THE FRUITS THAT FADED AWAY

Ariel steps out of her wooden ranch house into the warm day’s sun. A woven basket in her hand. The hills are beautiful; lush green grass covers the expanse of land with prominent trees scattered around the field. Every flower is an arresting shade, blossoming out of the ground to add a splash of colour wherever they sat.

Her home sits at the bottom of a hill, towered over by many trees. Yet, the most magnificent of those trees sits at the top of the hill. Its stem is weathered from age, its bark rough and shedding in certain areas. Yet it is domineering in its appearance, even when gazing at it from the bottom of the hill. Its branches spread wide in every direction, crisscrossing above and below one another, which gave it a maze-like appearance when she looked up at them. On those branches hangs enviable, robust, golden fruits. They dangle down from long, thin golden strings attached to the sturdy branches.

Once in a while, the fruits fall from their string, cut off from the tree, and in time they lose their colour. They become bland. A dull colour replacing their once vibrant outlook. Other times, fruits that were yet to fall still showed signs of decay even as they hung from the tree. Unlike the ones on the floor, their colours interchanged on occasion. From gold to grey and vice versa, or both colours showing at the same time.

Charged with unknown energy, Ariel begins to hike up the valley. It isn’t a daily routine; to go up the valley and collect fruits from the tree. There are days when the valley calls to her, and she will know it is time to collect the fallen fruits. Today is one of those days, so she walks, humming an unknown tune that seems stuck to her mind, but she has no idea where she could have heard it.

When she gets to the tree, she looks up, the side of her face lightening up from the glow of the low-hanging fruits above her head. Ariel admires the tree as it was like nothing she ever knew. Mystic and rugged but with a beauty that drew her in each time, she came to it.

Ariel walks around the tree, picking and dropping any rotten fruits she finds into her basket.

She picks up one fruit, smiling as she watches what is stored with them. It was a recollection of Sneakers, her great-uncle’s brilliant German shepherd.  She was a glorious specimen of a dog. Intelligent, docile, and friendly. Ariel had no doubt that Sneakers loved her great-uncle. No day went by that he left his home without her at his heels. Well, only when he had to go to church. Any other time, she walked by his side. Ariel laughs as she recalls seeing Sneakers mount the stairs for the first time with graceful ease.

It was the first time Ariel ever saw a dog do such a thing.

Whenever her uncle came to visit, Sneakers would sit at his feet without him uttering the order. She would just watch them converse, her pitch-black eyes sucking in the scene as her body moved with each breath she took. When she was bored, she would stand, walk out, and stroll around before returning to his feet when she was good and ready. When she was petted, she would sit and enjoy the attention. Her favourite of all touches, of course, were the ones centred at the back of her ears. Oh, those ears had their own personality; Ariel remembers fondly.

“Did you know…” Her great-uncle said to her as they sat in the living room. “Did you know that Sneakers was born the same year as you? You are the same age.”

Ariel laughed, petting the dog with affection as she looked back at him, awed by the information. Her eyes were beautiful, big and black, looking up at Ariel. She stroked her furry head and said to the dog, “we are going to grow old together then.”

Granted, she was a kid then, and she didn’t know that different dogs had different life spans. Sneakers died after age made her weak and less active. Ariel had noticed that Sneakers started climbing the stair slower, going to fewer places with her great-uncle. When the news of her death came, it was shattering. A year after that, Ariel’s great-uncle followed, and just like that, they were no longer in her life.

Ariel softly smiles as the colours begin to wash away. The cold pale grey eats over the fruit slowly. Ariel squeezes the fruit in her hand, and her heart breaks as every image is soon wiped clean. A single tear falls on the dead fruit. 

Then, she wipes her eyes and places the fruit in the basket with the others. She can’t remember what was on them, she just knows that their horrid colour didn’t belong anywhere near the tree. So, whenever she came to the top of the hill, she would collect them and take them to her home.

A few fruits were dead before she got to the tree, so whatever recollections lay in them, she could not recall. For those fruits, there was no mourning, no pain from the loss, just the misery of wondering what they held before. She packs them into the basket, collecting each one from the grass and cleaning up the tree’s surroundings.

There are a lot of memories today, some of them from when she lived with her aunt in Zambia. It was there she learned to knit and sew her own clothes, a skill she cherished for years. Her aunt had been a young woman whose main goal in life was to learn as many skills as she could, and Ariel aspired to be like her. By the time she was twenty-five, she knew how to play three different instruments, fix certain problems with cars and electronics, paint a house, and create candles.

“You never know when knowing a particular something would come in handy.” Her aunt used to say. “So, learn what you can.”

“I will.”

“Remember that not every skill is physical. There are some mental skills too, critical skills that you have to cultivate. Like listening, speaking, understanding problems and devising solutions. To me, these are all very necessary skills.”

Ariel pursed her lip. “So necessary that they made it a part of my courses.”

