The Harvest
Kathleen McCluskey

The Pillar was our world.

Its white bark fed us. Its roots gave us water. Its branches held our villages high above the dark earth below. The elders taught us that beyond the crown was only The Empty Blue, where no living thing could survive.

When the Pillar began to die, I was chosen to climb.

The trunk stretched farther than any man had ever dared. My hands bled. The air grew thin. At last I reached its highest branches.

The elders had lied. There was no endless forest of Pillars. There was only ours in a vast field  beneath an impossibly blue sky.

The ground shook and a shadow blotted out the sun. Something enormous began descending from the sky.

Five gigantic shapes cascaded down from the blue, their pale flesh creased and lined like living canyons. Dark pores gaped like caves. Fine hair, thick as tree trunks bent in the wind of their approach. They wrapped around the crown. The branches groaned beneath their grip. Our homes splintered. People clung to the bark, screaming as our world was torn free.

I was lifted higher and for one impossible moment, I looked beyond.

A polished wooden table, a crystal bowl. Countless other Pillars with shriveled, purple worlds.

The sky began to split apart, but it wasn’t a sky. It was a mouth.

The first bite shattered half of the villagers. Mountains of teeth crushed wood, stone and flesh all together. Our mauve worlds popped and oozed. The air filled with a thousand screams before they were swallowed into the darkness.

As the jaws closed around what was left of my world, I finally understood why the Pillar had given us everything we needed.

We had never been its children, we had been its fruit.

The Last Tree
Richard Meldrum

In the wind torn desert it was a fixed point, like the stars and rocks the tribe used to find their way across the featureless landscape. It stood thirty feet high, with arms spreading out from the main trunk. The tribe never considered its origin or that it had once been a living organism.  In this blasted world, bereft of vegetation and animals larger than a mouse, it was unique.

The tribespeople had no sense this world had ever looked any different. That food was once abundant and water fell in unending cascades from the sky. That buildings once stood hundreds of feet high and machines flew in the blue sky. There were legends of the old ones, but no-one took them seriously.

The outsider arrived uninvited. He claimed to have found the secrets of the ancient ones and wanted to spread this truth to the desert tribes. He spoke of untold wealth and knowledge in a faraway place, where he had seen the remnants of the ancient world with his own eyes. He spoke of something he called forests, where living objects called trees extended green arms towards the sun. He told them the object they used for navigation was a tree, long dead.

Fearing heresy, the tribespeople honored their own gods by tying him to the object he called a tree and burning him. Afterwards, they gathered round the corpse. No one believed the object he was tied to had ever been alive.

Broken Bough
Elaine Pascale

The climb was always the best part.

Roy felt guilty that his job entailed installing environmentally detrimental teleports. He knew that humanity should have learned its lesson when they forcibly evacuated Earth, but they were simply repeating the same old patterns.

He could quit but he needed the job. When he wasn’t causing climate catastrophes, he enjoyed the scenery. And the wildlife was starkly different than that of Earth. For instance, the avian creature that was observing him as he ascended the smoothly barked tree. The creature appeared to be on a nest and Roy hoped it was not guarding eggs as that would make the installation more of a battle than a job.

“Hey bird,” he called cheerfully, knowing that “bird” was not the correct label, but not having a better term to use.  

“Hey Earthling,” the creature responded, shocking Roy enough that he lost his grip and slipped down a few feet before righting himself.

Roy realized that the bird, as he now thought of it, was communicating telepathically. It showed him images of the history of its planet; it showed him of the destruction to come in a very short timespan due to the activities of Roy’s species. The devastation was heart wrenching.

“Now you understand. And now I hope you will forgive me.” The creature left its nest and swooped on massive wings toward Roy. It attached its scissor-like beak to the ropes that held Roy aloft and sliced through them as if they were made of paper instead of thick cables.

As Roy fell, he realized there was no need for forgiveness, and he enjoyed the last few seconds of scenery.

