“Symbiosis” • by Jeannie Marschall

It was almost time. Tension saturated the air, thick as treacle and just as stickily sweet. Soon the trees would make their move and then all hell would break loose, with heaven nipping, razor-toothed, at its heels.

We should be safe at home, as Leadership had decreed, behind the locked sliding doors and steel-shuttered windows of our settlement’s domed houses, while the almost-palm-leafed forest seethed outside. Yet when had humans ever listened, particularly when the risk was this thrilling and the prize this honey-glazed?

So we pretended to huddle obediently in our rooms and workshops and laboratories, staring right through research papers or aimlessly tinkering with our equipment, music playing in the background to drown out the sound of feet and claws and pincers outside. The creatures of this wild place were restless, searching for bounty that was dangled so close but would not be given, not yet. Even we could feel the drag on our bones, beckoning us, luring us. Won’t you come out, won’t you run with them, get ready, get ready…

We resisted, because there was no sense in letting our instruments drop from our shaking fingers yet. We were still rational enough. You couldn’t reach the pods before they were ready. High up between the fronds, guarded by spikes and poison and a vine-lashing parent’s snarling protectiveness, there was no getting at the glossy, football-sized treasure chests before their time. All the way back at the beginning of their cycle, there had been no incentive to do so, either: the trees knew which substance to release into the air to repel any cradle-robbers as their young matured. Only later—only now—did they change the dance of molecules seeping from their pores into something riveting; something irresistible; something that, ever since we witnessed it for the first time a year and a half after this colony’s foundation, had driven Leadership into fits of uptight rage, making them insist that order and control had to be maintained throughout this night.

This planet had other ideas, millions of years’ worth of plans of reproduction, of proliferation and distribution. We were the distributors. We were not allowed to resist.

More than that, hidden in the tremors of our lungs and the sideways glances we cast at the cameras we knew Leadership was watching us with: we didn’t want to resist.

What for? whispered on the sugar-stained air that we could not filter in any way that mattered. What’s the harm? A few limbs missing, a little blood lost? So what, in the grand scheme of things? So what, when all we wanted to do was live, all of us, just as we were, in all our motley, awkward, gangly, scarred and stretch-marked, perfectly imperfect glory?

After another hour or another lifetime of waiting in something very akin to agony, when we were almost ready to tear our skins off, already shedding the scratchy layers of cloth from our over-sensitised bodies—finally, finally, with a coordinated cracking wave—the trees broke open their seedpods and scattered their forbidden fruit all over the forest floor in a final eruption of scent, saccharine and beatific. They were the emperors distributing gifts to the tumbling masses, and every single creature, born of this planet or not, went into a frenzy. We burst out of the husks of our homes and ran among the many-legged alien shapes large and small that were scrambling between the trunks, and knew that for all their high-and-mighty speeches, the domes of Leadership, too, would stand empty.

Screams and hisses and our colleagues’ shouts rose in the air as we all scrabbled in the dirt for the sweet bounty of the forest, wrestling them from each other’s hands, talons, beaks, slingers, and stuffing them in our various mouths with gasps of laughing, shrieking, warbling ecstasy that filled the forest, while the trees swayed and sang and waited for us to devour every last one of their children. Too drunk on the drug-drenched air, too ravenous to do anything but gobble up and swallow the wrinkled, brown, thumb-sized fruits, our myriad teeth would miss the precious, armoured kernels within. We’d do as the trees asked—feed, rave, race about, roll in the rich, dark soil as we fought, or sang, or fucked—and then, much, much later, in the cool, still, early hours of the morning, the assembled creatures would break up and slink back to their dens, carrying the next generation of forest giants off to where they might fall, creating a far-flung nursery of palm-like trees very similar to Earth’s Phoenix dactylifera from the ashes of our excreta.

Bruised and sated, leaning on each other’s always-infinitely-beautiful bodies, all drowsy and gloriously filthy and feeling nearly reborn ourselves, we humans would look into the rise of an opalescent sun and know that come next year, rules or no, we’d all be just as wholly not-sorry to be recruited into the nocturnal celebration of what we, with inane grins, had come to call Date Night.

 

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Jeannie Marschall is a teacher from Germany who also writes stories and poems, mostly of the fantastical and queer variety. The other half of her time is filled with hiking, foraging, and tending a semi-sentient wild garden.

Find more of Jeannie’s works at Black Spot Books, QueerWelten Magazine, or Snowflake Mag. Longer works are brewing and almost ready for consumption.

BlueSky: @JeannieMarschall.bsky.social 

 

 

 

 

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