War and Peace: The Untold Lemontree Story

by TK Marfether

I was born like everyone else. Only my womb was something you'd find on the kitchen table: a lemon. That lemon later became a nice sauce on a bit of salmon, and half my seedling brothers and sisters didn't make it and were destined for the landfill, but by some miracle or godly intervention, I was eaten by the dog and shat out on a walk.

There, laying in fertilize and contemplating ‘why, the fuck? oh god, why, WHY, the sticky gooey texture, someone save me, what on earth’ I put down roots and began to grow, thankful that this time around, I did not have a nose.

I don’t remember much else, just a vague memory that I was once some type of flesh-walker. Perhaps one of the many squirrels that thought I had nuts only to be greatly disappointed in my sour green balls, or maybe a bird with flittering wings with their abhorrent nesting habits that left my bark covered in white fecal matter. But there was one memory still intact. I had won. And I would return.

But for now my life was hope, redemption, and most of all, lemony bitterness.

My early life was characterized by two events.

The first being warfare.

I grew in the gutter of an off-street in an ill intended suburb, not that I knew what that was at the time. There, in the gutter, were all manner of other plants. There were young trees like myself, more keen and prudent in the art of growing as they were native and natural and I was considered to be among the weeds, a stilted outsider to be put-on and desecrated. There were grasses, who lived fast and died young and were constantly in fits of passion as their sole purpose in life was procreation and therefore the gutter was not but an orgy pit to their kin. There were wild flowers, who practiced that delicate art of seduction, bringing in bees and beetles and butterflies alike, always proud.

And then there were my closest friends, the weeds.

The weeds and I had an alliance. We were in unfriendly territory. We were the colonizers.

My best friend was a pathos, who had known a life of luxury in a window sill, soaking up sun and earth and tap water, until a new plant was introduced to that same sill, sickly with spidermites and aphids. The pathos contracted the bugs and within a month was all but dead, and so was thrown unceremoniously into the gutter with the rest of our ilk, pot and all. At first, we thought it an act of terrorism, a bomb of disease that was doomed to consume us all, but it turned to be a saving grace. The spidermites, in this new territory, preferred the grasses and their orgies turned into the plant equivalent of a car-bomb, spraying their eggs into the snobbish natural trees. The aphids took to the wildflowers and they were mowed through within the week. Me, being a citron, tasted awful, and thus was left well enough alone. And soon, my friend the pathos, found root in the drain from the side of the road and began diverting the water, clogging the abyss with vines, turned the rains into annual deluge. With newfound strength, and a infinite source of water, we flourished. The pathos began to climb the natural trees, to choke them out. The death of the wildflowers made room for other weeds, and soon an army of dandelions marched through our lands, destroying the last of the grass and filling the air with white fluff and pomp.

Our greatest victory came in the shape of a hurricane. At this time, I was small above the ground, for I knew that strength came from below and I had lain an extensive network of roots, reaching down into an untapped reserve of power. The natural trees had been too content with their lot, were favored by the topsoil, and had trapped me out of the best of it. But it was not their demise. The winds pushed them all over, toppling their enterprise. As they began to rot, their nutrients that they had stolen from me all those years, seeped into the soil with each passing rain. It became my strength. And in a few years, it was me alone, tall and proud, with the pathos and the dandelions.

The second event in my early life came just after my first successful fruiting. I had tried fruiting for a few years, but I never received the right kind of pollen, most likely I figured due to me being the only wild lemon tree around. But there was a chance meeting with a moth and I had my first bunch, a small cluster of lemons that I hoped would be the first seeds of a forest in our promised land. It was that fruiting that caught the attention of a flesh walker. He came with a machine, cleared away my friends with trowels and spades, and with gargantuan blades, cut my roots and lifted me from my reservoir.

I was transplanted into a citron grove and mutilated. My wild branches were trimmed. My fruit was discarded.

I thought all would be lost.

But as my body settled, I tasted the soil of my new home. Never had I tasted anything so miraculous, so heavenly, so ripe and perfect, and thinking back on it now, my feet ache to have that feeling again of culminating exuberance. The one who had found me knew the quality of my essence, knew what I needed even before I did.

It was here I became adult. I joined the expanded root system of the grove, connecting with their own reservoir, that they had built themselves through surrounding the mountainside and collecting annual runoff and snowmelt, packed with silt and other such delicacies. I was cut again, but in the cuts I was given new branches. The flesh walker called it grafting, but I called it adoption. I became a family of myself. No longer had I the need of other trees for pollination, for I could do it myself, supporting branches from, what I could tell, ten other trees I knew not. Perhaps I shall find them one day, and thank them. Or perhaps I could find those who accepted my own branches and grew them as their own.

I lived here in a peaceful existence, the war of my youth nearly forgot.

Nearly.

War came again, this time on the winds of summer.

I had just flowered when news was spreading of birds, carrying with them darkness and decay. The western grove collapsed in a week and the dam of the reservoir broke as their roots withered. When the flesh walkers came to check our annual pollination, a month of the blight had already passed. The reserves of our roots tasted of nothing but lime and stone and pesticide. Our branches were cankered and degenerate. I myself had caught the condition in my highest branches. Anything with the rot was amputated immediately, and those who had the infection were cut to the base, felled, ground to bits, roots ripped, and every piece of them burned until their only memory was ash in the wind and a red, bleeding sky.

The severing of my limbs was not enough. The blight had infected my innermost sanctuary. When my trunk began to puss and fester, I was cut and turned out, broken down, and given to the great conflagration, wherein my soul found its way home.

"Name?" Said a disillusioned voice. "C'mon we don't have all day."

Name? Had I a name? Who was I but a lemon tree?

"Lemony," I said. But it didn't feel like enough. My name needed more of a crunch, a pinch of salt, an addictive sweetness. Something that would satiate my hangery nature. "Lemony Snickers."