The Myth of the Wound Sealer

THE MYTH OF THE WOUND SEALER

by Lia Binte Sidin

(Content Warning: Story contains themes and depictions of death, loss, and sexism.) 

It is said that trees never really heal from their wounds. Not really. Every single impact, abrasion, scrape, and cut made by human hands or mother nature—all of these remain within a tree for life. Instead, what they do is try to wall off the affected area. Isolate it from the rest of the healthy, growing tissue. We will keep you within us, they seem to say, We will still possess you, yes, but you will no longer belong. Grimly, stubbornly, they seal off the wound and attempt to grow over and around it.

Junaid had always thought this beautiful. Scars concealed within that were a marker of survival. A catalogue of hurts that one could thumb over and remember.

Some wounds were the result of natural events, others were deliberate. Incise the branches of two trees and place them one atop the other, so that they could merge into a far hardier, resistant version of themselves. New and improved. Jun imagined two heads bending over together, mulling over a mutual trauma. In a different, less gentle timeline, one of them, refusing to conspire, stepped away, turned around, and attempted to swallow the other. For even with human intervention, there was always the chance that one could overpower its partner. There would be none of the mutual harmony envisioned but, instead, a parasitical struggle, an outcome resulting in only devourer and devoured. 

And what with all the various hurts and wounds that trees seemed to harbour and bear with grave, still dignity, perhaps it was only natural that our ancestors would turn to them in their times of need. Whisper a secret to the oldest tree you can find, it is said. One too terrible and dangerous to keep within the shell of your body. One that is longing to burst at the seams. Find the oldest on a night when the moon is waning, cup your hand around it and whisper it long, whisper it low. The woods will always keep our secrets.

•••

“I require help. The lemon tree will not heal.”

Those were the first words that Jun heard Amani speak. It was a strange request to make. Jun was much more used to receiving calls that involved more elaborate plans. Mainly from the affluent seeking landscaping solutions or ideas for lush garden spaces, carefully constructed and tended to in ways that they could not sustain in their own lives. Calling down an arborist for just one tree was akin to calling down a whole extermination service for a wayward ant that had happened to wander in.

The lemon tree had been in the family for a long, long time. Passed down for generations. It contained a lot of sentimental worth. Most importantly, Amani and her husband were willing to pay. Even the transportation costs would be covered.

Jun had acceded, pulling up into a gravel driveway that led to a black and white bungalow. This was where she would meet Amani for the first time.

Black and white bungalows were rare, and it was rarer still for anyone to be occupying them. They mostly belonged to the state and this one, Jun noted with interest, had an elevated veranda that drew strongly from the anjung belonging to the kampung houses of old. In the past, when such designs were more common, these anjung were covered porches where house owners would entertain unfamiliar or uninvited guests. A liminal space where one hovered in-between the inside and the outside.

Everywhere, greenery spilled out, trailing over the balconies, crawling all up and down the latticework. It was so overly verdant and lush that it hurt to stare at for too long.

As she approached, a flicker of black peeled away from the side of the house, and Jun's eyes darted in shock from pillar to pillar to woman.

•••

Jun was struck by just how resolutely unaffected by the heat the other woman was. While Jun shamelessly wiped away at the trickling sweat with the white towel draped around her neck, and Amani’s husband, Sayf, executed the subtle dab-and-swipe technique, Amani refused to deal with the heat. There were no polite, furtive dabs to banish the sweat when no one was looking. No, she stood there robed in black from top to bottom, placid and still and gazing serenely down. It gave Jun the sudden, inexplicable urge to walk right up to where she stood on the anjung and press their cheeks together, a sure reprieve from the swelter.

“Sayang, can you go inside and grab some water for us.”

Water. Water was the logical choice. 

Instead of heading in, Amani continued gazing down at Jun from the anjung. Her lips parted. For a moment, it seemed as if she was trying to mouth something.

“Now, please,” Sayf said, clearly meaning, now shoo.

And as the woman in black tilted towards the house to carry out her husband’s bidding, Jun tried very, very hard to will away the phantom sensation of coolness on her cheek.

