longer painful because my nerves are deadening. Peach trees don’t have nerves. The counselor warned me that this transplantation would mean relinquishing my body. But I thought the annihilation of self would be mortifying. Instead, I’m finding that it’s —well, it’s not pleasant. It’s—

I can’t find the words for it. Maybe that’s for the best.

I let the nurse know about the change in sensation, and she rushes me through the rest of the fruit tree groves. A whole orchard of oranges. A few lemon trees. A handful of fig trees, spry and wicked looking. About seventy trees in total. More than I expected.

“Oh,” the nurse says when we come to the last gated section of the garden where a huddle of persimmon trees gossip together. “I thought that —but I guess not. There aren’t any peach trees. Are you sure that’s what you want to be? You’d make a nice cherry tree, I’m sure. Or—”

“I don’t mind if I’m alone.” It’s better that way, actually. “Or, there’s room in the lemon grove, I guess.”

“Oh, no, that’s not possible. You’ll cross-pollinate. We’ll have to grow you on your own.” She reaches as if to touch me. I flinch, and she thinks better of it. Waves me along instead. “Hurry, now. You don’t have much time.”

She leads me out of the walled garden, which opens to a flat slab of land overlooking a deep gorge. And down in that gorge, a field of flowers. Of orchids and daisies and roses and hyacinths.

Hyacinths. Abe.

“Were they all people?”

The nurse is stooping down to check the soil where I’ll be planted. “This will have to do,” she mumbles. “It’s not ideal, but—”

“Were they all people?” I ask again. A heavy numbness seizes my limbs. I’m running out of time to have this question answered.

“The flowers? Indeed. Most people want to be flowers. Like I said, a peach tree—”

“Is rare. I understand.” I look down at the flowers. A river of flowers. “It’s just that my — my friend is down there. He— he’s how I heard about the procedure.”

I press my hand to the heat in my chest, just to remember the hand that burned there before.

“I’ll give you a moment,” the nurse murmurs, for once quiet.

“No, no. Let’s go on.” I’m ready to let go of the memory. Of all memory. “What am I supposed to do now?”

“Just settle yourself right there, honey. Do you have any questions?”

I shake my head.

“Is there anything you want to say before you change? Anything you want to be remembered by?”

I think it over. As it stands, all that will be remembered of me is what happened to me and Abe.

“If anybody asks you what it feels like, tell them it’s—” I have never been good at naming things. The words were always Abe’s domain. “It’s strange. But peaceful. Or, no, not peaceful. Certain. Inevitable, but —not in the kind of way you dread. Like— Actually, never mind. No, there’s nothing I want to say.”

“Okay,” the nurse says. “When it happens, you’ll know.”

I settle into the soil and consider the gorge of flowers again. I try to call out to Abe with my heart, to see if —by some psychic happenstance— I’ll be able to find him. My eyes settle on a hyacinth that grows from the wall of the gorge. Close enough that I can see the details: a slender, wild hyacinth, not like the full-bodied blooms in a hothouse.

That could be Abe.

Or it could be a stranger.

Either way, it feels as if we are together —me and this hyacinth— as I change.

The numbness settles. My skin stiffens to bark. Arms grow into branches. Hair surges into foliage. And sluggish roots slip down into the soil.

“Oh.” Sap fills the mouth. “So, this is me now.”

And then there is just a peach tree.

SPRING

This is peace. Good and steady. Quiet.

There are still thoughts —no, not quite thoughts. Something else. Consciousness. But not human consciousness. Plant consciousness. Green consciousness.

Human consciousness was solitary, so this new consciousness begins from within. Internal. Consciousness is trying to name the things within.

No. That’s not consciousness.

Not name, no. No names because no words now. No semantic gap between meaning and meaning-bearer, but just meaning. Not trying to name, but know.

Consciousness is knowing the things within. The life-bearing warmth seeping in through the leaves —photosynthesis. The pulse of minerals and sugar dripping from the warmth —sap. The core of death deep within the trunk is not rot, but heartwood, the strength to remain standing.

