Planting Trees as Graves, by Rukman Ragas

Sarah Jackson -

Content warnings

Domestic violence. Grief. Infant death.

You tend to the trees with stipulated grief. The living are there to weep and you are the keeper, so you guide the angry son; his white knuckled fists around an axe, unable to forgive, unwilling to forget, from the grave of his father where a coconut tree sprouted. He is a bruised child, weeping by the common tea bush under which his mother rested, short and sad. A tea tree takes seven years to mature, seven feet tall—unless you cut it at the waist. She rustles, a cold comfort, for the grave under the coconut is empty. You will come back to the child later.

There are little forget-me-nots sprouting in a plot you tend, a smaller one than many, as if it was done hastily and awkwardly. Like they hadn’t expected the mother’s womb to be a grave. She cries out for her mother, you know, but her mother refuses to visit. To come back to the one she lost when she had one living feels like inviting disaster. You can’t explain that to the baby, so you croon her to sleep with a gravekeeper’s ashy voice and a gardener’s meaningless sound. Most lingering dead have concrete wants but all she desires is care and warmth and that inextricable spark of what makes love so unconditional. You can't give it to her—one can't trace the shape of something one has never known, after all—so you sing lies to the flowers, watering with tears.

“Aararo ariraro, who is the moon to you?”

“Who hit you to make you cry, the apple of my eye, won't you go to sleep?”

The old widow stands before a sunflower plant, weeping and smiling. Her new husband, a bond like a fresh wound, holds her hands like they are a gift he got and couldn’t give back—the same hands that buried her wife several summers ago and she is here again, here for the first time with another, as to assure her dead love that she is not forgotten, that she has grieved all these years, she’s loved all these years, and while now there’s another, he will not replace her.

Her new husband is awkward and lanky, for what can you say when your wife still grieves her other love? Forever unable to compete against the dead but still the winner at the end—because he is here, isn’t he? You wish you could tell her that she’s passed but when you crossed the bridge with her flower, she only wished her wife well. Love fades and the dead are not immune.

The garden is a middle place. Everyone is yours, and you try to take that duty seriously. Duty is the last remnant of who you were. This grove, a prison, this grove, a punishment, this grave, a reprieve.

***

Night falls like only night could, slow and sudden, and the living retreat except for your patrons of grief. And a killer.

The moon is a lonely interloper, and she is beautiful enough that you consider trapping her in your water bowl, just to have a conversation (she used to visit quite often, and you get drunk on local moonshine even as the moon’s glow turns paisley, the craters on her face ever more prominent. She used to listen before you chased her away). The dead are not good conversationalists, imprisoned in their great, shameful desires, whatever that helps them tether to the world of the living. And now, only one desire sings through the middle place.

The little boy is asleep under the tree and she rustles around him, spreading her paltry leaves above, as if she could protect him.

The killer lurks in the periphery. You sit and you watch. The rules are simple; you are only the gardener, only the gravekeeper, and your domain is the dead inbetween. The living are not your business.

The axe is new, untouched by blood. But the tea tree fears it, not from her son but for him. What does a father do when a son runs? What can a mother do except cower?

When the shadow detaches itself from the wall, the tea tree shudders as if a gale ripped through the grove. He is a surprisingly normal man, dark eyed with glasses, 5’5 and thin. He approaches the tree in a mixture of a defeated dodder and lunges. He looks at the tree with regret. Bends down to kiss the son on the forehead. And the killer, she from the shadows, a daughter drives her knife through his bac—

—Rewind

Night falls like only night could, a whispering cloak of dark. The chorus from the grave of forget-me-nots is a wail, wordless and meaningless. You are a spectator again, front row seats afforded with such impunity.

“Malalai” they say when a baby speaks, finding beauty in words that never existed before and will never exist again but in the moment of speech, they are worth the weight of the world in gold.

In malalai, the baby cries, until a woman with dark eyes and soft glasses detaches herself from the dark and walks over, bending to tend to the flowers. Blue and spiraling, they grow over her hands, hungry newborn questing for warmth. Blue and spiraling, they adorn her neck, pulling back, pulling until her veins bulge, eyes give out, and the tongue, the long purple thing it lolls ou—

—Rewind

The night falls as only night could, a glistening black silk in the lover’s hand burying itself like it no longer exists. You watch again as he wipes his hand in the dark, sweat the only proof of existence.

She stands in front of the grave and he swipes his hand across his lips, hard enough to bruise. He offers his hand and she grips with an iron strength. His bones protest.

“This is—” she says. Your ears buzz. “He is here with me to see you.”

She squeezes again, and something cracks. He smiles back at her and turns toward the grave, the empty grave because you know she is no longer there, it’s just sunflowers, sunflowers even as she squeezes his hand, until bones snap and shudder and sprout through like a flower of red and white, spurs cutting through her as he smiles and she sobs. He is a doll within her grasp, and her hands move up as his hand turns into pulp, onto his head where she cradles him like he is someone to be saved and pres—

—Rewind

Night fal—

—Rewind

Grave of possibilities, the garden of reminiscence, the harmony of all that could have ever been and all that ever was. Sing, sing, my strange child, sob for me, and grieve yourself because no one else will. Grieve all you could have been, all you are and I plant a grave for your regrets inside me.

Author's note

Rukman Ragas is calling on you, dear reader, to join them in refusing and resisting the genocide of the Palestinian people. Wherever you are, get in the way and throw what sand you can against the wheels of genocide. The elimination of the Palestinian people is not inevitable. We must resist it with our every breath.

Rukman Ragas

Rukman Ragas is made up of earnest contradictions and temporary obsessions. A Tamil writer of speculative fiction from Sri Lanka, they are fascinated by tender horrors, hysterical resistance, and the thin lines of disgust and desire. Rukman’s work has appeared in venues such as khoreo, Tasavvur, and The Baltimore Review.