Blood is thicker than water. The Earth knows that better than anyone else. The memories contained in a speck of DNA are stronger, more vivid, than what lies in the recollections contained in a droplet of water. They hold weight, they hold power—in their joy and in their pain.
Perhaps that’s why the Trees were drawn to them, cradling the red liquid spilled down into the Earth, intertwining with their seeds. The Trees gave them roots, a shelter, a home.
The Trees listened, acted, when no one else would.
The Trees were moved by their hope; the Earth offered it a shape.
The Two-Leggeds didn’t know what was happening at first. They saw the saplings, the fragile sticks stemming from amidst the destruction, the ruins that they wrought. They appeared from between cracks in stones, amidst bodies decomposing[1]. With the same callousness reserved for the lives they drained, the Two-Leggeds dismissed the skeleton black trunks as something to come back to later, another dead pest to be eradicated.
They underestimated the strength of angry souls when allied with the Earth. They underestimated the power of wills, of memories, of belonging.
They could not imagine what it can look like when Nature grants you a new becoming[2].
The Inhabitants felt the shift, the merging. They tended to the saplings with the same love with which they’d touched the Land for generations, coaxing the Trees into growth. They gave from what little they had even as they were being taken.
Overlooked and untouched, the ebony trunks had thickened, claiming space on the surface of the land, expanding their roots in every crevice below. Only then, bright as blood, did the leaves unfold: Scarlet scored through with green veins, blooming with clusters of white flowers. Bold and unerring, planted like Nature’s very own flag[3], unbending in the wind.
Because when someone gives the Earth something it was not ready to take, the Earth gives it back in a new shape, a new body.
The Two-Leggeds with the feet that didn’t fit the Land didn’t realize their mistake until no bomb could shake the Trees’ roots, no blade could break their trunks, no hands could tear their leaves, nor pluck their flowers. The Trees were here to stay.
They refused to give them the Land, even as they eradicated its inhabitants one by one.
They inhaled the smoke that shrouded the air, exhaling it again clear. The rubble did not hinder them—they grew taller, stronger, building for themselves an armor from what remained of the homes that had fallen. They made a new one for themselves, to hold their memories safe inside, to keep them alive past their lifetime.
With each new life the thieves stole, the Trees popped up with fervor; reclaiming the Land that was being looted.
See, the Two-Leggeds forgot that the Earth knows its inhabitants: The hands that tended it unselfishly, the hearts that loved it unconditionally, the souls that yearned to meld with its terrain[4]. It knows who belongs to which soil, even when the Two-Leggeds forget, traversing seas and sands to settle. The Plants remember the pitch of their voices, the weight of their footsteps, the sound of their pleas.
The Earth knows which Two-Leggeds don’t fit, and the ones it chose as Inhabitants. For years, it watched as destruction was delivered, homes were abolished, hearts were broken but never souls, until it could stand by no more. It reached out to cradle them when they fell, tethering them when they floated unmoored from their fragile bodies.
And when the liquid memories harbored in the spirals of their DNA weeped to the Earth, the Trees answered.
In the silence, they listened.
They absorbed the Inhabitants’ blood into their seeds, preferring it to water. They molded something new to rebalance the scales that had been set off kilter. They offered a new way of being. When the leaves sprouted red, they held their memories within each vein, flowering a bloom for every soul. The Two-Leggeds hacked uselessly at trunks that would not give, because the Trees made a promise, a vow strong as the iron in their roots.
The Trees carried them on[5].
Maha Jahangir
Maha is a reader, writer, and book influencer who loves collecting pretty books as much as she enjoys escaping into them. She spends most days procrastinating on life by daydreaming of worlds in her head and making up characters for people to fall in love with. She can also often be found overdressed in fancy gowns, wandering between the pages of a book with her cat, Princess, shadowing her footsteps. Maha graduated from OCAD University with a Bachelors degree of Fine Arts (Honours) in Creative Writing. She hopes to one day publish books of her own with characters who look and feel the way she does. You can find her on Instagram at @onetruedaydreamer.
Haraway, Donna J. “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.”
Staying with the Trouble, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2020, pp. 30–57. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373780-005.
Manning, Erin. “Sensing beyond Security: What a Body Can Do.” Politics of Touch,
NED-New edition, University of Minnesota Press, 2006, pp. 134–61. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctttsxrz.10.
[1] I came across a quote on Pinterest many years ago that spoke of how once people die and decompose, they essentially become food for trees. I found that bewildering, and for this fabulation, I wanted to play with the idea of the trees absorbing the people in their entirety—their blood, their memories, their souls—creating something new entirely, giving life to a merging, instead of just sustaining something existing.
[2] I specifically pulled from Haraway in my thinking for this world; in the idea of a new becoming. I was especially inspired by the concept that “living and dying is a multispecies affair of symbiosis”, that life and death are not something that each species experiences individually. I wanted to imagine what a merging of these events could look like across species.
[3] It’s perhaps most obvious here that the specific geography of my fabulation is a dystopian Palestine if a new race of trees was born—it’s a meeting of the blood of the Palestinians and the trees of their land. What would their resistance look like if it was carried on through nature, beyond their bodies, in a new form? Bodies are fragile, but their hope has an immortality to it.
[4] This particular area of thinking really came from the concept of how bodies exist with their environments, as part of it, not something within it; how we are always reaching to exist as Bodies Without Organs (Manning)—and how it would feel for the Earth to be on the receiving end of that reaching. What if the Earth reached back?
[5] In my fabulation, one of my main musings was really to take the idea of human intervention and turn it on its head. What if it's the plants, the earth, nature that chooses to intervene in the affair of humans? What if they decided to create what they thought was best for the environment as opposed to leaving that to the humans to decide? And what would that perspective look like? What would emerge?