Strength to wait. Wind blows and something dances through the branches. Petals. Cherry blossoms. Flowers bursting from the cherry boughs in bloom, brought over by the wind. Sense the coolness of each petal. How they are as soft as skin.

Wait.

Consciousness is not just within, but things around. The spongy, living thing surrounding the roots —fungi. The churning deep within the soil —earthworms. And even subtler —microbes. And then, the magnetic touch at the root-tip is another tree. The slow sap of nutrients from that other root —sugar molecules— a gift from another tree. Everything delicious in the soil is from the network of plants and worms and microbes.

Oh.

Oh!

Before, awareness came with barbs. Awareness hurt. Hurt is not for plants. Hurt is...well, it’s human. Hurt is alone. Now, there is no alone. Everything, even the air, is thick with growing life. Pollen from other plants. Fat bodied insects drifting in pursuit of pollen.

All there is now is life. All there is now is growth, the instinct to grow. To sink roots deep down into the damp dark earth, drink the nitrogen from the microbes, soak the sun from the sky.

Soon, fruit. Or maybe, eventually.

Oh, wait, no.

No, there is no soon, maybe, or eventually. There is just now. And how now passes into then. Consciousness that arrives and creaks by like everything else. Like the rain, the sun, the wind. Like a procession of ants. The awareness of things passing by. But it’s always just now. There is only now.

Now, and then now, and then now again.

Grow, and then grow, and then grow again.

SUMMER

There comes a pulse in the electricity crackling through the fungi. Fungus: the telephones of trees. In the walled garden, the trees are absorbing excess nutrients from dead branches and then —something else hits the ground— a microbial rush that has them giddily pumping sugar to their tight clusters of flowers. Flowers which will be fruit.

Something approaches. What is it?

Then comes the sudden break —a singular branch snapped off from the trunk, and then another. Rapidly. One right after the other. Sap flows, congealing at the wound. Water redirects to healthier branches. What is this?

Then, wet weight over the roots.

Warmth on the trunk.

Not sun-warm, not the kind of warmth that can make green or fruit, but animal warmth. An intentional touch unlike the uncaring brush of wind or splattering rainwater.

Carbon dioxide pools in the air.

Oh, right: humans.

This is a human, a gardener tending to the trees. The dead branches snapping off is pruning. The wet heap of nutrients is spreading fertilizer. The warmth is the gardener weighing his hand against the trees he tends. A language of body and care that plants can speak.

The gardener returns often to prune and fertilize.

Summer thickens with humectant heat.

Life, good and green, all around.

FALL

The cherry orchard is the first to bear fruit, just as summer spoils into fall. The soil is rich with rotting cherries, sucrose spreading throughout the walled garden before making its way outward towards the gorge. Then the lemons. And the oranges. And then, finally, the apple orchard explodes with fruit. For the rest of the season, each bee that brings the gift of pollen tastes like apples. When one tree fruits, they all fruit.

But no peaches.

The gardener has a habit of speaking while tending to the trees. A rumble through the bark and leaves and roots in an oral language that wasn’t important earlier in the year. But now —no peaches, no peaches, no peaches— it seems worth listening to.

“It’s all right,” the gardener says when the time for fruit passes. “You’ll bear fruit. Peach trees can bear fruit alone, you know. Self —uh, auto-pollination, I think it’s called. They don’t need to be grown in a pair.”

But when?

“But most don’t produce until they’re four years old. You were only planted last year.” The gardener’s breath is warm and rich with carbon dioxide. “And overall, you are looking so much better. Peaches will come. I promise.”

He pinches a leaf between his fingers, rubbing fondly. The way Abe used to touch his boyfriend’s —Evan’s— earlobe. Fond and sweet.

The wind shakes out the branches. A leaf lets loose and smacks the gardener’s forehead. He laughs, a bright melodic thrum that rumbles down to roots. The gardener keeps talking, but the words are less consequential than the way he arranges them. He has a slow intellect, this gardener, cultivating his thoughts gradually and pruning them as he speaks until they take a shape that satisfies him.

Abe wasn’t like that. He said whatever sprung to mind, the moment it occurred to him.

