The Ones Who Made Me

My first memory is of a three-year-old girl named Nadia looking at the flowers growing from me. She desired to be taller so she could pick them. Nadia wanted them in her hair; she wanted to press them in a book; she wanted to bring one to her Grandma, who would help her get them against her father’s will.

I have memories of Nadia having her first kiss, losing her first child, the panic she felt as the world around her crumbled so easily when water and food became scarce. Overnight, living somewhere isolated became a blessing. In a week she went from worrying about over-sharing her marriage struggles to the clerk at the bank to worrying about her survival.

Around me she buried her loved ones as the years went by and her hair went grey. At first, she would have long periods of crying, but by the time she was older and unable to walk on her own, losing people did not differ from losing a sock. She felt more shame for not being sad than she did about the loss.

I thought I was Nadia at first. That maybe this way of existing, of replaying her memories, was what the afterlife was. When I started gathering the memories of the others buried around me, I became more self-aware. I was not these people. The only thing these people shared was their burial location around me and partial moments of their lives where they intersected.

What started as Nadia’s family orchard became the center of a small settlement that her people only kept control of for a few years. Larger, more violent groups fought over Nadia’s orchard to the point Nadia no longer cared who made the rules as long as she got to keep living. She often lied to these people, telling them she was the only one who could keep me alive.

The man who killed her was not a wicked man. He was the first I felt who had no memories of the way the world used to be. The need to keep surviving guided him the same way it guided most animals. The joys he experienced were mostly to see another day where the ones he cared about were not starving or thirsty.

Over time, the days got hotter and longer; I stopped sleeping as I did when Nadia was alive and kept revisiting the memories I was collecting like Nadia used to watch TV. Once I became more conscious of myself as a being, I started becoming more aware of what I was capable of. I felt the large root I had running into the river absorbing the water that went through me and trickled out of my branches in a steady drip. I believe whatever made people sick was the same thing that burrowed through me, causing veins threw out my body.

Eventually the people nearby became perceptible to me. I could pick up their sounds and their scents through my flowers. Around me, I could feel the outlines of the town being built. I could finally create my own memories instead of just accepting the memories others gave me. I still enjoyed seeing other people’s experiences after they were buried by me, but it felt good to have ones uniquely my own.

Eventually, a woman named Samantha became leader of the settlement. She frequently visited my hill to check on me and expressed her gratitude for everything. Samantha was interested in my biology, my root system, and how I absorbed and filtered the water from the river. She was motherly to me. Frequently measuring my trunk and commenting on how large I was getting.

The older Samantha got, the more people would come with her to my hill and the less sense she would make. She would start telling a story about how I had taken the radiation from the river and stored it in a fruit. Over time, this fruit started to burst and rupture, and I placed it in the sky far away from humanity.

Samantha suffered from what Nadia’s grandma had. She made her condition worse by trying different ways to filter the water and testing it on herself. She made me wish I could do more, but at the time I was not entirely sure what or who I was. Humans lived such brief lives, and all I could do was watch.

This went on for a long time. Many would gather around me daily, pruning dead branches and helping me grow wider and taller. Eventually my branches reached over the community, and they praised me for the shade I gave them. Eventually, I grew large enough during this time that water came out of my branches in streams, making small canals around the village.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it. The people viewed me as one of their own and they cared for me like I cared for them. It was the first time I experienced my version of peace. Something I had not experienced myself but drew from Nadia’s childhood.

Laremy was the 82nd leader in the religion that worshiped me. He lived at the top of the largest building in the settlement. It was a few stories, and they built it around one of my largest branches. He was a kind man, listening to everyone’s problems no matter how large or small they were. He would ask me for my advice and actually pause, hoping I could reply to him. I wish I could. I often tried to think of ways I could, but there was little I could do in a single human’s life except make a single fruit bloom every morning above his bed.

When he eventually passed away, I finally got to see how he viewed me. I still relive his memories of singing to me often. I wish I could have comforted him and eased the embarrassment he felt talking to me. He was the first person who truly believed I could hear them, and it comforted me.

I wish I could have told him I was listening.

That time ended, and eventually cold came. People warned seasons would eventually take years instead of months in Naomi’s time. Too many generations had gone by now, and people had forgotten or thought it was a lie. Fortunately, that harsh winter lasted only half a year.

I tried to stay awake when the sun appeared less frequently. I didn’t want to go back to only reliving the experiences of others. Their suffering, their begging for me to come back, it was worse than it was from the beginning. Now I understood the turmoil and haunting feelings that so many experienced when I first gathered memories. If I were faster, I could have prevented my hibernation. I spent decades after this trying to figure out if there was a way to stay awake. I eventually grew to make it through normal winters but not something like this where the sun was barely visible.

By the time I started waking up, the surrounding population was a fraction of what it had been. When I could start using my pollen to see again, I saw a small body at the base of my trunk. With what little reserves I had remaining, I formed a fruit on the bud nearest the child’s body. I forced the resources I had saved to bloom thousands of flowers to force my water filtering to turn on and make this one fruit.

