The Last Days of the Lotus Eaters

Leigh Harlen

Art: P Emerson Williams

The earth, and the creatures in it ate her flesh, but the tree kept her bones, its roots wrapped around and entwined every remaining bit of her. Wind stirred the branches of the tree and it tickled as if it were her own leaves being caressed and tossed about. Birds perched on the branches and she felt their hopping feet and heard the chirps of their offspring. She remembered what it was to have a beating heart, breath in her lungs, and feel the wind toss her hair about, so that it tickled her face. She was awake, but not alive.

Lita wasn’t forgotten immediately. After she was buried, when she was only half awake, the roots not yet able to reach her bones, she heard her parents weep above her. Every day they came to wail and lament and she hated them. Hated them for not believing her. When her flesh was consumed and the roots fused to her bones huge blossoms appeared on the tree that for years had produced fewer and more pitiful flowers as it died little by little. Now they were rich and fragrant, dense and beautiful in a way she had heard the old folks talk about when they were melancholy and nostalgic and flushed with too much wine.

Her parents gasped, taking the blossoming to be a sign, a comfort. She felt the tug as they each plucked one, the grinding of their teeth as they chewed, reveling in its sweetness. The flowers slid down their throats, into their acid filled bellies and then plucked out their memories, their fear, and their grief. It all passed into her, tasting like bitter dust. Her mother’s agony as she was birthed, and her father’s joy mixed with terror as he held her tiny body in his arms for the first time, thinking how fragile she was and how much his life was about to change. She saw herself running through the woods and understood the fear they had shoved down brought on by her careless certainty that no matter where she ran or how high she jumped she would never be hurt. And she felt the doubt that had crept in when she told them over and over that the sky shouldn’t be so black, so empty, and there should be life beyond the walls of their little village. Their minds were emptied of all that made them doubtful and unhappy while she felt swollen and sick.

At night, the wind stirred the blossoms and carried pollen through the air and into the lungs of the sleeping villagers, dulling the fears that had been growing as the tree died. When people heard that it was producing flowers again, they came to eat them and one by one their fears and doubts were erased completely and buried in her.

Only the priests took vows not to eat the flowers, though they were also soothed by its pollen, their faith fortified and guilt dulled if not erased. They read secret texts that told them what to do to keep the tree from dying and they needed to remember. All except one, one priest was given leave to break his vows and eat the blossoms. The one who had killed her.

He walked up to the tree and picked a flower. With his other hand he took out a flask and raised it to the tree. “I truly am sorry, Lita, you were a remarkable young woman. But you were wrong.” He took a sip of wine and ate the flower and gave her his memories.

The night he heard that there was a little girl who talked about stars and the end of the universe, he was relieved and terrified. The tree was dying and they needed to revive it, but he had hoped that necessity would come when he had passed his position on to a younger priest. He stayed awake all night, reading the holy book to fortify his nerves and staring into the flickering light of a candle knowing it would still be years before the ritual could be performed, the text and his conscience demanded certainty.

In the bright morning she was running through the grass, running so fast she felt like maybe she could outrun the end of the world. She stopped when he stood in front of her.

“Lita, could I walk with you for a little while?” he said.

She had been taught to trust and respect the priests and though she wanted to keep running, she nodded.

“I heard you telling stories at the market yesterday,” he said.

“They aren’t stories. The night sky is empty and it didn’t used to be. I read about stars in the library, there were so many of them and they were so beautiful that people wrote poetry about them and used them to navigate. There was a moon and there were huge oceans. Entire planets where people lived and travelled. Not just one little village with an empty sky,” she said.

He smiled. “Most people would say those are just stories, fairy tales. It’s unusual for a girl your age to believe such things.”

She glared at him. “They aren’t made up. Why would so many of the ancient writers all make-up something like that?” She wouldn’t be reasoned with, not about this. She had told her parents, her grandparents, her friends and their parents since she was old enough to look at the sky and wonder why there was nothing but the sun in all that big black emptiness. No one believed her, she had hoped the priest would be different, that he would know some arcane secrets and share them with her.