Ariel remembered a lot from her life in college, especially the subjects she hated and those the loved. Critical thinking was on a short list of subjects she had not fancied. She remembered what it was like to start college, even how it felt to begin her work as a teaching assistant to one of her professors. Both had been nerve-racking experiences because they required her to leave her home and move to a whole new environment. Still, she had grown from every experience it brought, and every one of those experiences shaped the person she became in one way or another.

With everything almost cleared, she walks around on one last survey and finds a partially decaying fruit stuck in the blades of grass between the thick root of the tree. She squats to pick it up, turning it in her hand as she keenly observes its contents.

Her friend, Sarah, smiled up at her through the glassy exterior of the fruit. They were in the living room of her family’s mansion. It was completed when Ariel was nineteen years old. Though her family wasn’t into naming, she called it Geraldine’s mansion. In honour of her grandmother, who had passed before the house was completed. Ariel had been static when Sarah decided to spend the summer vacation with her and her family.

They spent their time exploring the house, and Ariel had been a cherry tour guide when they had to leave the house and go into town. They strolled by the river, sadly almost dried due to the arid conditions of the land. They trekked through the forest, where Ariel spooked Sarah with folklore about strange creatures and forgotten souls that haunted the forest.

It had been beautiful. One of the hundreds, if not thousands, of memories they had made in their decades-long friendship. A friendship that ended when Sarah contracted the virus and passed away after two weeks of fighting for her life. Ariel could still hear the whirring of the machines and the beeping of the monitors. She could still see herself behind that glass as she watched her closest friend, her sister, her partner in crime, leaving her behind.

Ariel falls to her knees, the pain crippling and more tears threatening to fall and clouding her vision. Her breathing grows choppy as she raises the fruit to her face, her fingers delicately touching its surface. In these fruits, she didn’t only hold the memories of the living. She held the memories of the dead. Those who left her left her behind. Like her brother, her friends, uncles, and her aunts. At seventy-five she had lost so much, but she could always come back here, to the tree and live with those recollections once more.

The memories of dancing in the large hall with her family, of eating at the dinner table and sharing outlandish stories, climbing trees, and staying up all night to watch her favourite shows. More than a few of those memories held people who were no longer with her.

As they faded, she lost them. As she lost them, it felt like they were, for her, truly dying after all those years, but she couldn’t mourn. Just as one couldn’t kill what was already dead, she couldn’t mourn what she couldn’t remember.  And when all the memories faded, what would she be left with.

Who would she be?

This time, when the final colours begin to fade, Ariel sobs, a loud wail tearing out of her lungs as she clutches the dying fruit to her chest. Her body shakes with the force of her cries as she bends at the waist. Her forehead rests on her knee. She remains there, mourning her losses, tears finally leaking from her closed eyes. She does not notice when the fruit becomes hard and grey; like the others already in the basket.

Ariel lifts herself upright, pulling the fruit away from her body, staring at it with unfamiliarity. She turns to the side and places it neatly in the basket, wipes her tears with the back of her hand and stands from the floor.

Tiny blades of grass stick to her dress. She plucks them off, and they float down to the ground. With tenderness, she reaches above her head to softly caress the other fruits hanging low on the tree. There is grief when she notices that a few more have some dark spots even as they hang from the vine, but as long as they have not fallen, they are hers to cherish for as long as she can.

Resigned, she turns away and begins the walk down the hill towards her home. Inside, she has a shelf mounted on the wall above the kitchen counter. There, she stores every memory she collects from the tree. There are numerous fruits stacked in it; she never threw any of them out. Their dark colour contrasts the arrestingly white colour of the shelf. It was the only time they looked remotely beautiful in her eyes.

Sometimes there were flickers of colour on them, little instances when she could see the memories again, but they lasted short periods. Ariel carefully places the new fruits above the old steps away from the shelf. She sits on a rocking chair beside the table and leans back to rest her head on it. It rocks her as she watches the fruits fondly, willing one of them, any of them, to glow. To give a small hint of what it was that she had lost.

A soft smile kisses her lips once more, and she deflates, shoulders sagging from weariness as she closes her eyes.

She can’t help but wonder and feel pity for the others outside her little world. It is from the new fruits that form that she learns bits about the ones she lost. The people in her life that come to her with pictures. The ones that try to remind her with stories. Those that had to look after her, whose faces and memories were completely removed from her tree. She sees the sadness in their eyes when they try to get her to remember them. The pain in her daughter’s smile as she fears the day will come when Ariel forgets her too.

There is no assurance she can give, no promise she can make. She only goes up the hill to collect; no willpower can stop the rot.

One thing was for sure when the fruits fade away, everyone suffers. For while Ariel grieves for what she cannot remember, the others grieve because she lost what they still can. 

Photo by Allef Vinicius on Unsplash

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Hello, I am Louisa

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