Bloodberry

Bloodberry

The red berries stay frozen on the black brier, untouched by frost. The villagers do not need them anymore as they wear tiny four-leaved yellow blossoms in their hair instead. You watch your skin stretch thin and turn translucent over your collarbone. A wet, yellow bud tears through your flesh with a sickening pop. You pull the stem, but your lung lining peels upward with the root; fibrous yellow threads are already braiding themselves through your pectoral muscles. Green shoots force their way up your oesophagus. You cannot scream; your throat is packed with wet, writhing tendrils. Pale sap leaks from your tear ducts as your eyeballs swell under the pressure, golden petals erupt through your ear canals, deafening you with the sound of tearing cartilage.

Finally, your sternum cracks like dry kindling as the central stalk bursts outward. Flaps of skin hang like leather around a blooming, fleshy cavity. Your ribs uncoil from your spine, stretching into wooden branches that grip the air. You move toward the river near Long’s Farm, teeth clicking against stems, a walking nest of wet loam and bone.

From the black mud of the burial pit, a ghost rises, a shape of gray ash and charred bone. The spirit presses his burnt hand deep into your open, pulsing ribcage. The yellow vines instantly wrap around the ghost's blackened knuckles, drinking the smoke from his hollow chest. The ash turns to golden pollen as the roots pull them close, fusing two dead hearts into a single, wooden breast before you sink together into the silt.

Years later, fishermen haul a heavy mass over their gunwale. It is a double-headed trunk of pale wood, its bark smooth like human skin. One side is choked with charred black ash; the other is packed with rich loam. When a fisherman slices the timber, thick golden syrup wells from the cut, smelling of honey and rot. Deep inside, two distinct pulses beat in perfect, terrifying peace.