Soul Fruit

A single fruit among the orchard’s bounty is enough to preserve your life. One fist-sized soul hanging ripe upon myriad branches is enough to redeem your soul. Across the vale, there was an entire grove laden with miracles. That is good and well, but I required only a pair. I needed one for Ma. And another for myself, to save my spoiled soul. Too many will kill you, locals warn, but just one, and you’ll be safe. No matter the severity of injury, the rigor of disease. If you haven’t yet died, you’ll live another day. You’ll be cured, mended, cleansed. Sup upon the soul fruit, consume it like a juicy pill. But never two. Not at the same time. Two will kill you, even if you are as healthy as a horse.

Our horse, Vital, died on the way to the spirit grove. It was the king who killed him. Fisher himself, the kingfisher king. He hovered above the trees where the canopy concealed his iridescent feathers, their emerald sheen that was said could blind a man. Fisher dive-bombed through the leaves and speared Vital through his hide, right into his guts. I fell from the saddle, and, looking up, I saw Vital’s gums and bared, cartoon teeth as he shrieked worse than any harpy I’d ever heard before. The kingfisher king flew away, my horse impaled on his beak. I watched with tears welling as he tore through the canopy. Then I looked away, unable to gaze at the luster of the bird king’s magnificent wings.

Without Vital, I was forced to walk on foot, wading through the chin-high cattails along the murky arteries of marshland. I bowed my head, because I was crying for Vital, but also to avoid the wide eyes of kingfishers among the willows and sourgums, the harpies who milked their featherless babies, regurgitating blood into their gullets to muffle the cries of their brood’s insatiable hunger. I wanted to go home, but I didn’t dare leave empty-handed.

I had to get to the spirit grove. By any means, I had to reach the sacred orchard where the soul fruit grows. I needed to save my soul, for killing Pop. And I needed to save Ma, whose life was in danger after rousing his wrath. Ma had grown tired of collecting bruises. She told him last night over dinner—some of the best butter-fried eels and gnome skin Ma’s ever made—One bruise per day. It’s all I’m willing to suffer. So take your shot, and move on, Buster. You strike me twice in the same day, I’ll bruise you back. Understand?

Pop leaned over the table and clocked her. It was the second bruise he’d delivered that day.

Ma was dignified as ever. Without a word, she placed a napkin across her brow to staunch the blood. She even finished her meal—one of her best! She hung up her apron and walked over to Pop. Calmly, she reached into his pack, gore leaking through the canvas. She took the dead kingfisher prince that Pop had bludgeoned with his driftwood maul—the one studded with alligator teeth and bloodbear fangs—appraising his kill with a raised brow. It was a decent trophy. Even in death, the young bird was regal. Bigger than a gnome, smaller than a man, it hung limp, its beak already half a meter long. Using two hands and all of her strength, Ma lifted the dead bird by its clawed feet and swung it, beak first, across Pop’s ugly scowl.

A broken nose. Teeth on the table. Blood trickling down Pop’s receding hairline.

Well, Pop would have killed Ma then and there if I hadn’t taken the last of my eel and used it to strangle him. They are tough as leather and require a lot of chewing. I wrapped the carcass around Pop’s neck, which, ironically, bulged with eel-like veins. As he strained to pry my dinner from the vice-like hug cinching his trachea, I ran to care for Ma, who lay across the floorboards in a ruined heap. Pop had walloped her good, giving Ma a couple whacks with his fabled swamp maul. Behind me, Pop clawed uselessly at my fisherman’s knot. He expired at the dinner table. Ma was laughing, even as she was dying.

Soul fruit, my boy. It’s the only thing that will save us now.

So there I was, out in the middle of Swampvale, far from Bogtown, far from home, seeking the spirit grove. Seeking the soul fruit that grows on ghostly boughs.

And Fisher, the fucking kingfisher king. What did he do? He ate my horse! My only friend. Even with a ripe and ready soul fruit, it was too late now for Vital.

But was it too late for me? Can a soul really be saved once it has become tarnished? I closed my eyes against the acrid swamp air, but each time I shut my own I saw Pop’s. They were bulbous, bloodshot, and pushing halfway out of his head. Trudging through the mire, the sodden weeds dampening my salamander slacks, I pried my eyes open, willing myself not to blink.

It began to rain, first gently, then hard, then torrential. The wereturtles loved this dreary shit. They came out from the mud and reeds, and I heard them screaming. They are slow but eternally ravenous. Easy to evade, but if they manage to get you, expect a slow, gruesome demise.

Something hit my head. And again. It hurt. Then I saw it piling at my feet: hail. Great. Just fucking great. What could I do? Nothing. So I just kept moving.

The sun was low on the horizon, a dim, dying orb behind a black veil of storm clouds. It looked like an eye, dead and pale. It looked like it was watching the world, watching me. When it dipped below the edge of Swampvale, buried by the spindly willows and diseased sourgums, it felt like my final farewell to Pop.

At night, when I arrived at the spirit grove, there he was—the kingfisher king with blood on his beak and horse bones piled before his taloned, lizard feet. Birds can’t smile. No lips. But I swear, the kingfisher king grinned at me. He smiled like a gnome in a toadstool shop. It was sinister, cold and cheerless as the moon.

The wereturtles were coming from behind. The cattails parted for their slow-paced phalanx of cumbersome shells and elephant feet. Somewhere nearby, a bloodbear growled, mist rising on its rot-scented bellowing. The wind picked up. The rain fell harder. The hail came in sheets. And all the while, smack dab in the center of the spirit grove, the kingfisher king smiled at me, staring me down among the spectral limbs of ghost trees burdened with ripe and heavy fruit.

All these fruits to save my soul, to save Ma’s life. All I needed was one for each of us.

The moon was full, glinting off each slow-moving carapace, transforming the wereturtles into something worse, something bigger, stronger, faster, and far more dangerous. In orgasmic delight, or maybe torture, the bloodthirsty reptiles contorted into their moon-enhanced form. Ugliness does not begin to describe the sight of them. Frankly, I could not bear to look.

And speaking of bears, the bloodbear ambled closer, moaned piteously in its painful plight of mere existence in a cruel, hard world. Its paws were the size of dinner plates, which made me think of Ma’s meal, and how I had used her buttery eels to murder Pop.

The kingfisher laughed, maybe sang, making strange, eerie sounds that seemed to suggest sadistic mirth. Etched in moonlight, the bird stood perfectly still—so still that I thought maybe it had turned to stone, a silver statue. But then Fisher opened its dinosaur beak. Still smiling, the bird king let out a terrific, primordial wail, belching out a stream of ectoplasm and soul fruit seeds, and with them, an unbroken horse skull. In the deep pits of Vital’s dark orbital sockets, I saw an end to everything.

The full moon crawled up beyond the spider web of willow branches, the rotten patchwork of half-dead sourgums. In its cold, muted light, the spirit grove illuminated like blue fire reflected off mercury. Each soul fruit glowed, yellow-brown like tooth decay. In the dim, white moon, I saw Ma watching from above. A dead eye hovered on the edge of storm clouds.

The wereturtles advanced. The bloodbear prodded me with its muzzle. The kingfisher king smiled, still as death. Nothing could save me—my life or my soul. So I ate the soul fruit. More than I could count.