Having consumed those secrets, she understood he was different, he did know. He had wanted her to say, “Yes, you’re right. They’re just stories.” He wanted her to take it all back because he liked her, he liked that she was smart and not afraid to argue with him. He didn’t want to have to kill her, but there was also a coldness in him, a small shard at the center that made him certain that he could, that gave him a feeling of righteousness. He was doing what was best for everyone. What was one little girl’s life in the face of chaos and despair for an entire people?

He left her alone with her confusion but he didn’t leave her completely. She often saw him out of the corner of her eye, listening to her conversations just a little too intently, watching her when the villagers gathered to dine together with a dark and contemplative expression.

A couple of years after that first strange conversation, he stopped her while she was walking home from school.

“Would it be alright if I walked with you?” he said.

“Of course.” Even if he was a bit strange, her parents would send her to bed without dinner if she was rude to a priest.

“Tell me, do you still think the sky is too empty?” he said.

“I know it is.”

“What if you’re right? What would be the purpose of knowing?”

Lita hadn’t thought about that. She’d spent her life so angry and frustrated that no one believed her that she hadn’t thought much about why she wanted so badly for them to know beyond simple vindication.

“The sun is a star. Whatever happened to the stars could happen to our sun too and we’d all die.”

“And what would you do about it?”

“I-I don’t know. I just think people should know.”

“Would it make them happier to know if there’s nothing to be done about it? What would be the point of being good, of having children, working for a future that might be snuffed out with the sun at any moment?” he said.

She frowned. “Why would knowing the truth mean people don’t do those things?”

“Does that belief make you happier? Because it seems to me you don’t have any interest in those things. You don’t have many friends and you’ve never expressed interest in having a boyfriend or a girlfriend like other girls your age. Your teachers say you’ve never talked about wanting to be a farmer, a builder, a healer, a baker, or any other role in the village when you finish your studies. Do you see yourself having a future?”

She wasn’t unhappy, but it was true that she took little interest in planning for the future and her insistence that the world had ended and they were the last to know drove people away and gave her a reputation for being strange.

“I don’t object to doing those things, they just don’t seem very important,” she said.

“I think you are quite remarkable in that. Most people who believed that would lose all hope, they would do nothing but wallow in their despair and possibly act out in rage and be violent to others or themselves. But even if everyone took the knowledge as well as you but the sun was still there and shining bright for fifty years, a hundred years, we would still need to plan for a future. We would still need food and people to heal us when we’re sick or hurt. We would still be better for having lived full lives.”

“Are you trying to tell me that I should stop telling the truth?”

“I am asking you to consider that maybe other people should not know it.”

“But they’re believing a lie, it’s not right. I don’t know how to explain why it’s not right, but it’s not.”

The priest sighed. She understood now that he was seeking some kind of acceptance or consent from her to do what he knew must be done to sooth his own conscience. But at the time she had been confused, he was talking to her as if he might believe her but it gave her no peace because he was raising questions she didn’t have answers to and making her feel foolish. It was evident to her that it was true and people should know it for the very simple reason that it was wrong not to know the truth.

The priest came to her one more time shortly before she was to finish her schooling. She was sitting in the grass reading from a dusty book she had found in the library, a book about cosmology and theories about the creation of the universe. It had been filed as science fiction and forgotten by everyone but her.

“I hear you’ve decided to become a teacher, Lita,” he said.

She nodded. Although the priest made her uncomfortable, she was also happy to see him. In her sixteen years, he was the only person who had ever engaged with her about her belief that the universe was ending, even though she left each conversation feeling confused and chastised, it was a relief to be taken seriously and she felt more prepared to argue with him each time.

“Would you care to walk with me a bit?” he said.

She closed her book and slipped it into her bag. “Okay.”

