"New Leaf" by David O'Mahony
New Leaf
by David O’Mahony
He seems like a nice enough young man. A bit skittish, but a dreamer who’s polite and well dressed, much like me. Even a similar name: Salvor to my Solomon. Maybe that’s why he follows me down the long fern path into the woods more easily than all the other men and women. But how am I to know he has the same idea as me? How am I to know he’ll cut first?
The soil yields easily to his hands. He hasn’t thought ahead but I try to tell him it’s alright, don’t panic. I’ve done it a dozen times before, any time the dry spell goes on just a little too long and things need to get moving again. He’s gentle. He kisses my forehead and leaves my face clear to gaze up at the oaks before running off north, opposite to the way we come. How is he to know it is the wrong choice? The crack, the scream, the exquisite searing of flesh being split by bough and branch tells me he learns soon enough. The fast rustle of leaves as the shadows descend from the canopy and the growling of foxes are the forest gorging itself to sleep. Somewhere I feel the earth being disturbed, reshaped around shattered remains as the roots crack into his bones and drink the marrow until he is made endless. I am so proud of him, and so jealous. Why take him and not me, after everything I do for them?
The rolls of the sun and stars are endless and cold. Only the branches creaking under the weight of shadowy, unknowable things keep me company.
A phalanx of ants eats away at my skin, coating me like a wave until every exposed scrap is picked to clean, virgin bone. Is that it? Is that why I haven’t been made immortal yet? Do I need to shed my old flesh and leave it behind? They retreat to their dens as hordes of creeping blind things do their best to nip and gnaw and delve into my back, my legs, my futile arms.
A rat cracks my skull at the back, digging from underneath and hacking until the goop of my brain satiates it and the dirt around me. And I think, this is it, this is when my ascension comes… but it waddles off, fat and swollen, and leaves the essence of me behind.
The roots ignore me, stretching around me like I am tainted. Or am I unworthy?
I would kill to weep for myself, but I have no eyes. Some burrowing, twisting creature wrapped in a hard shell takes the left one. Just a taste at first, something tentative and gentle like a lover’s kiss before it sinks pinprick fangs into the decaying jelly and swallows it down greedily before scratching away at the skin and nesting in the cavity that is my nose.
It isn’t expecting to be eaten by a snuffling, huffing wild boar covered in mud and filth. The first bite severs the insect in two – the second takes the rest and my right eye along with it. It drips out from between the boar’s teeth, spilling down onto the exposed old bone before it tries to bite down on that too, stopped only by a loud hullo in the distance and the wild yapping of dogs. It runs. It doesn’t last long.
I feel its blood drain into the earth, hear the old, grating whispers as the shadows grow fat on death and slaughter. Still I wonder why they aren’t coming for me, to make me one of their own.
The leaves fall and turn to mulch around me, the shadow things hang bulbous and weary from the branches as the squirrels play among my bones while trying to find their lost acorns, yet still nothing comes for me.
Not until the first bite of winter, when the starving deer staggers beneath the tree, its hind leg dragging behind it as it grabs my fractured skull in foam-dappled teeth and scatters the soil – still supple before the deep frost hits – and my bones along with it. It gnaws on my breastbone, then my jaw, then my arm until it keels over and broken bones puncture deep into its chest, leaving it heaving and wheezing long enough for a shadow to wake, sweep down and tear it asunder.
Even as the pieces fall around me its legs still kick, still fight before the grove grows silent once again, and I’m left behind while the sky turns.
I surrender, and wait for the peace of turning to helpless dust.
A slender root kisses my ribs, wrapping itself around the bone tenderly as a dozen siblings cup what’s left of my legs, my feet, my arms. The marrow is long gone but they break me apart anyway, delving deep into what’s left – but not taking, giving.
They pull me toward the lumbering trunk as branches scoop down to dig me free of the soil, the bark snapping open to take me in and hold me close like a mother cradling a newborn infant.
A dozen leaves erupt on a low branch, heavy with a hissing that casts me out as a cloud, a black shadow loitering between the stalks. Small for now, but not for long. I hang beneath the stars, waiting, hungry for the next soul with a sharp knife and a bad idea to lead somebody even more lost than them beneath the canopy.