It Isn’t Really a Pear.

The first thing Barb did at the new house was plant the tree on the small sloping knoll in the backyard. Before she unlocked the front door. Before she opened the back of the truck.

Planting the tree was first.

Technically she planted the fruit.

With pear trees you’re supposed to transfer a potted tree to soft, loamy soil, somewhere where the sun can reach it. Barb just dug a deep hole in the grassy mound in the middle of her new backyard, and threw the fruit into it, filling the hole back up with dirt that couldn’t even generously be called soft. It was barely dirt. More a ruddy clay.

But she knew, because her mother had told her, that the tree would grow. They always grew, no matter where they were planted, how deep the hole, or how grey the sky.

Throw the pear (it wasn’t really a pear, but it was easier to call it that and the memory of what it was had been lost to her family) in a hole and it would grow into something best described as a pear tree.

Like the baby growing insider her, the tree would grow tall. This had always been the way, with both the children of her family, and the trees they carried with them.

11 years later.

Cassie (Cassandra, to her father when he was angry) sat on the tire swing and thought about bees. The thoughts buzzed through a head topped with dirty, possibly red hair. Her thoughts were buzzing so hard, they drowned out the sounds of her brother, Tim, who was desperately trying to get her to give him a turn on the swing.

Tim was six, also a ginger (although more obviously so because he didn’t find bath time as objectionable as Cassie did) and he was managing the impressive feat of partially cleaning an epic amount of sticky pear juice from the bottom half of his freckle adorned face with the tears of his growing frustration.

“Cassieeeeeeee! You’ve been on the swing for an hour!”, Tim wailed.

Cassandra opened her eyes and regarded her brother calmly, a small roll of the eyes and a mild frown crinkling the delicate, elfin features that she shared with all the women of her family,

“Have not. It’s been ten minutes”, she said. “Wizard Apprentice ends at six and” she lifted her phone out of her lap to check the time, “it’s only six fifteen”.

“So that’s” Tim scrunched up his tear streaked face to start counting, “fifteen mi-“

“Tim”, Cassie interrupted, “have you ever seen a bee?”

That stopped him.

Tim sniffled a bit and twirled the pear core in his hand by the stem.

“A bee?”

“Yeah,” Cass said, hopping off the tire, and smoothing the front of her shorts. “The little bugs that go ‘bzzzzz’ and sting you and you swell up and die? Sometimes.”

Tim made a face at that.

“No,” he said. “Dad, and Ms Bradley, say there aren’t any in this part of Ontario anymore.”

Tim tried to balance on one leg and get the other off the ground and into the tire swing. The swing pushed out and away from him, and the small, sticky faced boy fell on his back with a thwap! noise and whimpered.

“Sissy,” he pleaded.

Cassie helped him off the ground, dusted off his back with the flat of her hand, and gave him a light whack on the bum, before helping him up into the swing and giving it a shove.

“Pears don’t grow here anymore either,” she said, frowning a little as she started to climb the wooden steps nailed into the bark of the tree trunk.

It was fall, and their father had warned them not to climb until he’d had a chance to check for dead branches, but the few fruits left at this time of year were higher up, and Cassie needed to eat. Eating helped her think, and she wanted to think about bees.

“But mom says these aren’t really pears.” she continued.

“What?” Tim yelled from a few feet below.

“These aren’t really pears!” Cassie yelled back.

Neither child spoke for a moment. Tim, now nine feet below his nimble, fast climbing big sister, swung his legs out valiantly in front of him, trying to force the tire higher. Cassie could no longer see the red and tangled top of his head through the thick branches that obscured almost the entire lawn from her sight.

Their mother had, frequently, told them, and their neighbours, and their teachers, that the fruits of this tree weren’t really pears. She’d say it in an absent staccato. These. Aren’t. Really. Pears. No one had ever, to the children’s knowledge, asked the obvious follow up question.

The fruit looked like pears. Same shape and size, same smell on the skin, same texture. But as soon as you’d take a bite, you’d know it was something else. Not quite an apple, or a plum but, somehow, a combination of the two. With a little grape mixed in. Possibly banana, depending on the day.

The first bite always killed the follow up question poised on the asker’s lips. “What is it then?” was a question that never got asked. Instead, people eating from the fruit of the family tree, always got interested in having the most fascinating conversations. Except Tim, who devoured them and had never said anything more profound than “Paisley Klein is called Paul now. He’s going to be my new best friend,” the summer previous.

The children never understood the conversations the adults had around them but, once, after eating a slice of pear and apple pie that their mother had baked and after sitting on the back stoop for a few hours chatting with their father, the lady who lived next door, Mrs Amble, had run back home like someone had kicked her.

