‘ARTIFICIAL REGENERATION’

Allen Forrest is a painter and cartoonist, winner of the Leslie Jacoby Honor for Art at San Jose State University's Reed Magazine, his Bel Red landscape paintings are in the Bellevue College Foundation's art collection. He lives in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

ARTIFICIAL REGENERATION

His body and the trees ached with a harmonious groan against the night’s breeze, the trunk of him bowed from the cold, curved into a willowed shape, and he worried, not for the first or last time, whether he should be out here beneath them at all. He knew he had made his choice, but it still bristled under his skin, like his mother was watching from the distance.

He poured more dirt over her with the shovel.

The Burying never took very long, despite what the Buried seemed to believe. It wasn’t a long or particularly complicated process, at least not on his end. He poured the dirt on ‘til its fill not unlike filling water in a cup, except the water was dirt and the cup was the ruddy earth of the forest floor. This time though, he took notice of it for the first time, of the effort he was putting in. The pull between his shoulders, where exactly the dirt laid across her form, what areas required more or less of his attention. He never took so much care with anyone else. He made her a beautiful grave.

And in the allotted two hours, he took hold of her wrist and pulled her out of it. 

That was the way it was done, after all. He stepped back after she caught her breath, blinking back into the world like the newborn calf he’d seen on his school trip to the farm ages ago. Then he led her out of the forest, out between the trees and the holes, the holes and the trees that had changed their lives forever.

He was there that day, not that he thought anyone knew that. Not the night the holes first appeared, of course. No one knew when that happened. But the night they found out what they could do. The cold that night was bitter like the kind that stings between fingers, he remembered, early November with leaves trodden across the soup-mud ground. It was very brown and empty, and sort of ugly, and sort of pretty in its ugliness, he thought, warming his hands in his pockets, feeling the warmth spread like melting butter, tucking his knuckles into fists like that could protect him.

He was only out there because they were, and they were only out there because they paid ten-year-old Theodora Yoder her fee of ten dollars, and they only knew about the fee from the whispers, rumors spreading through their school, from the elementary school up to their high school. They were out there together, at the least; he and his friends, a group of boys once-wild losing their spark, five of them who all knew without knowing in a year’s time they’d be strangers.

They were out, of course, to see the holes.

When young Theodora Yoder–no longer so young–first found the holes back in those years, she would tell anyone who would listen that she found them herself, that she was out walking in the woods out back behind the middle school, climbing deep hills and trenches beneath orange-gray oak trees, when she almost stumbled right into it. Massive, perfectly circular, like someone took a cookie cutout of the ground. It stretched on, down so far, she claimed, to the earth’s core, shale sun-gleamed rock down and down to dark abyss. 

His closest friend spotted the first one, between the trees, gave him a punch to the shoulder and ran up to the edge, to the precipice, with breathless watery laughter. He followed his beam of light behind the others, up to it, the first hole. It wasn’t deep–a crater, in the earth, maybe ten feet down. He spotted the far edge, cut clean across the ground in a near-perfect circle, like someone dug a trench with a protractor, guiding them along perfectly. He traced the curve of the edge with his eyes and imagined he was on the moon, if but for a moment: exploring something wholly unknown, like Theodora was claiming this was.

He felt a spike of chill on his arms. He wanted to get closer. He wanted to run away.

“Let’s go in!” One of his friends, the reckless one, said with a laugh, and ran right in. 

They wandered between the holes for a while, late into the night. It was like the holes never ended, stretched on and on into the woods. They kept going, getting deeper and steeper, until the boys had to help each other between them, stepping carefully, catching ones who’d slip. He almost fell in one, somewhere down the line when his flashlight went out, only saved by the gripping of hands on his shoulders. 

“Have these always been here?”

“No way, we would’ve noticed before now.”

“You think little Yoder really found these all by herself?”

“I don’t know, but ten dollars is a scam.”

“Where did they come from?”

His friends’ voices bent to whispers, steps slowed, hearts raced. There were no answers to their questions, he knew, and he thought they did too. 

His one friend, the reckless one, stopped at his shoulder and dared him to spend the night in one. 

He refused, and he didn’t know why, to say, but it felt dangerous, unwelcome and unreal, and he wouldn’t step foot in one, he just couldn’t. He felt the draw, they all did, standing in the night, the stars far above, but for some reason, he couldn’t bear it.