“What led you to want to teach?”

“There are so many things we’ve forgotten. Technology that could make our lives easier and maybe even save us if someone with a brain that works just the right way learns about it.”

“You still think the world is ending?”

“I know the universe is ending. Everything is being pulled further and further apart and soon it’s going to start getting too cold to grow things, then it will get too cold to live on the surface and we’ll need to go underground, and eventually it will be too cold to live anywhere. We need to prepare.”

“That doesn’t sound like something anyone could prepare for. If annihilation is inevitable, why not let people live happily until the end?” he said.

“Maybe it is inevitable. But we would last longer and we might have a chance to avoid it for a long time if only people knew. And I think that’s worth the fear and even the despair.”

They came to the dying tree and he stopped and looked at her. “You are very certain of yourself.”

She was proud, for the first time she felt she came out of a conversation with the priest as the victor. “I am.”

He pulled a small flask from his jacket. “I still disagree. I think you are young and idealistic and want to believe that people think and act like you, that they would accept inevitable doom with grace and resilience. But I do admire you.”

“Thank you,” she said.

He raised the flask. “To the moral certainty of youth and to the intellect and tenacity you have grown into so well.” He took a drink – although she now knew that he let it graze his lips and slosh back inside.

He passed the flask to her. “Just a sip, I can’t have it said a holy man is getting young women drunk.”

She hesitated, but she was flattered and her parents only let her have wine on holy days. She took a sip. It tasted like vinegar and ash and in just seconds she was unconscious.

The priest believed that the drug would prevent her from waking up and feeling any part of the ritual, but he was wrong. The tree did not share the priest’s minimal compassion and the ritual was not one that it allowed its sacrifice to sleep through. She also knew from being forced to carry his memories that even if he had known, he would have buried her still alive at the base of the tree anyway, such was his faith and conviction.

When she woke, she choked on the dirt and screamed as the roots bore into her like hungry fingers, ripping into her soft skin, ravenous for the life bleeding out of her body and the taste of the knowledge that had marked her for death. It had been a long time since it had been given a new life to nourish it.

As the blossom pulled out and transferred the priest’s memories of her and of how he had liked her and how he had vomited when he heard her muffled screams coming up through the ground, she wanted to tell him that she still knew he was wrong and that she still intended to be a teacher in her own way.

He walked away, his mouth still sweet from the blossom he had consumed and his mind emptied of terrible memories and doubts about the righteousness of his actions. He returned to the priesthood a blank slate, prepared to watch for the next girl who wanted to know why the sky was so dark.

Years passed and her parents and all the people she had known when she was alive died, their names soon as forgotten as her own to the handful who struggled to survive on the increasingly hostile surface. The sun still shone in the sky, but it looked smaller, the plants began dying, and the people above whispered through frostbitten fingers, “Winter is almost over, summer is on its way.” But she knew winter would never end and soon the people above forgot that there had been such a thing as summer.

The tree alone stayed green and every night it spread pollen on the wind so that they could believe winter was all there was and they shouldn’t look too hard at the sky. As her bones crumbled, the blossoms began to shrink and there were less and less of them each year so the people saved eating them only for holy days and slowly their doubts began to grow.

A young girl came and sat at the base of the tree.

“I don’t have any friends. They all think I’m strange. Yesterday a group of big kids tried to throw me in the river because I told them winter didn’t used to last forever. It used to get warm and green. I read it in a book. A little kid was swinging on a rope and they jumped into a lake and didn’t get sick and have to be warmed up afterwards. They picked flowers, not like from you where we eat them, but just because there were so many and they were pretty. I wish you weren’t just a tree so you could talk to me.” The girl stood and ran away.

Soon after, the girl’s teacher came to eat the blossoms and she swallowed his doubts and the fear he felt when a priest came and asked about her, wanting to know what she wrote about in her school essays and if she had any plans for the future.

