I.
You and your sisters left your bodies where they were standing, in a grove in Zimbabwe, some fifty years ago. You left the dead buried among your roots, but still remember the way their bones nestled against your bark. Corporate development hadn’t really reached you yet, but you could tell it would eventually. As the years wore on, the droughts became longer and drier. It was time. So, you and your sisters each took a piece of your bodies with you as you left. You wear a seed around your neck in a tiny glass bottle. When the wind blows and you hold the seed in your hand, you can feel the thoughts of your sisters brush against your skin—you have skin now, a deep, burnished brown that drinks in sunlight. You’ve let hair grow in a kinky halo around your head, emphasizing your height—a height that echoed the height of the body you left back in Africa. It’s still standing. When you sleep, that is where you are. Letting your leaves rustle in the wind and sinking your roots down, down, down.
II.
You weren’t sure what you wanted to do when you came to America. There aren’t many marketable skills that dryads have outside of craft and gardening—but you weren’t ready to miss the earth of your home that much, not yet. You weren’t ready for this new soil. You’re not used to soil without flesh mingled among the minerals—it was so much more lonely without it. So, with the assistance of various assimilation programs, you bounced from job to job, never quite finding something real that you could hold onto. Nowhere to put your roots.
You are on the east coast now, where the rains come and stay, until they don’t. You work in a diner late into the night. Your boss likes you—which is good (he’s quite intimidating when he’s angry; smoke drifts from his nostrils, and his skin takes on a metallic sheen)—because you can stand for long hours without getting tired and only really need water breaks. You were offered longer breaks, and they are in fact mandatory, but you don’t want to stop and think about what you’re doing, here, in America, far from home, with your sisters scattered across the globe. So, you stay active, and you smile at customers and display a saintly amount of patience. There’s a sort of ongoing bet among your coworkers to see how much you can carry in your wiry-strong arms. You’ve never lost. You get excellent tips in addition to the decent minimum wage. You start to think you could make a place for yourself. Maybe. Even if that place will never be the grove in Zimbabwe where you would drink water and blood from the soil with your sisters.
III.
You have a studio apartment, where you stay. There isn’t much room, but you don’t really need it. You only sleep a little bit. You spend most of your days reading books, taken from the university library, and tending to houseplants—those bratty little distant cousins of yours with ancestry in other lands. They’re finicky things and very particular about where they are placed, but you can usually coax them into behaving. They remind you of your younger sisters, the way they were delicate before they grew strong. You invite your coworker Celia over sometimes to share space or partake in one another’s bodies. Like you, Celia isn’t quite used to having flesh. Ae were a sylph, a thing of air and thought. Ae were a suggestion of a breeze. You both feel adrift, though the feeling pricks at your heart more than aers. After all, you lived hundreds of years with roots. Ae were nomadic in nature. With the directness of the earth under your feet, you meet aer.
IV.
There’s a park you and Celia go to visit, though ae only accompany you rarely and when your days off coincide and only if ae’re in the mood. You like to sit and absorb the sun and whisper to the local trees. You hum sometimes—your voice is an alto, and you sink easily into a low register. Celia thinks you should join aer band, but you don’t see a reason for that when the band already has a washerwoman with an incredible wail and who cries tears of blood. You don’t have a flair for theatrics, and only barely tolerate crowds. Celia accuses you of being boring. You are inclined to agree. At least, sometimes. Celia is flighty and impulsive and doesn’t have the breadth for long hours of contemplation. When ae get excited, ae shimmer. Ae talk fast, and you have a low, measured tone. You think the two of you just live at different speeds.
V.
