{"id":5982,"date":"2024-05-16T09:52:39","date_gmt":"2024-05-16T08:52:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/writersrebel.com\/?p=5982"},"modified":"2024-05-16T09:59:28","modified_gmt":"2024-05-16T08:59:28","slug":"infertilities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/writersrebel.com\/infertilities\/","title":{"rendered":"Infertilities<\/span>Joseph Nicholson<\/span>"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

This story was shortlisted for the Writers Rebel Flash Fiction Competition.<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Daddy said, help me bury it<\/em>. So I stood, rain plicking off my hood, watching him steam with the spade in the hole. Come on then<\/em>, he said, and I cast in the dirt I\u2019d clawed up, already a wet clod in my palm. We had to cover the white things, hide them. When we\u2019d stamped the soil into flatness he told me, That\u2019s yours, that is<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It was already trembling, just a thin whip of tree. But it took, somehow. Grew taller and taller, year on year. If I lay in its shade I\u2019d sometimes feel a lick of cobweb in the air, or the fluster of a bird\u2019s wings in the distant aboveness. Bees hovered up and down the trunk, past the hundreds of narrow eyes watching over me. One summer the tree swelled with tiny fruits, first gold then crimson red. Daddy made me spit out the bitter when I tried one, he stood over me crying at the sink saying Never, never, never do that again<\/em>. But that didn\u2019t stop the starlings pecking at them in the grass, like breadcrumbs. After Daddy got sick and we sold the house the new owners hacked it down, they wanted designer decking and it was in the way. My tree, and what did I do about it?<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another rowan now. It\u2019s in the wall outside my office window. Under the numbing light of meetings I stare at it clasping into the not-quite-nothing between the bricks, rooting in air. Just a scrap of leaves, held into the wind like a leap of faith. It somehow endured when the heat came last summer, pressing greenly against a dryness nobody had ever seen before. It should have another two hundred years, whole centuries to reach into its promise \u2013 upwards, outwards. I\u2019d give it a year here, if that. Soon, it\u2019ll be too big, too grown to carry on living.<\/p>\n

Funny how it keeps trying though, creating itself out of unwelcome. No sense of the trees that have failed before or the death ahead of it. Every time I see a sapling like that, something faint inside me wills survive, survive<\/em>, though I know it won\u2019t, how could it, surrounded by people like us, in a place like this?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Joseph Nicholson<\/strong> is a writer living in west London, near the canal. Alongside writing fiction, he works in a creative agency, making campaigns and films for\u00a0charities and NGOs.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

He writes: “When I was very small, I planted a rowan tree in the garden of my childhood home. It grew beautifully \u2013 magical and wild. And like the tree in the story, it was cut down by new residents \u2013 people who didn’t think it was fashionable enough. The climate emergency is so overwhelmingly enormous, impossible to process intellectually. But I think we do understand the fragility of the world through the particulars of nature: the smaller things, like that rowan. A tree that a little child wonders at, a tree that for some is totally disposable. And the thing is, though the human age can feel maddening, crushing, almost hopeless, life clings on. New trees seed, and grow \u2013 somehow. The story isn’t finished. Not yet.”<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  This story was shortlisted for the Writers Rebel Flash Fiction Competition.   Daddy said, help me bury it. So I stood, rain plicking off my hood, watching him steam with the spade in the hole. Come on then, he said, and I cast in the dirt I\u2019d clawed up, already a wet clod in […]<\/p>\n

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