He left them there. He trudged back home, embarrassed at his fear, ears red and burning, in the dead of night, passed silent streets and sleeping homes, and a mile more to crawl in his bedroom window, for fear his mother would somehow awake and see what he’s done on him.

And he missed it. The greatest discovery of the century, the biggest of mysteries. His friends slept in the hole, the first one, close enough to the town that they could still hear the road, could hear the Yoder family going about their nightly business, the dogs on the chain. His friends laid their heads in the moist dirt, looked up at the stars and felt It–the tremendous, resounding pull, the overwhelming sensation, unlike anything and impossible to replicate. They woke—so he heard, so the story went—to a furious Theodora Yoder and her daddy, Mr. Yoder, who had to yank them out of the ground with a start, and they told him everything. There was something about the ground, something about the holes, or maybe it was the trees themselves; something that led to this enormous, all-encompassing rest.

His closest friend told him in confidence, three months down the line and five days before the friend left town forever, that he’d thought he had died, until he woke up.

It was something unlike anything–the deepest most wonderful sleep ever had–and word soon spread to the town large, this strange pulling power of the soil, the overwhelming wonder of burying themselves into the earth like the trees around them, the right way to lay, on one’s back like a corpse, staring straight up while someone covered you. And there, deep in the cold earth, they felt It, the thing so magnificent and beautiful they would come again and again, would talk about it in the dark back corner at Uncommon, the local coffee bar, would whisper at the high school football games, and would recount stories loudly over glasses of wine at book clubs in suburban dining rooms. Word spread as word does, and it didn’t stop until everyone in town either wanted a turn under the trees or spat nasty things at those who did in the back of church halls. And Mr. Yoder, seeing the potential uncovered right in his backyard, took a note from his daughter and started charging ten dollars for an hour in the dirt. Enough was enough, some claimed, and they petitioned the town council.

They held a town hall meeting in December, in the back of the Methodist church out on Shade’s Crossing Road. There was no official announcement for it from the city hall; they relied solely on hearsay and the gossips of the town to spread the information, like no one wanted to write it down, like that would mean it was real. He took his mother, whose fifty-eight sometimes felt younger than his sixteen, with him. She was a tall woman, hunched rather like a bird, constantly fiddling with a cross on her neck, and she wanted to put her two cents in, wanted everyone to know that she felt the best path forward was to leave the damn thing alone, to remind everyone it was unknown and unnatural and the true way of life was to do it, feeling it all, to walk the path and not break. She found it strange, something she didn’t understand, and anything she didn’t understand was to her, a morally righteous woman, morally wrong and bad. 

He never told her that he had been out there that night. It made him sick to think about, so he didn’t.

The town hall meeting felt to him like something out of a movie or out of time, with low yellow lighting and hushed whispers, like if they spoke too loud the trees would hear and take back what they’d given. What to do with this new thread fate had decided to place in their path? Some were like his mother, wanted to rope it off or ignore it, leave the holes alone and keep children far away. Others, those who revel and want in mystery, felt it was too big to ignore, to pretend the trees weren’t giving them a thing precious as gemstone, opportunity incarnate.

Yoder was one of the latter, and he wondered how much of that came from truth, how much Mr. Yoder truly loved this new facet of the land, or how much came from the fact they had popped up in the right spot, right behind his plot.

“Think about it,” he said, eyes sparkling. “Come to this town and leave more refreshed than you’ve ever been. We could make a spa! A country club! Come on, how could this be a bad thing? We give our lives to the trees, and in turn they give us peace. Sounds like a pretty neat deal to me.” That turned people from his side, and he magnanimously tried to turn them back, sprouting tales of prosperity and wealth, of creating a safe future for everyone. 

Mayor Lutner and the city council vehemently vetoed any idea of a country club. But they didn’t decide to rope it off, either. They determined since it was, in part, Yoder’s property, that he could do as he wished, but this was too big to run wild, too tempting to reveal to the world.

Time passed, as time often does, and the town kept its promise no one spoke about, and the holes were a secret well-kept, treasured, cultivated, even, with careful, dirt-stained hands. Everyone seemed to understand it was something too big for the world to be involved. When his friends flew to the other ends of the world and spread like seedlings, while he stayed, silent next to his mother in church services and worked grueling hours at the football factory down the road, he found that no one really wanted to talk about it at all; it was something of a fact of life, and what you chose to do under the trees was between you and God. 

