Samsara in the Orchard
BY SOPHIE CROCKER
“why would i escape samsara thats where all my friends are.”
—Twitter user @rundizzy
Nobody in the village goes to the corpse pile in the old plum grove unless they want to get pregnant. On the first day of spring, I go.
On the surrounding hills, plum trees grow in healthy soil, bright grass. But here, the trees are grey bolts against a dark sky. Years of plums decompose underfoot. Through my borrowed respirator, everything smells sweet, wet, and rotten – the smell of corpse or the smell of plum. I’ve borrowed this hazardous materials suit from a neighbor. The gloves are too large, so I hike them up to dig through the bodies. Between famine and plague, there have been so many deaths in the town this season. At least, here, the icy weather has mostly preserved my townsfolk.
To look for mother here is to love her the same way she loved father and I. Mother showed me that you prove your love to be real, actual love when the object of affection is no longer useful to you. If you still show them devotion, that’s love. When father left mother for a calloused, no-nonsense woman from his factory, mother even helped him pack. When he returned a year later, brain deteriorating from a work accident, mother knit a blanket for him so that he could have his own makeshift bed on the sofa. Pretty soon, he could only walk for a few minutes a day. Soon after, he couldn’t form a coherent sentence. Yet somehow, he’s outlived mother. I stopped loving father when he left, but mother loved him better than I did.
I spent all 30 rubees my mother left me on the most selfish possible thing: my own canary. At work, I keep her, Limoncello, secret in my pocket, so that if the coal mine grows unsafe, I will know, no matter how far I am from the company canary. A month after mother’s death, I held Limoncello’s egg as she hatched, my tiny chick, a sunrise from between limestone hills. Even now, Limoncello flutters ten feet behind me. She despises the scent of corpses.
***
I was a funny baby. The neighbors would bring us firewood and dried fruit as an excuse to hear me laugh. I was a needy girlchild, inseparable from mother while we harvested peaches or worked the looms. The year we lived in the city, we scrubbed wealthy women’s clothing and chamber pots together, and I got so well-known for joking with the ladies that they would even gift me extra rubees. I’d say something like, “For that price, your shit really don’t stink.” I still think, though, that mother loved me best when I did nothing for her. Even before father left, mother and I shared a bed, and sometimes I would wake to her kneading her thumbs into my back like a lonely kitten. When she got sick, it was not with plague but with something deep and malignant in her lungs. One of the last things she told me, fist between my shoulder blades, was this: “I think I’m done, Lorica. Don’t bring me back this time.”
“But mama.” I turned to face her. She had a heart-shaped face, like mine, her upturned nose a little heartbreak. “I can’t just leave you. I love you.” I say it like I need you.
“You know I love you too. I can always do that.”
“Always will?”
“Always will.”
“Don’t go,” I said.
“You’re okay, baby Lorica. It’s just a little punchline.”
I shook my head, not understanding.
She kissed my nose, so I kissed hers back. She said, “Even the best stories have endings.”
***
Mother died in the autumn, back when I still thought I’d be able to quit the mines and not just dabble in jestering but truly make a job of it. After a bitter winter, no one who relates to my jests can afford to see them. “What is gruel, really? Is that just a word for any grey mush? Or do there have to be oats?” does not land with a crowd used to living off ortolan and honeyed pears.
Besides, I’ve found it difficult to squeeze humor out of this grim year. What is there to say that has not been said in maudlin poem or protest song? Our mountainous archipelago of inland villages has lived grimly for decades. I cannot afford the water that does not make me sterile, so if I want a baby, I must bring back an old soul; I cannot have a new one. There are not enough new ones to go around anymore. Of course, the new ones are expensive. How is this humorous? It is not humorous.
The bodies are still frigid from winter, though the slush has melted. The faces are mottled, wormy, plum-blue. I half-close my eyes, wanting to see as little of my dead townsfolk as possible. Still, I recognize bloated cheeks, even with the eyes plucked out. The crows here never go hungry. A fat murder of them flies overhead. Limoncello chitters.
It used to be much more common to come here, drag a beloved corpse via sled or wagon to the town alchemist, and get knocked up. But a baby is another mouth to feed, even a baby that used to be a best friend, a cousin, a lover, a father. Girls as young as ten would re-birth their own siblings until their bones went brittle. They’d walk bowlegged and hunched. They’d perish in childbirth.
When father had his accident, his brother came to visit and suggested that we put dad out of his misery, and then mother or I could birth him again. Start him over. I was nine, yet to even get my first blood. Mother loved him more than he deserved, but even she had limits. I refused to give birth to my father.