Said is past, not present. Not now. Said is gone. Abe isn’t gone. He’s still here, in the soil and in the air. The taste of him in the pollen from the bees. And here is the now, and the now is the gardener’s weight against the soil, the soil’s weight against the roots. The now is just the gardener, talking as he helps things grow.

And then, just as quickly as he was here, the gardener is gone. Because now it is winter.

WINTER

With winter comes death. Small deaths at first: the unfruitful flowers, the leaves, the grass, small branches withered with frost. And then the big deaths: insects, the hard small body of a squirrel that lived in the den it burrowed in the trunk. A crow came along to eat its corpse, and a younger squirrel moved in.

What happened to Abe —and to Evan, to me— happened in winter.

It is difficult to remember, especially like this. Never tried before, never wanted to, but now —in the small death of winter— the memory surges up to meet me. A thing blooming of its own accord.

There was a barbed wire fence.

No, further back.

We were dragged out into the stark cold, to the edge of the Cook Ranch acreage. One of them, the largest boy in the pack, pointed to the buck fence that rimmed the ranch. Told me to kneel in the snow. When I did, he then pointed to the other side of the fence and told Abe to crawl through.

It was a barbed wire fence. Abe didn’t want to crawl through. So they forced him. Hoisted him up. It took three boys to wrangle him off the ground and throw him over. It took three boys to catch him by the wrists and wrestle them against the barbed wire. It took three boys to tie him there, to still him.

It only took one to bind me.

The memory lapses in the long blank of night, punctuated by brusque flashes. Huddling over the fence, forehead to forehead with Abe. Hands tangled and shaking. A metal thorn snagging in my skin as I pulled my arm free.

In the days afterwards, we would be asked over and over again —by medical professionals, by policemen, by news outlets— how we got free. I don’t know. How we got home. I don’t know. We must have walked, a long slog across the frozen plains, following the country roads back into town. But I don’t remember that either.

I can remember some of the after. I can remember holding Abe’s hand until we were thawed and eased apart. I remember staying in our apartment alone while Abe went home to his family. I remember Abe’s family not taking my calls, not letting me see him. I remember when I heard he was considering becoming a plant. When I heard he’d become a hyacinth. I still wasn’t allowed to see him.

It wasn’t a surprise that Abe chose a hyacinth. He loved the Greek myths. So much so that he was convinced that Apollo was his patron saint, and —possibly— that he was the reincarnation of Apollo’s slaughtered lover, Hyacinth. The Hellenist obsession was a secret not even his parents knew. Abe was a former-altar boy. He should have had saints, not pantheons.

I worshipped him like he was in every canon.

SPRING, AGAIN

When spring comes, it’s all at once. And with spring returns the gardener.

When he returns, he scoops all my roots out of the earth and moves me. As he transports me, he pants with exertion, breathing into the bark. It is a new way to share life. To absorb his breath and breathe back.

The earth in the new place is thicker, and not so bitter. He says something as he covers my roots with soil. Oh, he’s explaining why I’ve been moved. That’s right: human action has intention.

“I’m sorry. There wasn’t enough sun on the ridge, and the soil was all wrong. You need soil consistency closer to clay. I hope you don’t mind.”

It feels better. Already my roots push farther down into the earth. Astonishing how they know what to do. How growing doesn’t require attention or intention; things just grow.

“I know you have a friend in the gorge. And I’m —I’m so sorry you lost the view. I really am.” His voice is pitched so low that it trembles. “But I want you to know that you’re downstream from the flowers now, and you’re sharing the same irrigation system. The same water. You’re drinking what ran off him. Off his petals and roots.”

That’s nice. As my trunk settles, it groans with satisfaction.

“I thought you might like that. You’re closer to the pond now. I don’t know if you ever saw it. There’s lily pads and ducks. And, um, oh! You’re farther from the walled garden, but closer to other solitaries, like you. There’s a willow nearby. I hope you can feel it.” A pause, and then comes a quieter admission: “I hope you can hear me.”

The gardener presses his palm to a branch, weighing his hand against it.