And the whole time, he dreamt of craters, of holes, of graves. He felt it on his drive to work in his dad’s old truck, when he got off the highway and turned down the factory road. He felt dirt on his hands when they were clean, grass under his feet when he was inside. He felt it up until the moment he showed up at Yoder’s doorstep.

Without asking, Yoder seemed to know, as he dug in the desk for some papers. “I can always tell. When folks got the spark. It takes a keen eye, which I got. And you got, I think. Here.”

He laid out a piece of paper with a lot of tiny text. “Get your signature right there, then we can go over the job, Tillin’. That’s just standard stuff, NDA and exclusion clause. And o’ course, laying out my role, here, as the purveyor and employer and keeper and all.”

He didn’t know what that meant, but he wanted the dreams to stop, so he signed. Then, Yoder handed him a shovel and a timer, and laid out the number one rule, what he was choosing to give up here. A Tiller can never be Buried. The worry, Yoder explained, arms thicker and heavier than he remembered from his childhood–from all the shoveling–leaning on the rickety table, was that the townsfolk would one day all Succumb, and there would be no one left to Till.

“And wouldn’t that be a crying shame, a waste?” Yoder asked.

The Succumbed were buried in the back of the forest, in neat rings around the largest hole–that big monster stretching into the core of the earth–and they were left alone, Yoder told him. They never woke up. 

And that was that, and he was a Tiller, and he never told his mother.

He didn’t go back to the Succumbed, that far in. Something about that itched under his skin, so he did his job best he could without, walking the Buried to their temporary homes in silent calm, the cool metal of the shovel handle warming beneath his palms as it rests right in the nest of his neck where permanent bruises started to purple. He dug his holes, while the soon-to-be-Buried stood or sat, sometimes cried, and he made a jerky gesture when it was ready. He didn’t like the next bit, not a fan of watching them slowly get covered with dirt, the way their eyes glazed and stared at the sky, gray-blue reflections looking back at him. Sometimes they sighed, which was off-putting to him, made a chill dance on his shoulders. He watched their faces disappear and pulled out his assigned kitchen timer (a now-faded bright red base and white face, black numbers, the two and four almost faded–he always pictured a woman in a kitchen, sometime long ago, rubbing two fingers on those numbers waiting her dinner or maybe her husband or wife). He turned it to the correct time, the time the Buried requested, no longer than a day, and watched his breath in the air a moment before picking his way back through the mounds.

When the time was up, he was always right in front of the correct mound, reached down a hand, and pulled up the Buried. They gasped like resurrection. Some would thank him, would offer him money. Others, still yet, cried. A few stayed solemn, looked near disappointed, and he wondered about those.

He wondered about a lot, but he never spoke it. He chastised his own mind for being the voice of his mother. It was new, that was all, he tried to argue back, tried to justify the un-naturality, the feeling not unlike knowing you’re being watched, like the trees had eyes and mouths and were swallowing them up. He wasn’t his mother, but he couldn’t shake her worry all the same.

She was one of those, the ones who come up solemn. He tried not to notice her that first time, that cold night where he laid her grave with such care, but of course he did. He didn’t recognize her from school, but that didn’t mean anything; there were a few local schools that would know of the forest, would have heard the rumors. He saw a few from the rival school make their way here, maybe she was from there. He didn’t recognize her face, though–no remnants of a Yoder or a Miller, no brother or sister he might have seen in Beller’s grocery. She seemed very usual: a round face and frame, brown hair chopped at her chin. In a way like most people his age, since she was about his age, he fell immediately in love, but in a way like most people his age, he would never say a word.

The first time she doesn’t speak to him. They aren’t told not to, per say, but it was still discouraged socially, about the town. He’d learned from the other Tillers that the rumor had it that the Tillers knew more about it all, that they knew the secrets of the trees, of what that peace beneath them truly was. But really, the Tillers knew less than anyone.

“For the best, we’ve found,” Mr. Yoder had said in his interview, eyeing him up with specifically his left eye, face half-turned and squinting in the low light.

He was told by Morri he had a new Buried that morning when he clocked in. Morri used to be a grave digger in Westfield Cemetery, before she found the real money was in burying the living. She was forty-six, a stocky sort, Mr. Yoder’s second in command, and she looked after him ever since he started. All the Tillers did, really. They were nice enough, and close enough, outcasts and rebels, and they did their job and went home with little fuss. He liked them quite well, though he refused their weekly outings to the diner. He was too afraid someone would see him, get it back to his mother.

