The commodore had given up most of his life, including a leg, aboard steam-chugging warships in the service of Her Majesty—and by god, did he miss those days. He wasn’t one of those veterans who’d survived countless battles only to hate himself and the things he’d done; rather, he remembered fondly the kick of a rifle, the thrill of killing. And when he finally retired to a quiet mountain villa, his heart still ached for his youth—to fight again, and be fought. But now he had just one enemy to kill: time. So he spent his white-haired days lounging (to the best of his aching ability) in his garden, letting the breeze soak him in the smell of lilacs as he attempted to escape into books of war, where a bold passage would occasionally fill his nose with phantom whiffs of piss and fear and cannon-smoke—ah, to be at battle! To be truly alive!
But the feeling never lasted. Each time he flipped the page, he was consistently older than he’d been, and miserable again.
The commodore’s servants were often spotted in nearby towns, where they hounded the shelves of bookstores and libraries, hunting for a text their master hadn’t yet devoured. One day, instead of a book, they returned with a young peasant.
“She carries a writ bearing Her Majesty’s royal seal,” the servants explained, after the commodore inquired why a woman (dressed in rags, no less!) was waiting in his courtyard. “She requested an audience.”
In the low heat of a long day’s dusk, the young peasant woman was led into the garden. With the help of a cane, the commodore lurched from his chair and offered a polite greeting. The woman’s response was a deep bow—almost condescendingly deep. She said nothing, and the buzz of insects filled the space between them. The commodore sensed a wild, petulant spirit. The woman’s greasy hair was hacked short, her skin covered in dirt and bruises, and in her hand she clutched a folded sheet of parchment which indeed appeared to be stamped by Her Majesty.
The commodore picked his tired brain. Why might a street rat be carrying the queen’s seal? He could only assume the stamp was a forgery or stolen. He debated having this woman arrested and interrogated on the spot. The gall she had, to invade his mountaintop with her awful smell, her scrappy face, her dirty nails, her vine, her—
Vine?
The commodore blinked. There appeared to be a… yes, a vine sticking out of a hole in the woman’s tattered shirt. It was about the size of a mouse tail, green and leafy, and very clearly protruding from her abdomen, like some freakish tumor. Looking her over again, the commodore spotted yet another vine, this one sprouting—impossibly—from the flesh of the woman’s bare foot. It snaked up her ankle as ivy coils a column, budding with yellow petals.
A moment passed when the commodore could only stare.
“It is proper,” said the young plant-woman, “to treat a visitor with samosas and cucumber water.”
Regaining his composure, the commodore nodded to a servant, who hurried off in the direction of the kitchen. Then, with a stab of his cane, he indicated the flowers growing out of the woman’s foot. “Are you…” He paused, still struggling to understand what his eyes were telling him. “Are you all right, young lady?”
“Not at all,” she said, and handed him the letter. “This should explain it. I’m here to fulfill my end of a bargain.”
With due care, the commodore broke Her Majesty’s wax seal and opened the document. He recognized the queen’s penmanship from back in the days when he’d received orders straight from Her royal cabinet. If this letter was indeed a counterfeit, it was quite an impressive one. Scanning those lines of black ink, the parchment began to tremble in his hands. “This says…” His words failed him; his heart was soaring.
“It’s true,” said the woman. “In exchange for a boon granted to my family by the queen, I have agreed, per royal request, to plant myself as your dream tree.” The weight of a life-changing decision pulled her hard features into a frown. “It seems Her Majesty wishes to reward your years of loyal service.”
“A dream tree,” the commodore echoed, not believing it.
The plant-woman stooped to sniff a budding rosebush with mild disinterest. “Where shall I take root? It’s up to you, but I’d prefer a spot with a view. Here in the garden, maybe.”
The commodore wondered if this was an elaborate joke. He read the queen’s letter over again. “This means…”
“My fruit will grant you visions, old man.” The young woman had begun traipsing carelessly through a bed of lilacs.
When the servant returned with a plate of fresh-baked samosas, the commodore took him aside and handed him the queen’s letter. “Send a telegraph to verify the authenticity of this.” The servant nodded and ran off again.
“The letter is real,” the plant-woman assured. She sat down with the plate of food and promptly began stuffing her face. The hot fragrance of spiced potatoes and onions was almost enough to mask her body odor, which had a moldy, earthy stench to it. “Now tell me where to grow.”
