On a gloomy day, the widow buried her three sons beneath the first rows of the orchard she had planted.
She had begged the village head and elders for justice for her sons but no one listened. When she buried them, her voice rang through the village as she sang mournfully. No one could go close to her orchard.
Dahlia believed the trees had drunk her grief and gave back bitterness and poison that would bring a famine that no cellar could hold. She was a beekeeper and saw the signs but again, none of the elders would listen.
Then she saw the grey.
It began in late spring when the blossoms should have blushed white and pink. Dahlia walked the rows at dawn with her smoker in hand and stopped for a moment.
A thin grey haze swirled up from the base of every tree, like breath on a winter window. It clung to the bark of every tree and pooled in the hollows between the roots.
She called out to her foreman, Ansel, who stood about twenty paces away sipping his tea. He glanced at where she pointed, his eyes sliding right over it. Then he shrugged and told her the morning fog was late.
What?
“It isn't fog, you daft!” Dahlia snapped. “Fog doesn't smell like ashes and pain.” Ansel stared at her strangely, his mouth slightly parted.
She knew and her bees did too. They wouldn't leave the hives. They clustered inside, humming a low, frightened note she had never heard in all her thirty-five years.
The next morning, she stood among the trees and watched the grey thicken. For days, the villagers walked through it, whistling, others singing, laughing and breathing it in. She sewed herself a face mask.
What happened next was inevitable.
The leaves began to turn brown and curl into themselves. Then the fruits became small and hard with a dark bruise at the core.
The village head and elders gathered at the long table in the hall, and Dahlia stood before them, telling them what she had seen. They listened politely, the way people listened to a child describing a monster under the bed.
“It's just fog,” said the eldest. “Or perhaps a blight of the bark beetle. It is common.”
Dahlia sighed in frustration. “It is not a beetle, sir. It is something from beneath the ground.”
Nobody would meet her eyes. She understood then that they could see it perfectly well but were merely afraid of what it would cost to admit it. The orchard fed the village. A sick orchard meant an empty winter.
Ansel came the next morning with a wagon of iron syringes and a barrel of dark tonic which he bought from a travelling merchant. Twenty men from the village also stood in a line along the first row.
“Inject the poison,” Ansel said, nodding at her. He looked angry and sad at the same time. “Every tree, both root and trunk. We must kill whatever is eating them or else we won't survive the winter.”
Dahlia ran, waving her hands and pleading. She threw herself against the oldest apple tree, the one at the head of the widow's row where she buried her sons. The bark shuddered beneath her plans like it was living. The grey swirled around her ankles, cold as a grave.
But the men dragged her away from the trees and the needles went in. Everything went quiet. Ansel apologised saying the deed had to be done to save them all. She knew that was not the way.
By midsummer, every branch stood bare and black when the grey lifted from the ground all at once like a held breath finally released and vanished. Dahlia knew something else had left with it.
A month later, she sat alone among her silent, empty hives. The bees were gone. The village was thin and hollow, living on rationed grain and the charity of neighbouring villages that had started to turn them away.
The elders said the blight was unlucky and no one could have known. But Dahlias knew and had warned them morning after morning. She had watched a whole village choose not to see.
She was the only one who looked. And the only one who still heard the humming from beneath the ground.
I hope you enjoyed reading this short piece. It's inspired by the Freewrite #dailyprompt phrase "inject the poison”.
Thank you for visiting my blog.
Image by Văn Long Bùi from Pixabay
