The earth is a jealous god. It took my sister’s body but not her silence.
I planted her beneath the blackthorn tree, where the soil is the color of dried blood. Grief made me gentle; I folded her limbs like linen, tucked a sprig of lavender between her fingers. Rest, I whispered, but the ground spat her back. First, a fingernail pierced the surface, moon-pale and glistening. Then her hair—wheat-gold, now threaded with worms—rose like a cursed harvest.
She speaks through the roots. At dusk, the blackthorn’s branches scratch my window, spelling her name in frost: Liora, Liora. The wind carries her voice, ripe and cloying as rotting plums. You buried me too shallow, brother.
I dig. My hands split like overripe fruit, knuckles grinding against stones and her bones. She isn’t there. Only her wedding dress remains, coiled with ivy, the lace blooming with phosphorescent fungi. It reeks of her perfume—honeysuckle and arsenic.
The crows bring offerings. A molar nested in twine. A lock of hair knotting itself into nooses. I find them at dawn, arranged on the porch like sacrament. The farm sickens. Wheat grows inverted, roots clawing skyward, grains black and squirming. The well water thickens, spilling clots of her laughter.
She comes at the equinox, wearing the earth as a gown. Her skin is a mosaic of beetles and clay, lips stitched with thorns. You thought silence was a gift, she hums, moss spilling from her mouth. Her touch is a mycelial ache, spreading through my veins. But I wanted to scream.
The land rebels. The plow unearths her ribcage, each bone sprouting hyacinth. Her spine rises as a twisted stalk, crowned with a skullflower whose petals drip nectar like molten lead. I drink it. It scalds my tongue to leather.
"Forgive me," I rasp, but she only tilts her head—a bird eyeing a worm.
You will, she says.
That night, the soil slithers into my bed. It fills my nostrils, my throat, a loamy suffocation. I try to scream, but my teeth crack into shale. Roots piston through my calves, anchoring me to the bedframe. Outside, the blackthorn groans, splitting to reveal her heart—a pulsing, mud-slick orb.
Now we grow together, she sighs.
Morning finds me rooted. My toes dissolve into taproots, my ribs brittle as kindling. Sunlight peels my skin to parchment; rain pools in my eye sockets, fermenting into something that swells and writhes. She tends me daily, singing lullabies as she prunes my gangrenous limbs.
The crows feast. The wheat watches.
Soon, villagers will come, whispering of the recluse who vanished. They’ll note the new tree beside the blackthorn—a gnarled, barkless thing with sap like pus. They’ll shudder at its fruit: bulbous and flesh-pink, throbbing in time with the wind.
But they won’t dig.
They never do.