There’s a customer that you’ve started to notice as frequent. She always comes in after midnight, orders a coffee, black, and scarfs down the biggest breakfast on the menu. She’s as thin as a rake, and you wonder if she eats at any other time in the day. She’s pretty quiet. Her name on the ticket is Sofia Saar. She unerringly wears black clothes with something floral as an accent. She looks as though she is perpetually attending a funeral. She’s dainty in all ways, with the exception of these big black boots she constantly wears—often tracking mud in with them. (She’s one of Celia’s least favorite customers because of this, but you don’t mind. You like the dirt.) You don’t really get to talk much, but one day, while you’re giving her the check, you murmur her last name. She looks up. She says, “It’s Estonian.”
You wonder how long her family has been here.
She says, “I’m first gen. We came over when I was ten.” She sighs. “I’m more American now than I am Estonian, but some things you never shake. You know?”
You do know. You can relate.
Sofia tilts her head to the side. “Do you have family here?”
You have family all over the world. But mostly in the lower hemisphere. A lot of cousins in Australia. Some of your sisters have drifted to Europe, some to the Americas. But when you stick your hands in the dirt at night, you can hear the sounds of their roots drinking water from the earth. You feel happy knowing that they live.
“That’s evasive.”
You shake your head. It’s the truth. It’s just that your kind don’t have immediate family the way humans do. Family is different. Family is interconnectedness. Family is abstract and specific. There is a knowing in entwining roots. But you and your sisters talked through the air and through touch, much the way humans do. The words were slow but they were received.
Sofia nods slowly, making the same face she does when she’s considering the taste of something she finds particularly… particular. (You watch her sometimes, the way her face shifts with her changeable moods, how her fingers dance over her books as she works). She slides a twenty toward you and hops off the bar stool. “Thanks for the food.”
You nod.
She walks away.
VI.
When she comes in now, she asks you questions. You respond, as best you can in between attending to other customers, but you like having time before you answer. You like to sit with your words. You get the feeling that Sofia is exercising a possibly uncharacteristic restraint while listening. She is, after all, so quick with everything else. You learn a lot about her too. Tonight, the topic is education. You’ve told her that you’re self-taught on most things, that you get all of your skills from books or trial-and-error. You tell her that your patience with yourself and with things outside yourself help with how you learn.
“I wish I had patience in general.”
You shrug. That is something that must be cultivated over time, like many other things.
She wrinkles her nose. “You use the word ‘cultivate’ a lot.”
Well, it is integral to your process. All plants do is cultivate. You suggest that Sofia cultivate patience with herself.
She rolls her eyes and shoves a forkful of omelet in her mouth.
VII.
You find out a few nights later a little of what Sofia’s family must be like. She claims she is the family disappointment. You don’t know if you could have ever been a disappointment to your sisters. That’s not how the quietude of existence alongside family was. There was a sacredness to your silences. It is easy to honor the dead with quiet.
She smiles wryly, “The look on my mother’s face when, instead of restoring our family’s crow-friend, I reanimated it, like, five minutes after it died. My birth father was appalled. My other dad was—he had an expression that I hadn’t seen before. He was the one who suggested I go to college for it. It’s not like the family carries any books on necromancy when our entire heritage is healers and birth doulas. I suppose I’m carrying on the doula work. Just, with death. There aren’t enough death doulas, and there’s always more grief.”
You wonder if Sofia wishes it were any other way.
She grins and shakes her head, closing her eyes for a moment. “I like what I’m doing. Human anatomy is so interesting. I’ve always liked that aspect of my family’s magic: the rate of decomp, the pull of a fresh spirit. There’s a lot more spirituality to necromancy than I first realized.” She drags a bit of pancake through the swirl of melted butter and syrup that’s coagulated on her plate. “I’m minoring in psychometry rather than mediumship, though. I think having an understanding of a person before they died—the life they’ve lived, their connections to personal objects—will help my necromantic practice. Especially if I want to get into law. Which I do.”
You raise an eyebrow.
“What? People pay good money to settle will disputes. And I’m hoping to get a side practice going where family members can get closure with sudden deaths. Doula work, you know.”
You think that’s a good thing to do.
“Well, let’s not get into the ethics of making money on grief.”
You won’t, if it bothers her, but you make a point of reminding Sofia that everyone makes money off of something.
