章 6: At The Bottom of a Tree Trunk
With the fury of a rebel, Yeung-Sung slammed his door behind him and strode directly into the bathroom.
He didn't feel like he had any control of the situation he was in. He stepped into the shower with his worry blooming and burned his cheeks under the hot water. A shower, he thought, would flush the idiocy of the words he had heard of his memory. Am I in a cult?
Even if they left him, the watery words still spread their influence upon wet patches, footprints and puddles lying slick across the bathroom floor while Yeung-Sung clamoured around the shelfing. He did his best to ignore them, not to look down. He refused, redacted, and did not believe what he was told.
"A clicker game?"
He shredded his hair with coarse threads from a towel he found inside. Droplets fell as he dried his body, and echoed Simon's explanation; "-For your own good."
Outside of the bathroom, the rest of the apartment was dark and foreign to him. A beacon of red light from outside permeated the room, phasing in and out with the rotation of a streetlamp.
Stomping and rattling through the hazy room, Yeung-Sung aggressively stumbled his way across the apartment until he found a resting place. His new bed. Pastel lavender sheets met his open pores and ate him whole. They smelled clean, too. Vile.
He was disgusted and suspicious, yet he was also tired. And confused.
So he dreamt.
In his dream he was a banana tree; seedless but ripe.
His trunk was not stiff but swayed and churned like an upset stomach. He sought balance, but it was as if the soil underneath him was a ball pit. So his head was full of nothing but this queasiness, and the demand of his plant-brain to give birth.
There existed no location at this time. Nothing but a nameless twilight, a one-man orchard where Yeung-Sung stood as steady as he could, producing his fruit.
Over time he became proud of his bananas. They were plump and pulpy, so he enjoyed twirling his branches around like fingers and displaying his best, most ripe fingernails to be picked, wanting to impress and to be useful. And they were picked. Picked clean each time, leaving him bare and loose and light, until he would doze off and re-awaken again in the same barky body. But he always remembered this was not who he was. Yet what could he do?
However long he remained, he would fulfil his purpose. Floods of hungry people came but there was never enough. There would always be one, at least one left to die beneath his feet, starving at the bottom of the tree trunk.
This cycle of growth and hungry ravaging continued, until one night as he slept the sky turned violet, and men clad in blue and red arrived and offered him a chance. But of course he was a tree and did not understand the words of men. And of course it was no choice but the declaration of a transplant.
Yeung-Sung was lopped off, separated, and planted all over in order to make a giant grove. The men fed and watered him with viscous fluids and spoke to him as he grew, with words so dark that they left shadows in the night. Re-growing again, feeling young, he saw that he now could enough to feed the hungry.
But he did not feel the same. The natural sickness of childbirth had gone; his bananas were now blue and red, and ripened to match the purple sky. The ones that feasted on him now let loose and began to fly. They were hungry humans no longer, but part of this unnatural sky. It was odd, it was weird, and Yeung-Sung, the ancient tree, did not know why.
Then he woke up. With petrichor tears streaming from his eyes.
He dabbed off sweet drool from his mouth and struggled to find a light. His sight was weary, like he hadn't used it for far too long, and suddenly, he missed his chlorophyll senses. His feet made creaks and groans but at last he found the switch. He could see but what he saw, everywhere, scared him.
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