DC Restaino
DC Restaino is a writer and editor living in London. His work has appeared online and in print at Funicular Magazine, Horizon Magazine, SamFiftyFour, Mulberry Lit, and elsewhere. He is an emerging writing fellow with The London Library. When not writing, he is desperately trying to keep his one plant alive.
Easy read of the story in the images above:
Pruning Our Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring
I am the last in the grove who still speaks, so the white shroud only visits me now. It is the same one every time. Their shroud is bright and announces their arrival, but it’s different from the brightness that shines above the grove. That is warmth and light, life-giving. Theirs is stark as an absence, as winter.
They hook me up to a box, cold and beeping and silver and whining. Another kind of brightness I don’t enjoy. My words splinter as I ask what it is.
‘An EKG,’ they say and frown. ‘We use it every day. For your heart. Remember?’
I wonder if they mean the hard, dead thing at my centre that keeps me upright.
The frown deepens, and their face becomes craggy and rough. They clack on a plank of some sort with their long-stemmed limbs. They shift and arrange themselves so quickly. Such an inefficient use of energy. They’ve always been so inefficient, but I’m not sure how I know that. I think I hate them for it.
The grove is comprised of seven others beside me. There were more of us, once, I think. Young things just sprouting up. Some were harvested and taken away. Some withered and dried up. Some never even took root before we were relocated to the grove.
The white shroud circles back. They have more questions, always with the questions. They are patient, at least, as I answer, but I only seem to worry them. I can sense it, a signal that radiates from their trembling form and vibrates to my core. I don’t want to worry them, even if they frustrate me. When I mention this, they seem interested. They pry deeper and deeper, cutting through my bark. Questions that are prompting, demanding me to look back, and sometimes asking me about themselves. I think of wind and bend their attention to another place.
‘Where is the box?’
They look around, always so quick. ‘The EKG?’
‘Yes, that’s what you call it.’
‘You are already hooked up. Do you not feel it?’ They lift thin tubes that curl through the air. They lead back to me and are attached to the trunk of my body.
‘I didn’t notice.’
They take note of this. I don’t know why.
They gave us names. The first of us to stop speaking was Holly. None of the white shrouds noticed, though, until Ash stopped speaking as well. That’s when they all started to panic. The panic never made sense to us. The rest of the grove is still here. When the white shroud visits, I have a sudden desire to share my life with them—introduce them to Willow and to Alder and to Elm and to Oak and to Birch and…. Maybe, if I show them my days are populated they will relax.
A group of the white shrouds flock near the grove. They all squawk and caw in garbled tones. I don’t think they are aware that I can mostly still hear them.
‘We can try flushing the system –’
‘– many times, already. What is once more going to –’
‘– there’s no other possibility. Surely –’
‘– try explaining to them. It’s clearly psychological in nature. This never presented in any of the animals.’
A quiet descends. Their limbs, bare and obviously desperate for a refleshing, stretch upward. I know, somehow, they’ve come to some decision when the one that speaks to me nods. I’m surprised they are so muted now, as they are so incessantly noisy otherwise. Only my white shroud remains; the rest leave the grove.
My white shroud does not clack on the plank they always carry. They do not seem to hook me up to any boxes, either. At least, I don’t detect if they do. They are sitting in front of me. They must have been for a while because I can sense their desperation in the hitch of their limbs.
‘Are you with me?’
‘I am here.’
They shift, loose-limbed and unwinding. ‘Good. I need you to stay with me. Can you do that? I want to tell you a story.’
This is nice. They’re usually so stringent with their answers. They mostly ask questions. Always with the questions. I tell them I’d like a story, and they do something with their face that makes me feel warm.
But when they speak their voice is rotten, damp like after a storm. Their words are lost on me—ATP and implantation and chloroplasts. They explain that progress has been slow. ‘A gestation period longer than that of an elephant’s many times over,’ they joke with a laugh. And it is their laugh, crawling along my limbs, constricting like a vine, that pulls something out of me. Something against my own nature. Sensations that flit on airstreams like birds alighting on me to rest—the burn of moving as fast as my white shroud, chasing after the flicker of their body, the sear of their teeth as they sink into the joinery of my limbs, the soft give of our flesh, a vital planting, the harmonics of our voices. Then, just as quick, it turns into a hatchet job. I feel the memory of it rooted deep. A stiffening that cuts me off from myself. The kind that fractures and cleaves, fragmenting like old wood, stealing breath and want, twisting into fangs that rend deeper and deeper like a slow-killing frost, and when I remember this, I retreat back to my hard, fibrous centre where it is safer—I am comfortable here and will be forever.
‘Do you see?’ they ask, so clearly desperate for something I no longer am. ‘Can you hear me? Are you listening?’
‘Yes,’ I say to them. I shift to catch a breeze. ‘It’s a nice story.’