The possibility of a future was almost gone. Soon it would be too cold for anyone to survive on the surface and they would need to go underground and start learning the tools to extend their survival as long as possible. And just like she had known, that little girl would be certain that people deserved to know and that immunity to the lie marked her for death because there were no words to convince a zealous and righteous priest that she was right. She couldn’t save her own life and she couldn’t return the possibility that knowledge gave to the rest of the village, only the tree could do that.

She didn’t have much time if any knowledge returned to the village was to be of any help, but she would have to wait until the girl was a little older, old enough to read and understand more than just children’s stories.

The new priest came to the girl again. The tree was dying fast and he didn’t wait as long between conversations as the old priest had for Lita.

The girl came to sit at the base of the tree as had become her custom.

“I wish I knew how to explain to the priest that it’s important for people to know the truth, I felt stupid. It’s just so obvious, it doesn’t make sense why I’m the only who sees it. You’re starting to die, but you’re still green and nothing else is, it’s not normal, I don’t care how ‘spiritually important’ a tree is, it can’t survive the cold so well,” the girl said.

Lita felt hope for the first time since she died. She reached out, one of the branches flicked and the backpack she had been carrying the day the priest had buried her slipped from the hole where it had fallen unnoticed.

The girl picked it up and opened it. One by one took the books out and flipped through the pages.

“Did you do that?” She looked amazed and suspicious but she sat at the base of the tree and read for hours. When night descended she put the books back in the bag and ran home.

Even though they did not affect her, the girl stopped eating the blossoms on holy days so Lita had no idea what the girl might have figured out from the books or about who they had belonged to.

One night, under cover of darkness, the girl came out to the tree with a ladder and one by one, plucked off each blossom and burned them in a pile.

There was terror and outrage in the village the next day when they discovered all of the flowers were gone, although no one knew who had done it. It was an ingenious idea, and Lita was delighted by the girl’s cleverness, but the blossoms grew back. During the weeks it took however, questions and doubts flourished in the little village.

The girl’s parents came to the tree and prayed. They ate two of the small blossoms even though they knew it was forbidden outside holy days to preserve the few remaining. They were deeply troubled by their daughter’s insistence that the tree was somehow blinding everyone to the fact that the world was ending, that the sky shouldn’t be empty, and the sun used to be nearer. And they were growing distrustful of the priest who came and asked them about her, if she told them her theories and if they thought she believed what she said or if she was just a girl telling stories.

That night, the girl came one more time. She opened a bottle of alcohol and poured it on the tree and set it ablaze.

In the ground, Lita screamed silently, not since the tree had ripped her apart had she felt pain like that. She thrashed and the tree above shook and groaned. People ran from the village and threw buckets of water on it.

It smoldered for days, but the fire did not kill the tree, not completely, she wasn’t sure if the tree could be killed. But it was badly hurt and would not be able to grow blossoms for a long time. Desperate for nourishment to heal itself, it gripped her fragile bones in its roots as if it were wringing the last drops of water out of a sponge. It squeezed until her bones turned to dust and the memories and knowledge she had swallowed for so many years soaked the earth. With no other soul to carry that burden, the hungry roots drank in all of the secrets she had kept for so long.

After several months, the tree began to regrow and a few pitiful, tiny flowers bloomed, still fueled by the last bits of Lita’s life it had stored in its roots. That night, when the wind blew it carried pollen laced with generations of knowledge and memories, dusting the sleeping survivors with doubt and questions.

The next morning, the girl awoke to a village gripped with chaos and panic. She looked at the tree, blackened and skeletal, looming on the hill over the village and whispered a thank you.

Leigh Harlen’s work has been published in magazines and anthologies including Aurealis, Bards and Sages Quarterly, and Dark Moon Digest. They live in Seattle with their partner and a mischief of rats. When not writing, they’re usually found petting strangers’ dogs or enthusing about bats.Follow them on Twitter @leighharlen.