A few weeks later Cassie had overheard Mrs Amble telling her parents that she was going to be patenting a new kind of zipper. One that never, ever, got stuck, even in cold, Canadian winters. And a few months after that, Mrs Amble had sold her house and moved to a bigger one in the city. Their mom had given her a whole pie as a going away present. And a pear.

Cassie, having plucked a fruit high up in the tree, scampered down and sat on the branch the tire swing hung from. Tim looked up nervously at her, as if expecting the sudden addition of her seventy-two pounds to cause the branch to break and send them both careening to their deaths. Or, at the least to their extremely minor bruisings.

Cassie took a bite from her pear and thought about bees. Some of her thinking was out loud.

“There aren’t any bees here anymore because adults made the earth sick. And they kept making it sick, even though they knew that they might make it worse for us to live on it. Are adults dumb? Or did they think they could fix it, like Mrs Amble fixed zippers for everyone? Or are adults bad? Dad’s not bad, except when he yells. But mom is bad, because she left and we only see her sometimes now. But other adults all thought mom was great.”

Cassandra started shaking the branch right over her head with the hand not holding a pear, causing leaves to rain down on Tim.

Tim piped up. “Did the bees leave because they were angry at the grown ups and they couldn’t sting them hard enough?” He laughed as he tried to dodge a falling leaf which then landed in his bright red curls.

“Sissy!” he yelled, still laughing. “Stawwwwwwp.”

“No,” Cassie said, “the bees here all di-“

“Cassandra!” a booming male voice yelled from the back door of their house. Cassie could just barely make out the top of her father’s head and wondered to herself if he knew he had the start of a bald spot going.

“Get out of the damn tree! It isn’t safe! And the sky is almost black!”

“Shit,” Cassie muttered. Not quietly enough.

“Sissy!” Tim drew in a sharp breath and jumped out of the tire swing. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard his sister swear, but if he’d heard it, then their father had as well.

Cassie let herself fall to the ground, almost rolling her ankle on the slight slope the tree’s thick trunk sprouted out of. The knoll, her mother called it.

“Coming.”

Their father jumped aside as Tim barrelled past him into the house but he held out an arm to block Cassie’s entrance.

“Phone.” He said, holding out his hand, palm up and peering down at her with cool grey eyes through his glasses.

Cassie huffed but handed the phone over. Her dad’s arm didn’t move.

“Want to help me check for dead branches tomorrow?” He asked, the corners of his mouth almost lifting into a smile. “Do one last harvest of the pears before we call it a season?”

“They aren’t really pears.”

An extremely long time ago.

The Serpent watched as the Gardener berated the Man and the Woman quietly.

It hadn’t meant to cause trouble. It had had an idea, after it had eaten the Fruit.

The Man and the Woman hung their heads, while the Gardener pointed at the gate with a long, outstretched arm. The Serpent had recently learned what Sadness was, and recognized it on the faces of all three of them. The Gardener turned his back on the Man and Woman and stopped being there.

The Serpent shivered. The sky over the Garden darkened.

The Man and Woman began walking to the gate at the entrance (or exit, the Serpent supposed, in this case) of the Garden. The Serpent wondered, shivering again, where they’d got the animal skins they were wearing. It hadn’t seen the creature the Man had called the Unicorn in quite a few days.

There was one more part to the idea the Serpent had gotten after its snack. The first part had gone…poorly. But it didn’t see any harm in this bit. How else would they eat, now that they were leaving the Garden?”

The Serpent moved towards them as they neared the Gate. It’s hind legs had started receding and it found that it could move easily on its belly.

“Stop.” it said to the Woman. She paused and looked down at the Serpent with an expression it now recognized as Hate.

The Serpent nudged the Fruit towards the Woman with its nose, its front paws now attached to arms that had receded so much as to be useless.

“Take it,” the Serpent said. “You’ll need to eat.”

“Is that…?” the Man started to ask, taking a step backwards and running a hand over his smooth brown head nervously.

The Serpent sighed. “This one isn’t to eat.”

The Woman glared at them both, the Serpent and the Fruit, through long bright red curls.

“What then?” she asked.

“It will make food,” the Serpent said. “Take it out into the desert. Dig a hole, and throw the Fruit inside, then cover it and wait for rain.”

“What’s rain?” asked the Man.

The Serpent looked up at the blackening sky.

“I think you’ll find out soon.”

“What happens after the rain comes” the Woman asked.

“It will grow a tree, like the one it came from. You’ll be able to eat its fruit.”

The Woman looked skeptical.

“It will.” the Serpent insisted. “It will grow tall, like the baby growing inside you.”

The Woman rested a hand on her abdomen then picked up the fruit and tucked it into the animal skin wrapped around her waist.

The Serpent listened to the Man and Woman bicker as they walked away from the Garden.

The last thing it heard before they were out of ear shot was the woman’s voice saying, thoughtfully, “It isn’t really a pear, though.”