Earthbound
Lee Andrew Forman

When the tower grew to its full height each lobe unfurled itself into reaching extremities, a network of points that would work in unison. Its design was born of life, of hope, of the vast loneliness endured by great thinkers. Their theories would finally be put to work; their ideas would soon find truth…or nothing. No one could predict what answers, if any, it might discover. Only that it would perform its function with the precision it was meant to achieve. It would seek the above, the endless abyss that until that day had been unreachable by all who tried before. The sky would either open, or come crashing down on them with disastrous despair.

When the device had fully formed, it stood ready to serve its designers. A new life, created to search elsewhere for that very thing. It listened to the points of light in the dark to see if they would speak, or whether their bodies were cold and silent. It employed the many senses it had been given to look for another voice in the cosmos, another world where consciousness existed.

As far as it could see, near into eternity, it found only one. A small world busy with noise of all kinds.

The travelers had already been prepared, and their vessels ready to launch. They would soon meet their only neighbors in the boundless darkness, whoever they may be.

The Tree of Life
Charles Gramlich

My eyes opened. I lay on my back looking up at a tree with strange, fractal limbs embedded in an achingly blue sky. The tree had no leaves, though it wasn’t cold so it didn’t seem to be winter. I didn’t remember what time of year it was. I didn’t know how I’d gotten here. I tried to sit up and failed. My arms and legs wouldn’t move. I strained every muscle but couldn’t even turn my head. 

Scream! No sound came from my mouth, but I heard something—a slithering. Needle-sharp stabs pierced my back and legs. Roots gone rogue? My mind went nova; I struggled as I’d never struggled before. My eyes were the only things to respond, roiling wildly. Fluid began to burble, began to drain. From me!

My cheeks grew hollow; my belly shrank until it touched my spine. The trunk of the tree flushed pink; the pink spread upward. Muscles and organs inside me began to liquify. Like a tire with a slow leak, I deflated, while the tree unfurled healthy leaves and beautiful blooms. The leaves were a wet, fresh green but the blooms were red, red, red—the color of a man’s life being leached away.

Under the Fractal Tree
Miriam H. Harrison

Angering the gods was always dangerous. Cliffs and eagles, hills and boulders—their punishments were known to be equally cruel and creative.

He pondered this as he sat in his place, chained to the fractal tree. Each thought led to another, churning on and on with anxieties and uncertainties. His restless mind had brought him here; his ceaseless questions of the gods had forged his chains.

And so he sat here—as he did each day, as he would forever—watching the branches of the fractal tree grow out above him, reaching like unending questions, like racing thoughts, like a restless mind that knew no peace.

Big Stick Chapter One
Harrison Kim

A giant vegetable stick grows from my stomach and everywhere I go I yell “Stay back!” because I don’t want to hit a stranger with my protruding organic matter.

My local grocery clerk and amateur naturopath Jilly Van Loon says the plant is a delusional consequence of my diet.  “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” she says.  “You’re a truly green guy.”

That’s for sure, I’ve been eating only salads for years. 

Jilly insists I need protein “eat more beans” but look at me now, a healthy companion veggie stick always with me.  If it keeps growing, I won’t ever have to search for shade. The main trouble is the measurement. Just a foot last week, now it’s four and I keep it covered with a blanket and carry it about in a wheelbarrow.  At the health food store, I transfer it to a shopping cart, and use another one for the groceries.

The security guard approaches and I tell him why I need so many wheels.

“There’s no veggie stick there, man, nothing there at all,” says the big guy.

I understand his concern, but I’m not a crazy person. 

“You can’t see it because you don’t feel it,” I tell him.  “I know from my lived experience what is real.”
“Well, if it’s real and getting that big, don’t you think it’s almost time to harvest?” he says.

Good point.  This thing is becoming truly cumbersome.

Tonight I will stand in the shower, with a knife in my hand.  I’ll strike down, slice into my veggie stick, and feel the weight drop. 

But the more I think, to really cut it out, I’ll have to go into the roots. 

I’ll let you know the results in Chapter 2.

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