•••

The trouble with the lemon tree, and the reason why it refused to heal, turned out to be the way Sayf had attempted to deal with its wound. There was a huge suppurated gash running slantwise across its bark, and he had painstakingly, uselessly, packed it in with a tree wound dressing.

“But it’s only aloe gel,” he insisted. “All natural. Very safe. Even people can use for themselves. The shop said—”

Jun patiently explained again that trees did not work the same way humans did. Sealing over a wound was not the same as slapping on some plaster or ointment. It would only serve to seal in the moisture and cause decay, rotting it from the inside out as it prevented new bark growth around the edges of the wound.

“But the shop said—”

There was the sound of something very fine and expensive being broken. Sayf leapt back, cursing. Iced teh was now spilt all over his leather shoes, and the remnants of the teacup it had been served in crunched beneath his feet. Sayf retreated back into the house, grumbling, finally giving way to Jun’s solution for the lemon tree. When she crouched down to help pick up the delicate chinaware, she met Amani’s eyes. They had grown more placid still, and all that Jun remembered was that the cup had been nowhere near the edge of the balcony table.

•••

It was a scene that would have been a cause for concern, perhaps, if it had been a different kind of story. The lonely housewife. An absent husband. One young gardener. Nothing but long stretches of time in-between and a tropical hothouse of an estate trapping heat so that the spaces felt more intimate than they should be.

Instead, all she did was talk. 

“You know, my grandmother got use lemons to henna her hair last time,” Jun said out loud. The smooth, rounded syllables she adopted for her professional voice had flitted away, brave enough to do so in the presence of one who reminded her of home, and what settled down on her tongue instead was that contracted, staccato rhythm unique to the Singaporean accent. There was no sound or movement from the other woman, but Jun was always aware of Amani’s presence in the distance. A spectre on the porch. Jun felt her interest shifting palably, like a wave, narrowing in on her. “She will make this boiling paste and then add a dash of lemon to it. It will make the mixture stronger one, she say.”

There was no answer for such a long time that Jun simply assumed Amani had headed back in. She continued to scrape away at the ragged edges of where the lemon tree was gashed. All of the artificial sealant placed by Sayf had been removed and now she was levelling it out, making the area around the wound as tight as she could. The tree suffered from other careless wounds as well, and she stepped back to assess them.

She tried not to startle at the rustling of fabric behind her, a smooth voice suddenly asking what her grandmother’s name was.

“Rohani,” Jun said carefully, keeping her eyes ahead. Don’t look back. Don’t look back and she won’t disappear. Everyone in the old tales failed when they looked back. “She used Hani when she was younger. Said it was cuter.”

She continued running her hands across the bark. Woundwood  was what afflicted the tree, the sort that formed from bad pruning cuts. Pronounced and ridged thickly, spilling out from the sides of the wound. They mimicked the wounds Amani's husband inflicted on her with each dismissive gesture and gaze. Something Jun wasn’t supposed to know, because she wasn’t supposed to be looking too closely. The eyes always have desires. Lower your gaze, her mother had told her time and time again. Jun raised hers.

“Not good, ah, the cuts,” Amani murmured. There was a strange smile on her face, one made even more private and strange from the way the light around them suddenly dimmed from a passing cloud. “Suami saya yang buat. My husband made them,” she continued. “He was always terrible with his hands.”

Jun stepped forward before her will failed her.

“Actually, you only need three cuts.”

She had always been proud of her own hands; They were steady hands that had scraped and cut and pruned with barely any mistakes. This time, there was the slightest of tremors. And why not? Why not betray her emotions a little in ways that Amani couldn’t, just to show her that this was possible.

“The first should always be the shallowest of cuts. On the underside.”

Her fingers were on the very ends of Amani’s dark sleeves where they encircled her wrists, barely touching.

“The second should be on the outside of the first. All the way through.”

She traced the wrist she could feel beneath the cloth, thinner and more fragile than she had imagined.

“The last should be the true cut nearest to the collar.”

Her finger slipped in between sleeve and skin and Amani wasn’t cold at all, but neither was she warm flesh and blood.

