Our Will is a Forest

As was the tradition, our mothers planted seeds in our flesh when we were five.

Mama coated walnut-shaped seeds with a salve of oak bark steeped in animal fat, then placed it on my neck and had me sit idle for a day. My skin slowly enveloped the seed, absorbing it into the structure of my throat. I would feel it every time I swallowed, and every time the Man Midas touched my neck, spreading his gold over my skin.

All we who tended his garden had golden marks on us. We were the progeny, cursed to serve under the Man: tend the flowers of his garden, scrub the walls, build marble floors, clean his ten-thousand robes. We put up with it. It was either that or be banished from the garden and face the wasteland beyond. The Man considered himself magnanimous for giving us refuge from the calamity of his own doing.

†

Headaches began seizing us all, first my beloved Trimmer, who thought he was dying of Man-made exertion. But it was the blossoming of buds in his brain, seeds planted by his own mother long ago.

Winds blew in from the apertures of his hut, carrying dust from south of the garden’s border, making my skin itch, and making the hay-made hut shiver so much I expected it to topple. Trimmer lay his head on my lap, powder wafting out of his mouth in yellow puffs that smelled of fermented cells and pollen.

He looked like a flower close to withering, precious and ephemeral. I pressed warm towels on his forehead to absorb the endless sweat, comforting him the same way Mama comforted me when I was sick. “Imagine a glade, far from the blinding gold and the Man-made perfumes, beyond even the wasteland where nothing grows. Before the time the Man pruned our ancestors, when we were still both flesh and bark, with arms and branches. You are laying on a branch, and your own branches are wrapped around it. The forest is breathing with the sound of birds and frogs and crickets.”

Trimmer was mostly quiet. Tiny cracks fissured his chest, roots slowly poking out. He shifted, cheeks squirming and lips quivering as if hesitating to invite a kiss from me—always hesitating because we didn’t have doors. Even our own kin would shun us for sharing love, for the Man had manipulated their minds to see the good things in life as evil.

I leaned down, but it was not a kiss Trimmer was inviting. He opened his mouth to reveal a tongue that had split in two, becoming a branch forcing its way up from the throat, bearing crab apples.

Tears of joy poured out of me. So had it once been, long before the Man plucked the forest out of us. The blood of our ancestors had boiled over in Trimmer, and was releasing its fruit.

I plucked a fruit and took a bite.

†

Our species did not simply live in the forest—we were the forest. The first of our kind were born from great trees. Their barks bled, and from the wound flowed green liquid that made rivers and bore three hundred children whose skin was wood, whose feet bore roots instead of toes, and whose upper bodies sprouted branches that blossomed fruit.

Before the Man enslaved us, our kind never used words. Our thoughts seeped into the juices of our fruit, and in partaking from each other, we tasted our joys and sorrows. Sharing our feelings in ways no language could capture.

Trimmer’s apple tasted sweet and sour and in-between flavors that carried feelings of deep-seated yearning. Not to be free, but to be free with me, branches wrapped around each other and around a tree, hearing the forest breathing.

My own seeds grew, too. There was a reason our mothers had placed it in our necks: for the branches to grow through our throats and be shaped by our tongues, for the fruit to ripen in secret, hidden within our mouths. It pushed through my back teeth, splitting my gums with a slow pain that softened as the wood became part of me, nestled in the raw wound it had made.

As my crab apples ripened, weight settled strangely in my jaw, but I learned to keep myself straight and show no hint that anything had changed.

I shared my fruit with others, and they shared their hidden fruit, too—our thoughts and emotions pollinating each other’s minds. They all witnessed my love for Trimmer, and understood it in ways words failed to describe. Those who would shun us were disarmed, their own feelings bare to reveal their own shame beneath. Only one feeling mattered, our shared rage for the Man.

Our memories connected in complementary wisdom, forging a plan from bread crumbs across the lifetimes of my kin:

Trimmer was once serving the Man lunch, and the Man spilled something sour on his face, and he had Trimmer wipe his eyes clean of it.

Hyakinthos, the one with a passion for watching bugs, once observed ants swarm over a locust, until it was dead and piece by piece they stole its parts down to a borehole.

Dandelin, the one who gave massages to the man, amplified the fury of our collective senses. Giving us glimpses of how the Man touched him.

Sunnie, Shaper, Wisterin, all had examples that pointed to the same truth as Trimmer’s—that the Man avoids touching his eyes.

And then others, whose memories led us to understand where the guards sleep, who can be bribed, and how the Man’s magic barriers weaken in heavy rain.

Soon, we were ready. We no longer had secrets, and we could no longer betray each other to the Man.

†

The rest was easy after that. Hand-in-hand with Trimmer, we led the rest up to the Man’s chamber, and forced his own hands on his eyes. We wanted the same thing, for the walls to be brought down so the garden might breathe out into a forest again. We were many.

He was but one.

© 2026 Akis Linardos

Akis Linardos is a writer of bizarre things, a biomedical AI scientist, and maybe human. He also enjoys cooking, playing piano, gaming, and hanging out with new and old friends. His words have wormed their way into Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Flame Tree, Cosmic Horror Monthly, and Uncharted, among others. Visit his lair for more: akislinardos.com