THE LONELIEST LIFE FORM ON THE PLANET
An emaciated young woman is standing in front of a black oak in a large backyard. Like all the trees in the backyard, and in the world, the black oak is wilted and brittle, barely living. The daughter is staring at the tree, head titled, eyes glassy. The daughter’s mother and a muscular man walk into the backyard holding protein shakes. They join the daughter in front of the black oak. The three stand in silence for a moment and then the mother’s phone starts to vibrate.
The mother looks at her phone, and says to her daughter with sing-song annoyance, “It’s your father again.”
“You know I prefer ‘Big Daddy’,” says her daughter flatly, rolling her eyes.
The mother pockets her phone while it’s still vibrating. “Well, yes, he’s big, but why can’t you just be a teeny-weeny bit more like your ‘Big Daddy’ and eat something for once?”
“Why is this tree dying?” the daughter asks herself aloud.
“There's no rain anymore and water’s expensive, darling. All the trees are totally losing it.”
“Will it ever rain again?” absently asks her daughter.
“You need to eat. That’s more important. Look at you.”
“Look at me, look at me. Please, everybody, look at me,” sings the daughter.
“Oh, I'm so tired of this shit,” says her mother, taking a sip from her protein shake. She looks at the muscular man beside her who returns her look with emptiness.
“So am I. I'm so, so, so very tired of this shit,” says her daughter.
“Then eat!” shouts her mother.
“Fuck off!” replies her daughter.
“Oh, sweetness, don’t shout,” says her mother.
“Let’s make her a nice shake,” says the muscular man to the mother, holding up his shake.
“Yes, Randy’s right. What about a nice shake, honey?”
The daughter looks at the muscular man and says, “Go fuck yourself sideways, Randy.” She then turns to the tree and asks it tenderly, “Why are you dying?”
“No rain. I said already, honey.”
Without taking her eyes off the tree, the daughter says calmly, “Go fuck yourself sideways, too, mommy” and asks with a sigh, “Why are you even here?”
“Don’t be rude, sweetie. I just came outside to show Randy where the pool’s going in.”
“What?”
“We’re cutting Mr. Twee-Twee down,” says her mother, kicking the base of the black oak with her sneakered foot.
“Come the fuck again?” asks her daughter.
“Your father and I are putting in a nice swimming pool, sweety. See how the area’s all marked up?”
The daughter now sees the survey flags driven into the grass, connected by string lines in the shape of a rectangle. “Twee’s gotta say bye-bye, sweetie. On its last legs anyway, right?”
“An actual, fucking pool. With water,” says her daughter.
“Swimming’s healthy, sweetie. Total body workout, right?”
“Just stop fucking talking,” seethes the daughter. She then gently puts both her palms on the black oak, leaning into it with eyes closed, placing her lips on the bark, kissing it softly. She then begins to eat out the tree in a grateful and loving act of plantae cunnilingus.
“What on earth are you doing, honey?” says the mother.
In arousal, the daughter raises her right leg in a rhythmical humping motion towards and upon the black oak. In response, the black oak sprinkles the daughter with a few dead leaves from its withered branches, acknowledging and accepting the daughter’s sexual desire with satisfaction.
*
The black oak has known for a few months that it’s been slated to meet its death on the terrifying end of a chainsaw as a sacrifice for a swimming pool. The tree knows the holocaust is real and global, and the massacre will continue in this backyard, just like it will in another hundred billion backyards. The tree does not want to be murdered.
Over the past weeks, the black oak has used its generations of ancient, stored emotive energy to influence the daughter from afar, incrementally activating her desire in an attempt to harvest and synthesize it. Maybe, just maybe, the tree has theorized, this process of interpenetrating energetically with the daughter could rejuvenate the daughter’s desire for her own life and thereby somehow serve as a defence against the chainsaw. The black oak has understood this plan might be just a desperate swing for the fences, but it also has further intuited that a fundamental, practical shift could actually materialize beyond a potential defence against massacre. Yes, if the tree could successfully co-create a single hybrid, mutually reinforcing synthesis of energies between human and tree, perhaps it could somehow serve as a way of igniting nothing less than a wider process to save the entire planet and create a new future. Maybe it’s what’s been missing from the planet for a long time. For millennia. Yes, yes, a concatenation of core-based, dynamic neo-genesis. Dominoes of regenerative energy forever falling forward toward rejuvenation. It would be nothing less than the creation of a sub-atomic matrix of change.
The daughter leans closer into the black oak and begins to visibly transform into a physically healthy version of herself. Magical morphogenesis. Her body fills out, her skin begins to glow, the corroded enamel on her her teeth regenerates, white and shinning. In the span of a few minutes, her body begins to teem with life, all the while she eats out the tree with amorous abandon. The back of her neck is red, splotched with tumescent hives of arousal.
In a sudden, new state of shocked, grounded awareness, the mother now remembers this exact glow of her daughter’s from the moment after giving birth to her twenty-one years ago. She is stunned to now remember it as a precious, fleeting transitional moment of nonverbal ecstasy, where the daughter’s postnatal wailing slowly softened into a contented burbling as the infant looked into its mother’s bloodshot eyes, felt secure, then nuzzled into her mother’s chest, falling asleep aglow with intense physical and psychic love. The mother also now remembers her own hives that had powerfully erupted among her neck, arms and thighs as she held her infant close to her sweaty, hot chest. She remembers the aliveness, the arousal, the limitless energy of it all.
