And he did. He tasted the last drag off his cigarette, recalled his pride as he watched the muscles in Brooke’s legs when she stooped to roll up the tent. He felt his fingers flick the cigarette into the dry brush lining their campsite, watched its glowing orange tip somersault and fall. Banished details returned, the gathering smoke where the cigarette still burned, the scent of flaming kindling, the thickness in the air as it prepared to sear. He saw Brooke’s forgotten look of horror as a shadow grew behind him, heard a now familiar crack, then pain and the dark.
“Seventy-three trees burned before the heavens doused them with tears. Seventy-three, Mr. Lawrence. And so I replenish, as I’ve replenished since my bride first took me to her side, and I remind the sinners of their sins.”
His stomach lurched, spasmed, seemed to rip apart with a stab of pain. Lawrence tried to look down, wanted to watch his viscera uncoil, but the tree man still clutched him by the hair and held his gaze. The pain lessened, and his mouth filled with the taste of soil. His tongue rolled around the flavor and rejoiced.
“You were preparing us,” he said. His voice was a rustle of leaves. “For planting.”
“You prepared yourself when you scorched my bride.”
“Brooke … Brooke never hurt you. Never hurt your…” He spit out a raspy laugh. “Your bride.”
“Are those who love sinners not sinners themselves? And she does look quite beautiful, does she not?” The tree man turned Lawrence’s head.
Brooke stood mere feet from him. Her arms shot skyward, as dark and rough as old leather, branches and thorns lining her hide like warts, ending in fingerless hands that resembled the pine cones that would gather in their yard each fall. Her eyes, as lovely a shade of brown as they had been at their wedding, stared at the sun in reverence. Her mouth was a yawning O and ringed with a bundle of tiny pink flowers the shade of her lips in the morning. She was buried in the forest floor up to her remaining knee.
It pruned her, he realized, and his mind slammed shut like a coffin lid. He dimly noticed the tree man had set him down, but any thoughts of running vanished into Brooke’s pleading wooden eyes.
“It took her fingers and it took her toes and it will not be done ‘til it buries my soul.” He laughed the words like a poorly delivered punchline.
“And your soul will replenish all that you have taken,” the tree man said, stepped between husband and wife, and drew its saw from its cloak.
“Mother Nature is a forgiving bride,” it said. “Nature’s Father, however, is not.” Its crack of a mouth fractured into a crooked grin. “Today is Arbor Day, Mr. Lawrence. Let us celebrate.” It raised its arms. The saw gleamed in the moon’s pale glow, and the trees welcomed a brother.
THE GREENHOUSE GARDEN OF SUICIDES
by Kirk Jones
Doctor Bryukhonenko’s Experiments in the Revival of Organisms, and the accompanying footage of a small canine head severed from its body, its life sustained with the help of machinery, now flashed in Dick’s mind as he watched the severed head of a middle-aged woman in the same condition. Like the dog in Bryukhonenko’s tests, the woman reacted to various stimuli. Her eyes lazily followed his hand when he waved them before her. She squinted under heavy lighting. She was, in a scientific capacity, alive.
As he scrawled the results down in his journal, the woman’s eyes spun like a roulette wheel, darting from one corner of the room to the next. Then the scattershot movements slowed, and she settled on him.
He dismissed it as chance and continued in his journal until a rhythmic clicking drew him back to the head. Her jaw fell agape as she continued looking at him. Then it snapped shut. Her features distorted to a look of terror. She opened her mouth again. Only a faint gurgle issued forth, but he saw the movements of her lips, and knew what she was trying to say: “Where am I?”
SWEAT BEADED AND STREAMED down the phone as Dick waited for his contact to answer. Finally, Sands picked up.
“Agent Sands here.”
“She looked at me,” Dick stammered.
“Dick?”
“That woman, she looked directly at me and tried to speak.”
“Then the experiment was a success?”
Dick wiped the sweat away from his receding hairline. “I think she’s conscious.”
“That’s great!”
“I can’t do this.”
“Dick, you need to calm down. Tara’s a suicide victim.”
“Please don’t use her name.”
“Sorry. She was clinically dead for nearly two hours before we got her up there. She’d be six feet under by now if you hadn’t revived her.”
“I can’t test a live specimen.”
“Look, it’s probably just muscle reflex. You were the only thing moving in the room and her eyes responded to the stimuli. Jaw spasms are normal as well. You know this.”
“I don’t think I can go back in there.”
“That’s fine. Your contractual obligations have been met. You’ve tested her reflexes and the results were more than we had hoped for. I’ll send someone up tomorrow to clean up, and you can get back to the university.”
“Thanks, Sands.”
Dick hung up the phone and looked out past the garden to the greenhouse where the suicide victim’s head rested in a large plastic dish. He thought about the eyes, a deep green clouded with death, reverberating with fear. A few days earlier, he imagined she would have stirred something in him long since gone, a rekindled sense of purpose, of youth perhaps. But now she was incapable of inspiring anything but fear. He shuddered as a wave of cold washed over his back and trailed down his spine like a slug scrolling down the leaf of a maple. Sleep wouldn’t come easily for him, and the nearest liquor store was over twenty miles away. The neighbor had been watching his movements closely during the past few evenings, and leaving the greenhouse out of range seemed like too great a risk for a bottle of scotch. So he decided to go through the motions, the ritual to prepare for sleep that would never come.
As he opened the toothpaste on the bathroom sink and squeezed the innards onto his brush, he thought about the girl in the greenhouse opening a bottle of prescription tranquilizers and filling her stomach with them. He spit, let himself fall into bed, and writhed beneath the blankets, thinking of the aging woman doing the same, only uncovered on her bathroom floor. The paramedics had found her naked, completely exposed to the world.
He wished Sands had left her veiled in anonymity when he delivered the head. At the same time, he found himself wondering what her body looked like. Did she groom herself for the suicide, knowing she’d inevitably be found by someone, or had a plant-like mesh of hair rested between her legs when the EMT walked in? That was something he dared not ask Sands, nor think about until now, though the thought of her naked body had chipped away at his conscience. He hadn’t been with a woman in almost three years, so long that sexualizing the bodiless head of a woman was not beyond him. He wondered where her body was now, and the idea of her headless corpse sickened him. Strangely, though he had always considered himself an ‘ass man,’ it was the face that allowed thoughts of her body to blossom, and not a headless body that brought his arousal to peak.
It was about that time that his panic diminished enough to allow him a few hours of sleep. His dreams were not so kind. Since he was young, sleep paralysis had gripped him from time to time. But the fear of asphyxiation always manifested as something else within, a dead body with its arms wrapped tight around him, a heavy beast crushing him underfoot, or sucking the breath from his lungs. Tonight it was the head, staring into him from atop his chest. He woke swatting at the woman’s face until he realized he had been dreaming, and then ran to the window to make sure the greenhouse door was closed. He had left the lights on.