But now I find mother. She’s near the middle of the pile, her hair dark and knotted as plum branches and her face angular, prematurely lined, rat-eaten. Guilt forks through me. Yet again I justify my lateness to recover her body. I tried to do what she asked – to leave her – until I could not bear the missingness. Still, I feel like a traitor. When the famished, exhausted neighbors stopped bringing back their stillborn babies and their sweet grandfathers, I could not bear the rage it instilled in me. How could they leave their people? Yet, for mother, I almost did the same.
The sun appears out from behind cloud for a moment, and white sunlight pours around mother and I like a flock of doves.
***
The alchemist’s is the nicest place on lampless, narrow Zero Street, which says little. Most of our homes are redbrick shacks with shuttered windows. The alchemist has painted some of his bricks blue and yellow, and a stone gargoyle crouches on his stairs. We call him the alchemist not because he can turn iron into gold, but because he can transform one thing into another, pull new meaning from an object and inject it elsewhere. Really, we should call him a bad necromancer.
This time, the alchemist is six. Whenever he feels the end coming on, he gives all his savings to a working girl who can gestate and birth him again. I haven’t seen him since he was an old man. I stopped on the way here to strip off my hazardous materials suit. Instead, I’m in my jester’s best, the nicest clothes I own: a purple velvet shirt and green velvet pants, a choker with a bell on it, and a floppy orange cap with two points at the end, so I look like a massive-eared spaniel. I try not to look at mother’s body in the sled. The longer she is dead, the more dread I feel, the more danger, as if I lose her again every morning.
The six-year-old alchemist lets me in. The disgust I had for him as an old man remains now, even with his cherub curls and dimples. “Winter doesn’t suit you,” he says, still with an old man’s careful cadence. “You’re that clown girl. Lorica… something. Yes?”
I just nod. I don’t know how he remembers his past lives so well. Maybe because he is an alchemist. I only sometimes remember, and then only snippets.
“It’s spring now, actually,” I say. Limoncello lands on my shoulder and rests her beak against my neck. She is familiar enough with my jester bell that the ring no longer bothers her. Sometimes, I feel as if she is more a part of me than I am, as if that uncanny canary ability to sense disaster before it happens extends to knowing what I’m going to do before I do it. I say, “Where does the soul live, anyway? My uncle said it’s in the bones, like marrow.”
“It’s not in anything,” the alchemist dismisses.
“Then what do you do with the marrow?” I ask. “Stew?”
He laughs the way children laugh when they don’t understand the joke. The main – perhaps only – room of his brickhouse is cramped, dim, and oddly clean. Wrinkled radishes and copper pots hang from the ceiling, redolent of drying meat. Though quilted, the bed in the corner looks thoroughly uncozy. I drag my mother over the threshold on her sled, wincing at the humiliation of it all.
The alchemist unfurls a sheet of brown paper from a roll affixed to the wall and, clambering on so his little arms can reach, spreads it over the bed. My legs feel like hot wax. Limoncello flutters off, and I manage to make myself lie down. The alchemist puts another sheet of paper over me. “Take off your pants,” he says. As I do, he adds: “I always tell my clients the risks. This is – what? – your soul’s third time birthing this soul?” He consults a ratty notebook. “No, fourth. Doesn’t say here if she was originally your mother or your daughter. Or perhaps a friend? Not that it matters, but I like to know. It’s for research. Do you know?”
I shake my head. I feel like she’s always been my mother, though I know that I must have birthed her. I still get déjà vu-type memories: lifting her onto a donkey for the first time, scrubbing her spit-up from my chest, hanging baby boots over chairbacks to dry. But I also remember so much unearthing. So many times, I’ve carried my mother’s body.
The alchemist lists possible side effects – cosmic entanglement, calcium deficiency, lifetimes of suffering, postpartum depression, past-life flashbacks, swollen ankles. He marks my thigh with charcoal. This line represents where he’ll cut the marrow from me. His price. All of these costs will make my job at the mine near impossible, but I haven’t much thought past bringing mother back. I need her in my arms, my baby. Then he goes to my mother’s body, moves an iron wand over her. I look at the ceiling. Seen only through peripheral vision, my mother could just be sleeping on that sled.
Then the alchemist goes to the end of the bed. “This will be cold,” he says. “Legs a little wider, please.”
I do as he says. I manage not to laugh. Right before the alchemist presses the metal wand inside me, Limoncello cries out. It’s almost a song, but louder, half-drowned. The alchemist pauses. I shut my legs on the wand – yes, cold – and as soon as I do, Limoncello calms. She flies to me and sits protectively on the brown paper. I pat her teensy head. On my lap, her weight is barely noticeable. I nod to the alchemist, who nudges my knees apart with the wand and moves it towards my vulva. Immediately, Limoncello darts at his face, wailing. She flies over his shoulder and throws herself against the room’s tiny window over and over. I hug myself, sit up. The yellow bird looks at me and ruffles her wings. So small and hollow, her bones. I have so much to lose.