That morning, she stood by the shed with one hand twisting in another, this new Buried with a new face, and they didn’t speak on their way into the forest. He noticed a tattoo on her arm of a plant of some kind, and first he thought it was horrible, and then he thought about it some more while the dawn brightened and decided it was nice.

She went into the ground without much fuss–although she was a sigher–and came up not an hour later. There were a few clumps of brown dirt in her hair as they walked back out from beneath the trees, and his hands itched to brush them away. Instead, as they reached the shed, he gestured with a hand, awkwardly.

“Oh!” She laughed when she realized and brushed her hands through her hair like building static electricity.

And she said thanks and left.

He saw her five more times over the next year.

The third time, that didn’t really count. It was outside Beller’s Grocery, and he saw her walking into Uncle Gino’s Italian Diner, with a group of friends. He only saw a glimpse, but she locked eyes with him, halfway through a laugh that wasn’t half as real as the one she gave him that first day, and the world stopped, and then kept on. He took his groceries to his truck, and she walked into her meal.

The other times were when she was Buried–real times that counted. The second time was his favorite. 

That time, when she picked her way through the grass behind him, following his footsteps, she spoke directly to him for the first time. “So why Tilling? What’s that all about?”

Even though he was the only one there, it took him a moment to realize she was speaking to him. He coughed, then answered, “They had an open position.”

“Hm,” he heard her frown. “Right.”

She kept talking, then, about the weather, about the local gossip, about the town which apparently, she hated. He wasn’t sure what to do with that–they never talked to him this much, not right up until the ground. She chatted at him as he dug, and he felt her eyes on his every movement, his neck sweating against his collar. He occasionally chimed in, only when it felt like she needed an answer, only when it felt like she was about to stop, and he couldn’t let that happen.

Instead of sighing, she frowned that time as she entered whatever It was the forest did for them.

In an hour he pulled her free, and this time he did brush the dirt from her hair, and the faintest rosy blush darkened her cheeks.

Three more times that year, and he grew bolder, he did. They never quite touched more than a hare’s breath brush, fingers static electric, to and from the trees. He reveled it in, much as he was loathe to admit it, every time she came to see him. It felt like it was all worth it, in those moments–the turmoil brewing in his chest every time he thought too long about the holes, the tension in his ribs every time he spoke with his mother, it all passed when he walked with her under the trees. She’d poke and prod with her words, getting him to talk more than he had since high school, about his thoughts, his world. She listened to it all with a thoughtful look, and he felt that she felt the same thing he did, that achy left-behind feeling called still-being-here, called never-left, called things-will-never-be-what-they-were. She would ramble (he would let her) on what she could do if she just left, if she just found it in her to leave her dad behind. She’d go to school in the city and see museums of long-ago far-away cultures and feel every feeling. She’d forget the holes even existed, because she’d be happy. It was like under those trees they bloomed, the two of them, in that little half-mile walk to the holes, but it always soured, crumpled in on itself like a dying leaf, when she’d get in the dirt.

Each time she was Buried she’d stay under longer, and each time there was a longer gap between when she’d return. He wanted to tell her to stop coming, but he worried he’d not see her again. 

Sometime in there, in the spring, his mother found out. The factory manager told her, at the grocery with a worried brow, that she’d take him back, that the position was still free, whenever he wanted it, whenever he found sense. When he got home, his mother asked him if he was Tilling, and the pit in his stomach stopped him from lying. He built up his defenses, ready for a fight, but she merely frowned his way and went to bed. 

He felt like a livewire around her, now. Waiting for the other shoe to drop. They never spoke much before, and not any more now, and he was wilting a little with every interaction. He wondered briefly and wildly if she even cared about him at all, watching her over the cereal at breakfast.

Then on a cool spring day, dew curling the grass, he trudged into the hut, and Mr. Yoder told him he had his first Succumbed, who requested him specifically to be their Tiller, their final Tiller, and he knew without knowing.

He didn’t understand, he told her so, behind the shed when she came that night to be Succumbed. Why would anyone want to spend their lives wasting away under the dirt? As far as they can tell, according to Mr. Yoder, the Succumbed didn’t die, per say–they just return to the earth early and then drift off when it’s time. Why would anyone want that? It wasn’t right.

She looked at him like she didn’t know him, like she was seeing a ghost, like he was something else entirely, and she grew like a fortress and said, “Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t make it wrong,” and she stormed off into the forest, pumping her arms and legs over the uneven ground. 