“Alright,” says the gardener at last. “I’ll check on you tomorrow. If you’re miserable, I promise I’ll move you back.”

The soil feels so cold in comparison to his hands. But it’s not painful. Nothing is. It no longer hurts to live.

Water has memory. It carries its previous shapes, vessels, and microbes with it, and when the water is absorbed into a plant, the plant becomes a part of its memory. It’s a theory we’re working on, anyway. Me and the other solitaries. One that would explain why the water from the flower gorge doesn’t just taste like Abe. It floats like clouds and plummets like rain that accelerated into hail which bounced down the valley and melted into water that Abe sipped then released back into the soil, thick with floral microbes. Rain, hail, snowmelt, Abe, every plant and animal it has ever been inside— it’s all there in the shape of the water.

In this way, the plants share their memory. There is a fragrant lilac bush that started trying to kill herself when she was a sixteen-year-old human and was planted as a compromise with her parents. She drinks the runoff from a large weeping willow at the rim of the gorge who is so old it no longer remembers being a human, but the water that moves through it dances. The willow’s roots straddle a boulder coated in lichen that used to be a grade schoolteacher from the United States, and that’s why fear shocks through the water whenever lightning gunshots across the sky.

SUMMER, AGAIN

Winter is for starving and dying. Spring is for thawing and coming alive. But summer.

Summer is the time to eat. To accept the gifts of pollen from the bees. To thank the earthworms that flex over your roots. To glut on the long days of sunshine. To bloat with water. To eat and absorb and eat and grow and eat and eat and eat.

FALL, AGAIN

The summer is for eating. Fall is for being eaten.

The blossoms tighten into clusters, budding. Budding, yes. And acid and water and sugar swells inside them into

into

Peaches.

Yes, peaches. Finally, peaches. Heaps of them hanging heavy on the bough. My soft, pulvinating peaches. Peaches. Yes. My peaches. My own peaches. Finally. The gardener sees and cups them in his hands the way he might hold the face of a lover. “See?” he whispers, lips brushing the budding peach fuzz. “See? I told you they’d grow.”

But then come the eaters.

The snails come, greedy for skin. At first just a few, and then in swarms. Masses and masses of snails that come at night. Leaving their salt trails as they creep up my trunk and tuck into the fruit. They flay each peach they encounter, even those still on the branch. Eating before my peaches are ripe, before they’ve had a chance to really be peaches. The snails will eat until I’m bare, until there’s nothing left.

The gardener tries to pull them off by hand, but he is one and they are a horde. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry, I’m trying.”

A raindrop hits my base, just above the roots. But it’s warm and when it seeps in, it tastes of saline. Saltwater.

Not a raindrop, but a tear.

It is said that when his lover Hyacinth drowned, Apollo held his body in his arms and turned his blood into flowers.

It is said that after her lover Adonis was gored to death, Aphrodite held his body in her arms and wept. Her tears mingled with his blood and became the anemone flower.

It is said that after the death of Patroclus, Achilles refused to bury the corpse. He laid with it, very nearly cannibalized it. All to be with Patroclus again.

Achilles was no god, so no flowers.

I am no god, and still I grow.

The gardener isn’t the only one who tends to me. After the snails skin my peaches, birds peck up the spoiling flesh, fly away, digest, and then defecate into the pond.

Miles away, a kindly mass of pond algae tastes my rotting peaches in the water. Tastes my distress. She overpopulates, ousting the ducks from the pond. The ducks waddle up my way, and they clack up each and every one of the tasty snails so that my peaches can grow and plump up with water from the gorge and plop to the earth and split, overripe and gorgeous.

The peach bounty doesn’t go unnoticed by the gardener. Overjoyed, he waits for my peaches to ripen and then harvests them from the bough.

And he eats them.

Yes, he eats them from the palm, one after another, juice sluicing down his wrist, yes, and soaking his beard, yes, swallowing with great squelching undulations of his throat that send the fruit down into his esophagus and, yes, yes, this I can feel too, yes, the inside of him, yes, his whole body and everywhere the water in his body has been, yes, our water is his water too, yes, yes, finally, yes.