Tyler brought the real estate agent by the next day. She was petite and sharply dressed and spread her A’s like a Chicagoan.
Cassie drifted behind the two of them as they toured the house, attempting to project an aura of fatal melancholy, while her brother and the agent kept saying the word “potential” to each other in self-satisfactory tones and taking pictures. Cassie didn’t follow them out onto the backyard deck—she lurked in the kitchen, glowering over a muffin—but she could hear the agent exclaiming outside. The size! The view! Access to the park just on the other side of the fence! Nothing more valuable than adjacency to land that would never be developed, nothing.
The agent gave Mom her business card with a many-zeroed number scratched on the back with a fountain pen that matched her suit. Mom accepted it with vague and noncommittal politeness, but Cassie saw her staring at it that night at the kitchen table, illuminated only by the dim yellow bulb over the stovetop, sipping tea and looking troubled.
Cassie went upstairs and emailed the lab director to put in for another week off. Of course, came the reply. Take all the time you need, my condolences, please have Section 2.6 of the proposal ready tomorrow by close of business. She read the email and, in a fit of pique and self-loathing, stayed up until three in the morning furiously cobbling together grant content and interspersing it with FUCK YOUR FUNDING every few sentences, which she immediately deleted. She saved without sending, so she could expunge any wayward FUCKs with fresh eyes in the morning, and went to bed without looking out of the window even once.
She dreamed about the boy in the bramble again—or remembered him, as she fell asleep, before dreaming.
It was winter. Cassie was bundled in an oversized wool poncho of Dad’s from his groovier days, but the boy merely wore a thin black sweater. Too cold to read or draw, Cassie sat in the bramble bower admiring her steaming breath, fingers tucked in her armpits.
“Would you like to hear a story?” the boy asked. Cassie nodded.
“Once upon a time, in the hollows of an old oak, there lived a cicada and a colony of ants. Every summer morning, the cicada arranged her wings of black and gold, climbed to the very highest leaf on the very highest branch, and sang her songs to the world. She sang all day long with hardly a break to nibble on a twig for sustenance. All the creatures of the tree heard the beauty of her songs.”
Cassie rubbed her nose and smiled at the notion of a cicada’s incessant shrill drone being considered “beautiful,” but didn’t interrupt.
“None of the creatures had asked her to sing, of course, but it was in her nature, and it made their busy days more pleasant to have fine music to dance to as they worked. The birds sang counterpoint, and the bees hummed along.
“The ants heard in her music a war song. They are belligerent at the best of times, but that summer, buoyed by the vibrancy of the music, they struck against their neighbors. They raided the termite’s nest. They stole acorns from the squirrels. No picnic basket within a mile was safe: sandwiches, chips, carrot sticks. Entire cans of root beer were carried away on their backs and stashed away in the vaults of the colony. If they were capable of singing, they would have chanted songs of triumph and success, but they were not; instead, they listened to the cicada’s song and reveled.
“Then autumn came. The sap of the old oak slowed, and the cicada became hungry. One day, too weak to sing, she crawled to the doors of the ant colony. She could hear them inside, shouting among themselves and feasting. She had to knock quite hard, with five of her six legs, to be heard. A worker ant opened the door and snapped, ‘What do you want?’
“‘Please,’ said the cicada weakly, ‘the sun is not shining and the sap has stopped flowing. I am cold and hungry. May I have some of your food?’
More ants came to the door to see what was going on. ‘Why don’t you have any food of your own?’ called one.
‘While you were busy raiding, I was busy singing,’ explained the cicada. ‘I know how much the creatures love when I sing. It makes the whole tree happy.’
‘While you were busy singing, we were busy raiding,’ retorted another ant. ‘This is our food. Go away.’
‘Please!’ cried the cicada. ‘I can see you have more than you need—why, there’s another raiding party, back with lovely lumps of sugar! How sweet it smells!’
The ants laughed at her. ‘Go sing some more,’ they jeered, ‘maybe you can sing the tree’s sap awake again! Try a little dance while you’re at it!’ And they slammed the door in her face.
The cicada crawled away in despair and died.”
Cassie turned to glare at the boy, objection on her lips, but he wasn’t done. “The ants forgot about the cicada in an instant,” he continued. “Their raiding party had returned with enough sugar to feast for a week! Overjoyed, they set upon the lumps and ate until their abdomens were full to bursting. None of them realized they were eating sweet borax, laid around the perimeter of a picnic by humans who had lost one too many sandwiches to the ants’ greed. The poison killed them all before the sun rose the next day.” The boy smiled beatifically. “The end.”
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Cassie’s mouth hung open in incredulous silence for a moment before scolding, “That’s a terrible story!”
The boy shrugged. “Sometimes stories are terrible.”
“That sounded like a fable. Aren’t fables supposed to have a moral?”
“They can, if you want.”
“What even was the moral of that story then?”
He shrugged again. “Don’t be the cicada. Don’t be the ants.”
“Who should I be, then?”
He looked surprised. “The oak, of course.”