He chased after her a quarter mile, down where the trees grew thick, where long shadows cast on the earth and the holes started. The mounds of the other Succumbed dotted in the deep forest in the distance, the sight making his stomach tighten, queasy and sick. 

She shouted over her brazen-back shoulder, “You’ll never know the weight of it! Every day! You have no idea, no room to look like that.”

“Like what,” he asked.

She turned around, eyes low like sin. “Like you know better. Like you know me. Because you’re a man, is that it?”

“No,” he protested, “no, that wasn’t it at all.”

“Do you even feel it? I wonder,” she said, still walking, back to it all like she didn’t care if she fell in somewhere or like she knew he’d pull her out. “I always wondered with you all. Tillers. If you even knew, or I guess, if you cared. Putting people under. Do you have any idea what you give them?”

She stopped, just short of the Succumbed, the line into the trees he hated crossing. Her eyes were brown, dusty hazel like moss new on wood, he noticed. He hadn’t before. They got big when they were wet, and he found he wanted to know what they looked like at all times. Not buried six feet under.

(They didn’t know if the depth mattered. For the Succumbed, they thought they’d just do what they knew, what they were familiar with, just in case.)

“There’s something more dead about the lot of you,” she said, “more dead than them.”

She gestured with half a wrist to the mounds around.

“Than you now, I guess,” he said, feeling mean.

She half-gasped. He wondered if she might cry. He thought of his mother, for a moment, and was deeply disgusted in himself that those words were her, coming out of his mouth.

“Life is raw,” she said, voice shaking, “it’s raw, and it’s awful, most of the time. If you know, if you’ve lived. This is all there is. I’ve never done anything half as important as what you do. I’ve never done anything, because of this stupid town and my stupid dad who won’t let go. I’m so–I’m drowning every day, in bills and school and debt and pain, like, it hurts. And this, the trees, this is all there is, how do you do what you do and not see that?”

“How would I know,” he said. 

She looked sad, he thought, eyebrows tilting and mouth grim. “You haven’t done it?”

“I can’t,” he said. “I’m not allowed.”

“Because you’re a Tiller?” She asked.

He shrugged. Tried to ignore how dangerous that question felt. Tried to keep ignoring what he’s been ignoring ever since he left too early that night years ago.

“Want me to show you?” Her eyes blazed like forest fire.

He swallowed. He didn’t know. There was nothing so still as that moment, he thought, not even the silence when his mother told him his dad was gone, not even the odd ache he felt after graduation, when he knew his friends would disappear into the dust beyond the hills, not when he last saw the long, strong back of his father at six years old climbing into his rusty red truck.

“I don’t want it,” he said.

“I don’t believe you,” she answered.

Without a word she reached out a hand, looking at him like he was an animal wild, like he might bite or scratch or bare his ugly teeth. 

“Kneel down,” she whispered. He was worried someone would hear, even though everyone who was around was already in the ground.

“They won’t,” she said, and he didn’t know he said that aloud. Her hand still reached, grabbing gentle fingers around his shovel handle, loose but firm.

He didn’t know what he was doing. He knelt, one knee then the other, and suddenly he needed to be closer, and he laid back, palms feeling that dead earth, head in the weedy grass. He didn’t realize he’d let go of the shovel until he saw it in her hands, until he saw her stare at it like it spoke to her, like it told her what she’d been looking for forever. 

His heart beat fast, and he realized.

“I’m scared,” he said.

“I know,” she whispered. “It’s okay. Let me show you. Let me show you.”

She took his hand, shovel in the other, and knelt down in the dirt next to him, and said, “You can have this. Just this once.”

She laid down next to him, hand in hand, and he felt her there, felt like he was baring his throat to her like an animal, his pulse point against the sharpened edge of the world for the first time, peaking and racing, and she said, “Look up past the tree line to the sky,” and he did, and he felt It. A pulsing, swirling something, his brain above his body, an echo reverberating. The knife’s edge, the moment between, and the peak of the tipping point, suspended in ghostly haze—alive, alive, alive. He could see it then. Just up there, he could see it.

K. E. Pleshinger is an emerging science-fiction, horror, and fantasy writer. She was previously published in Issue 22 of "Grim & Gilded" and studied Creative Writing and Digital Media Production at Ashland University before receiving her MFA in Television Writing and Producing from Chapman University. K. E. is currently based in Los Angeles where she works in entertainment, daydreams about stories, and lives with her cat, Book.