How is it the mother, out of nowhere, only now remembers how her infant baby had fallen asleep to her maternal heartbeat and thereby had temporarily also fallen into and became alive with the rich blood-flow of living life? How is it she only now also realizes that from the exact moment of her infant daughter’s rude awakening from blissful sleep—an awakening brought about by the mother’s own shouting at the nurses for faster care, cleaner sheets, better food—that the mother had herself brutally severed her baby from connection with that vital blood-flow of love? Only now realizes that her baby’s loss of love and peace had become an ongoing, repetitive cycle of chaos as her daughter struggled throughout life? The mother now finally clearly sees the history of her daughter’s suffering: initially there was the daughter’s paralyzing emotional isolation as an act of self-protection; and then, eventually, the daughter’s self-imposed nutritional starvation, which was paradoxically both an act of self-harm and self-protection in the absence of a reliable mother whom the daughter could openly trust in the life process of giving and receiving love. The mother now understands all of her daughter’s suffering was bred and relentlessly aggravated by a family system consumed with self-interest, greed and ignorance.
The mother now sees and understands her daughter, and is inwardly liberated to further fully understand why on that day when her daughter acquired enough language to ask meaningful questions, the daughter asked in a thousand different ways both expressive and silent: Why desire anything? Money? Family? Food? Love? The mother’s sad, liberated inner realization then turns into glowing joy over embracing the clean certainty of truth. Dropping her protein shake, she begins to cry tears of ineffable happiness.
If trees could smile, the black oak smiled to itself, knowing the mother’s realizations were direct manifestations of its plan. Yes, the mother’s realization of the truth would help initiate changing everything in the world. Is right at this very moment changing everything. Yes, yes, thought the tree, the dominoes of global, geo-rebirth had begun to fall. The inertia had started in this very backyard—once a place of chalky protein shakes, family misery and tree death, it was now the epicenter of a new beginning.
With this realization, the tree also enacts its own morphogenesis, re-growing vibrant, green leaves and stiff, healthy branches that sway triumphantly. The daughter’s body-glow edges towards a kind of over-exposed, super-nova, soul-bright brilliance. Her body rocks back and forth in a joyously reciprocal rhythm with the black oak.
Then, in a seemingly signaled, synchronized moment, the other trees in the backyard exude potent eroticism and regenerative brilliance. In response, the mother swoons towards a weeping willow. Dropping his protein shake, Randy saunters towards a silver birch. This process, the tree knows, is the power and freedom of actualized, sub-atomic desire. Knows this in its roots.
The backyard is now a singularity, a silent dynamo-feedback flow of trans-species, regenerative love-making, transmitting a pounding heartbeat code across the whole earth.
Then there’s a wild screeching of tires in the front driveway, soon after which, a man comes rushing into the backyard. He is 400 pounds. He is wearing sunglasses and his gold watch glints in the descending darkness. His body moves with heavy, chaotic anger.
“Where the fuck is everybody? Why is nobody answering my fucking calls?” He wildly looks around the backyard where his wife, daughter, and Randy are kneeling in front of their respective trees, faithful in performing oral gratification on their respective branchéd lovers. The man shouts, “What the actual fuck is going on here?”
He rushes to his wife, and tries to pull her to her feet. She will not move. He does the same with his daughter. No movement or recognition of anything from them, other than an unstoppable desire to keep doing it with the trees.
The father furiously dials 9-1-1. No answer. He tries again. No signal. Nothing. Dead. The dynamo-feedback flow of global regeneration has knocked out the power grids for good. In going dark, the world is regaining a new light.
Panting and wheezing, the father stands in the backyard. He drops his phone and falls to his knees, paralyzed, helpless. In the core of his body, the father can sense there is something correct and vital occurring everywhere, and whatever it is, he knows it’s coming from the trees. He also senses he has been excluded from whatever is happening. Amid short breaths of panic, he tries to communicate with the trees. He says aloud, trembling, “Hello? Can you hear me? Hello? Can we make a deal? What can I give you? Hello? I have money, you know. I have a lot of money. For water. You need water, right?” There is no response. Only a silent rejection that feels ominously violent to him. His hand automatically reaches for his wallet, and then goes limp.
The father rocks on his knees, weeps, burbles non-words: Wee, wee, ig, ig, ig twee, ig tweeeee…His sunglasses slide off his face. His eyes, ears, nose and mouth all turn to jelly. Then the rest of his body rapidly liquefies. In this transformation of tongueless truth and single-celled devolution, the father becomes the loneliest life form on the planet.
At what used to be called midnight, a strong, steady and endless universal rain commences, creating dark and purifying music.
by Sean G. Meggeson
Sean G. Meggeson lives in Toronto, Canada, where he works as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. He has written and lectured on such topics as Ricoeurian hermeneutics, neurodiversity, and interspecies intersubjectivity. He has published poetry and prose in a range of journals and magazines. Fiction recently published in Flash Fiction Magazine, The Gorko Gazette , Mr.Bull, Revolution John, and The Alien Buddha Press. Forthcoming: An essay on poetics in the UK-based journal, Futch.