VIII.
It’s nearing 2 a.m. and you and your coworkers are trying to close the place up as fast as you can. Sofia has been hovering for the past half hour, lingering instead of inhaling her meal and leaving as soon as she is done. You look at her levelly and let her know it’s about closing time.
She bites her lip and looks everywhere but you. Then she says, “What are you doing after this?”
You think for a moment. Celia’s off at a show so you don’t really have anything planned. You suppose you might read for a bit. There’s a compendium of North American Coniferous trees you’ve been enjoying really digging into.
“Would you like some company?”
You guess there could be some merit to sharing tree knowledge, and invite Sofia back to your place. So long as she leaves so your coworker can mop the floor.
Sofia nods and slides off her barstool. “I’ll be waiting outside.”
IX.
The walk home is quiet. There’s a tension between the two of you as you walk, but it isn’t unpleasant.
When the two of you are sitting on your futon and you’re talking about how the boreal forests of Canada and Russia are the lungs of the earth, she kisses you. You’re surprised. You ask if she’s passionate about plant respiration, too. She rolls her eyes and says “For fuck’s sake” before grabbing your face and kissing you further. You shut up.
X.
You and Sofia are hanging out in the graveyard on one of your free days. She was going over her notes and examining the quality of the dirt in this graveyard in relation to the one near the college. She has been saying that this one was a lot older and had melded more with the bodies due to its porous quality. She’s been grumbling all night, worried about her practicum. You’ve been watching her work, jot down notes, and mutter to herself. You like how prickly Sofia is, like a Pachycereus marginatus. Tall, retains a lot. You tell her she could have been a dryad.
She snorts. “I doubt it.”
You ask if perhaps a garden gnome would be more appropriate considering how similar her temperament is to theirs.
She slaps your hand lightly. Then something catches her eye. She points at your necklace. “What’s that?”
Adansonia kilima. You carry a part of your body with you. It is your seed. It’s part of your home. It was grown of bone and soil.
She asks, tentatively, “Can I see it?”
You hesitate, then nod, carefully uncorking the little bottle and letting the seed slide into her open palm, and it’s like the world stops. She is holding your heart in her hand. Gently.
You watch, stock still, as her eyes cloud over with white and her breathing slows. You realize this is how she must look when she practices her psychometry. Her mouth opens and shuts. Then her eyes return to how they usually are and she says, “You have known so many years. You’ve lived so long. You carry death. I hadn’t thought—”
You ask for your seed back. You think about what it means for you to have let her hold it. You’ve never let anyone hold it before. You tell her this.
She looks a little nervous. “Thank you,” she says quietly.
You nod. You aren’t sure if she understands the gravity of what just happened, if she knows that she holds your beginning and others’ ends. But you lean over and kiss her and walk her back to your place. You let your body talk.
XI.
It’s actually Sofia who gathers the courage to ask The Question. She’s eating apple pie à la mode. She takes a deep breath and asks, “Would you like to be my girlfriend?”
You don’t really know that you could be termed as a girl. Gender is abstract for a tree.
She groans. “Fine. A tree-friend. Dryad-friend. Partner.”
You don’t know what that would entail and politely ask for details. You’ve never been in an official relationship before. (Celia most emphatically does not count.) The way you and your sisters took lovers was in passing moments. It was learning to breathe alongside one another. It was learning companionable aloneness.
Sofia narrows her eyes at you. “Yes or no.”
You say yes. You can figure out everything else as you go along.
“Good,” she says, before leaning over the bar and pecking you on the lips, tasting like vanilla and cinnamon sugar. “I’ll be outside.”
You smile and collect her plate, wiping the counter with a rag. You think of your sisters and entangled roots, of the way breathing comes easier to lungs when you don’t think about it. You think of the skeletons in your soil, the way your fruit was fragrant because of their burial. How would your fruit taste now? You think of all the lands you could have been in and you are glad you are here.