Someone in the pink and green robes of my religion saw it. They rushed to the fruit, drawing the attention of most of the town as they did. They fought with greater brutality than the raiders did in Naomi’s days over the single fruit. As they fought, blood pooled around them. With those nutrients, I was able to make hundreds by the next day. I didn’t have time to filter it as I normally did, and the next day the ones that were still alive woke up to hundreds of red-streaked fruit that tasted metallic.

The priest who drew attention to the fruit saw it as a sign that I was hungry and that I required to feed on them. ‘Kill the few to feed the many’ was a chant they had for a while. They saw the child that died on top of my hill as a sign of the way I desired things, so they selected their sacrifices and left their bodies to lie on top of the hill. I don’t enjoy reliving this time. I dislike looking back on those memories of seeing their hatred for each other. They rejoiced at not being selected for the slaughter while they lied and plotted against friends to ensure someone else would be given as tribute.

At first, I produced as much fruit as I physically could with what I had. They saw that as a reward for the sacrifices. I then wilted my flowers before they produced anything, and they took it as a sign of my disappointment in them not killing enough. Then again, they misunderstood me, taking my production as a sign that they were not killing the right people.

It took decades to find some kind of balance. Like Nadia, I came to accept the death.

Esmia the 276th didn’t have a name, only a title. Her selection at birth destined her for sacrifice at twenty. She grew up knowing this, and people treated her as if she were the living vessel of me. Like every other Esmia before her, she lived a life of luxury before it was her time to ascend.

She reminded me of Laremy and Nadia. She would sing similar hymns to me and climb on my branches while telling me about her life. What separated her from Laremy was the fear she held onto of knowing when she was going to die. She loved me in a way, but hated me for believing I had wanted her and others dead. She would ask under her breath why I needed the lives, hoping no one heard her but me. The time she spent in my branches usually finished with her gentle sobbing.

On the day they gathered her at my trunk for sanguination, I wept. The accumulating anger I felt vibrated through me. My branches stopped flowing water and my fruit ruptured; the petals of my flowers and my leaves blanketed the town. This caused me to sleep in the middle of summer for two days, which caused the town and the surrounding areas to panic. Priests wrote this as a sign similar to the time I placed the sun in the sky and Esmia the 276th got to be known as Esmia the Last.

The priests finally correctly read my anger through their two-day fast and the months-long cleanup of my outburst.

I got to have the joy of watching Esmia climb my branches with her children, play at my base with her grandchildren, and show me to her great-grandchildren. When she passed, they built a stone structure next to me and cared for it as they cared for me. I eventually produce a small branch that hung over her tomb that was always in bloom.

From there, life progressed. The world slowly balanced itself. The settlement became a city surrounding an extensive park that people came to on pilgrimages. People paid sizable sums to be buried around me. Rulers and the wealthy from around the world saw it as a ticket to immortality. My fruit became less needed for life, and the church used them more as holy items. They bottled my water for ceremonies and sent it to places with no clean water. People all over the world built buildings like Laremy’s, and they grew trees from my fruit in every one. It was the second time I felt peace. By this time my branches were so massive that the whole river diverted through me, creating an intricate network of waterfalls throughout my canopy.

Slowly people stopped caring for me as a god and more as a landmark. It had been generations since Esmia and her tomb made more of a cave in my trunk. Humanity worried less about the world killing them and more about the awkward things they told their neighbors.

Eventually, some got annoyed at the amount of land I took up. Buildings started approaching my height. They pruned my limbs to make space for more buildings, and they confined me to my hill.

Kalice was the last person to visit me. I felt it in the air; I could sense the fear in the millions of people around me. I wanted to learn from my mistakes last time, and I focused on storing resources to maintain being awake as long as possible.

“You have survived so much.” I heard her whisper when she went into Esmia’s tomb. “How did you endure?” she asked as she took pieces of me and studied them with tools I didn’t understand that made sounds I did not like.

Kalice visited me every day for a year. She told me about how humanity was leaving. The pain of convincing her elderly father to go with her. The issues she faced with the people she went on dates with. After a week, I started leaving a fruit by her tools. And by the third day, she was excited.

“Do you understand me?” She asked. It had been so long since anyone had actually talked to me. I tried to grow a fruit in the same location I had every morning for her. The process had already started, but it would be hours before she noticed. It had been so long, and I still had not known how to control myself in the short time a human cared.

Kalice’s face went from hope to disappointment.

She continued to talk to me as she worked, but I could tell from her tone it was not the same. I continued to produce fruit for her; I gathered the metals and minerals from the river and played with the blending of them to make my fruit change colors. Over time, I changed the colors of her fruit in patterns every day. She noticed after a few weeks.

“Tomorrow is a red day, isn’t it?” She said while looking up into the dim light of my canopy. “If you understand me, make the fruit green.”

The next day, when the fruit was green, she cried.