Perhaps her trembling hands had infected Amani because her eyes, when they were fixed on Jun, were wide and sharp. Nearly shocked. It reminded her of the fallen teacup, of the unexpected shared domestic space that had enveloped them as they both carefully picked the shards out of the ground, a shaded glade of knowing that only existed for the two of them. Her finger twitched, placing a little more pressure on that skin that wasn’t quite skin. From afar, there was the sound of a voice calling. Sayf. Jun didn’t have to look to know Amani was starting to slip, eyes clouding over with the far-off quality she often wore around her husband.

“I need to leave,” Amani said.

 Jun thought that maybe, if she pressed down more, just a little harder, just a little rougher, it would anchor her here. Stay. Please stay, she wanted to say but, already, Amani was pulling away, drifting back to the house.

“Sayf wants the pH level of the soil around the lemon tree checked,” Amani said, with her gaze averted. “You should go do that.”

•••

That night, in the AC-blasted confines of her condo, the words Suami saya yang buat resounded again and again in Jun’s mind. Her fingers, where they had touched Amani, twitched imperceptibly. In her dreams, Jun was shovelling away at the dirt around the lemon tree. Checking it just as she had been asked to. She required samples for testing and she needed the fresh, clean earth beneath.

What she unearthed instead of the usual surface debris, plant residue, and compost was hair. There were handfuls of it, enough that they could be strung around her hands, and she continued reeling it in. From the house porch, Amani gazed down at her, except she wasn’t, because there was no one there when she looked up to check. The bungalow was all black instead of its usual black and white facade and hopefully, longingly, she thought that perhaps Amani simply blended in. 

You’re always disappearing. Stay a while, why don’t you?

It was what she could have said, should have said, but the words were lodged in her mouth.

Her hand jerked to a stop. There was something at the end of what she was pulling that stopped her progress. She needed more strength than she currently had for it to come free from the earth.

You should go check. Amani was behind her now. I require help. A rustle of fabric and a sudden wash of cold behind her ear. Amani was trying to mouth something. I need to leave.

There were hands around her own, a bruising unrelenting grip that helped her heave the obstruction in the earth all the way out.

•••

There was something wrong with the earth around the lemon tree. Something impossible about the soil surrounding it that troubled Jun the more she thought about it. The acidity level was simply too high. And while plants, especially citrus trees, generally thrived on earth that tended towards acidity on the pH scale, it was only the area around the lemon tree that gave such a reading. She had stuck her soil meter around other parts of the yard and none of them yielded anything close. It was as if there was something bleeding away beneath the ground of the lemon tree.

“Have you ever limed the soil?” she asked Sayf, remembering the sealant he had placed across the wound. It was a common mistake. Beginner gardeners overliming in an attempt to coax more productivity out of the earth.

“No. What’s that?” Sayf frowned. 

“You… wanted me to check the soil quality, right?” 

His frown deepened. “No. For what? Why, is there something wrong?”

Yes.

“No. There’s nothing wrong. Just checking.”

The moment Sayf left for his work, Jun flew towards the base of the lemon tree. Her bare hands scrabbled away at the earth, pulling up fistfuls of grass and dirt, digging in deeper and deeper. Images reeled through her mind. A barren desert. Miles of hard-packed, dry earth with nothing growing in it at all. 

Sweat slid between her shoulder-blades and sliced down her temples as she continued to dig.

There was something growing. Amidst miles of cracked, hard-packed dry earth, a brilliant green spot shone. Beneath, the fallen corpse of an animal. Under the lush grass, bright flowers had bloomed between the bones in defiance.

Her fingers hit something hard and smooth. Deep in the ground, something white glinted up at her. When Jun looked up, Amani was there.

She was smiling wide, wider than anything Jun had ever seen, a white, bright gash right across her face. Her teeth were sharp and brilliant, and Jun thought again of the broken shards. I require help, she had said. I need to leave.

Slowly, methodically, Jun began putting the earth back where it belonged, smoothing down any inconsistencies in the surface. There were no marks left when she was done. The earth bore no evidence at all of her panicked fingers.

Bringing herself to her feet, Jun turned towards the lemon tree. She cupped her hands around the bark, laying them right across the healing wound. From behind, she felt arms come up around her, two more hands appearing from the sides to lay upon her own. 

Bowing down to place her mouth against the cave made by their joined hands, Jun began whispering it long and whispering it low.