⥈
Cassie woke late the next morning, hot and disoriented. She hadn’t closed the curtains last night; she was blanketed in sunshine as well as sheets. She stripped her sweaty pajamas off, grabbed the towel from where she’d draped it over the treadmill, and marched straight down the hall into the shower. Mom was already outside gardening, judging by the intermittent noise of hose water flowing through the pipes. She’d just have to wrestle the plumbing for her share of the water pressure. The walls gurgled.
“Oh good, you’re up.” Mom didn’t look up from her weeding. “I’m almost done with this bed—I thought today would be a good day to finally do something about the blackberry. Maybe after lunch.”
Cassie checked her phone; it was almost lunchtime. “Shoot.”
“Don’t worry about it, honey.” Mom pulled her gloves off and patted Cassie’s shoulder. “I’ll go resuscitate a casserole.”
Cassie put her gloves on and considered the blackberry bramble.
In 1875, somebody cut down a Great Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) in California and shipped a 16-foot-diameter slice, in pieces, back east for the Centennial Exposition. Nobody believed it was real. It was too big. If she tried to convince anyone not familiar with the blackberries of the Pacific Northwest of the size of this bush, she would have the same problem; they would accuse her of perpetuating a hoax. It was over eight feet tall and spanned the entire width of the backyard; the neighbors to either side had kept it pruned back, but only barely. It sprawled another six or eight feet into the yard and some unknown amount into the wild parkland beyond the fence, completely obscuring whether it grew from this side or that. Probably both.
A handful of bees buzzed around the last of the flowers, but the bush was well into the fruiting season already. Clusters of berries glowed in the summer sun, unripe magenta mixed with soft iridescent black. Cassie moved closer. She remembered eating them by the handful as a girl, not bothering to wash them, just blowing them free of sepals and cobwebs and eating them straight. There were summer pies, too, and jams and muffins and scones. Smoothies and pancakes, fruit leather and tarts. Even with the birds and rodents taking their tax, there were still more berries than the family could manage. Cassie would return to the house with her fingers stained pink and her tongue a velvety purple, then come back for more. And that was before it had grown to its current size.
She reached forward to touch a ripe blackberry. It fell into her hand. Cassie blew it off and put it in her mouth. She didn’t even have to chew; the blackberry melted on her tongue. Her mouth flooded with saliva as half-formed taste memories surged. She reached for another.
She saw the tunnel then, low to the ground but surprisingly large. The passageway worn into the thicket from her youth would have been long overgrown by this point; this one must be from some animal. She squatted down and peered into the verdant gloom. It smelled like dirt and fruit. To her shock, the lower corner of the gate was visible from here, and it was open. She hesitated just long enough to hike up her socks before crawling in.
It was more of a crouch-waddle, really, to keep her bare knees from getting sliced on rocks and cane. She moved slowly, head ducked low, letting the thorns glide harmlessly over her skin. The further in she went, the higher the ceiling became. The sounds of house and yard fell away, replaced by the rustle of creatures going about their business in the underbrush. By the time Cassie reached the gate, she was able to stand with a slight hunch. It was only open enough for her to squeeze by if she held her breath and eased herself through in parts: one leg first, one arm next, wedging the gate further open with her thigh so her hips and breasts could pass. She turned around once she had fully cleared the fence.
He was waiting for her.
Like an icon in a wild cathedral, he stood upright, alert, unmoving, cloaked in light and shadow and watching her without a sound. His face was serene, almost imperious. A circlet of thorns and leaves rested on his head; he held another in his hands.
Cassie sank to her knees, robbed of speech and balance. Fortunately, the ground here was soft, springy duff, free of sharp things. Just as she remembered it.
“You,” she mouthed, still unable to speak.
“Me,” he agreed.
Cassie found her voice. “You’re real.”
He smiled. “I am.”
“You were real the whole time.”
He knelt before her, silently sinking into the duff a hand’s breadth away, and laid the second circlet upon her head.
“Of course,” he said.
And then he kissed her.
If she hadn’t been lightheaded before, she would be now. The kiss was soft, almost chaste, nothing more than the barest brush of his lips against hers. It was she who opened her mouth, inviting him, fingers digging into the floor of the hollow and tongue darting out to taste him. The response was instantaneous; he took her face between his hands and overpowered her tongue with his own, making a soft and hungry noise deep in his throat.
“Cassie?”
Cassie broke the kiss, dizzy and appalled at her mother’s timing. She looked up into gleaming green eyes as they drew away.
“Coming, Mom!” Cassie yelled, slightly hysterical. Good god, she sounded like a guilty teenager. May as well have screamed Anon, good nurse!
“We have to trim,” Cassie whispered. She phrased it as a statement, but they both knew it was a question. She worked her fingers in the duff nervously, awaiting his answer. His permission.
After a moment, he smiled. “That sounds very nice.”
“Thank you.” She could barely hear her own voice. She stood and slipped back through the gate, feeling the weight of his regard give her an unexpected grace. Her lips felt heavy and tender, and the crown on her head felt lighter than air.