The commodore made a sweeping gesture with his cane at the surrounding highlands. “Grow wherever you like. For all I know, you don’t actually have the power to become a dream tree, and you’re just some beggar who’s tricked me into giving you supper.” But even as he said it, he noticed a third vine sprouting from the soft skin of the woman’s wrist.
She wiped her mouth and set aside her plate. “Don’t worry, you shall never need to feed me again. Come morning, this patch of dirt will provide all of my nutrients.”
Or perhaps, thought the commodore, come morning, you’ll be gone, having stolen more of my food. He shifted his weight, feeling the ghost-pain of his missing limb creeping back again. “We’ll see if the queen corroborates your story.” With that, he hobbled away, dragging his wooden leg into the house, slamming doors behind him. He ordered his staff to keep an eye on the woman. Then he poured himself a cup of lavender tea to put his aching body to sleep.
He dreamed of vines and yellow flowers.
The letter, it turned out, was no forgery.
The morning was sweating; a pleasant spring sheen of dew. The commodore found the plant-woman sitting on the ground in the same exact position where he’d left her, as if she hadn’t moved all night. She didn’t stand up or acknowledge him; she might as well have been a filthy garden statue. (The commodore tried not to be bothered by her lack of respect.) Accompanying him was a servant with a steaming bowl of rice drizzled in salty plum sauce. “A peace offering,” the commodore explained, as the food was set down before the plant-woman, and he caught himself staring at her vines, which had doubled in size since yesterday.
She plucked a grain of rice out of the bowl, studying it in her dirty hand as if she’d never seen food before and didn’t know what to do with it. “I presume a telegraph arrived which attested to everything I told you.”
“Apologies for not believing you.” The commodore shifted his cane to his other hand. “But receiving this reward from the queen, and without warning… You can’t blame me for questioning such a great honor.”
The plant-woman pushed away her untouched food: an offering to the dirt and the flies. “How wonderful for you, to be so honored.”
The commodore realized he was grinning like an idiot. He calmed himself. “You mentioned yesterday that the queen has afforded your family some nicety in exchange for you becoming a dream tree?”
“You still don’t fully believe this is happening, do you?”
The commodore was careful to keep a measured tone. “Please, if this is some magical farce, some illusion, tell me now—”
His words caught in his throat when the woman finally stood up, revealing a sinewy web of sapling roots growing beneath her, tethering feet to soil. “I should start bearing dreams as early as next week,” she said. “I’ll stop breathing much sooner.”
The commodore felt a rush of complex emotions. Mostly: elation. Yes, he had pity for this woman… but not a lot. He wasn’t the one who’d agreed to get turned into a tree. And the fact that he would be reaping the benefits was far more exciting than the horror of the plant-woman’s current predicament. “What will the dreams be like?” asked the commodore, imagining himself young and whole again. How many more battles…
“They will be like dreams,” said the plant-woman. “You won’t have much control except in the very beginning of each dream—”
But the commodore interrupted. “These dreams, will they cost me anything?”
The plant-woman sat back down, nestling with her roots. “Dreams only cost other dreams.”
The commodore wasn’t quite sure what she meant by that. “Well,” he replied, “I am tremendously sorry that you won’t be around to witness the joy you’re gifting me with this transformation.”
“What makes you think I won’t be able to see?” The plant-woman looked astonished. “Do you seriously believe trees and flowers don’t have eyes?”
The commodore wondered if it was a trick question. He held his tongue, not wanting to upset his new tree.
Apparently it was too late. “Do you know the worst part about this?” said the plant-woman, and suddenly she was crying, sobbing, her violent tremors sprinkling dirt and tears. “The worst part isn’t the pain, or the death—because I’m not really dying, just changing, that’s what I keep telling myself… The worst part is that I promised to be civil and courteous to you. That I came here as a willing sacrifice, to plant myself in the garden of someone who will never want for anything, only because my family needed the queen’s help.” She spat. “Know what? I’m going to break my promise slightly. I’m too far gone to untwine my roots—” Her toes wriggled helplessly, caught in the gnarled nest of her feet. “—but if I’m going to become your tree, commodore, I’m through being polite. I’m going to at least tell you what I really think of you and your queen…” But her voice died, and she emitted only a faint wheezing sound. Terror flooded her eyes. Frantically she moved her mouth in familiar shapes, but something was blocking her words.
Something inside her.
The commodore leaned forward, peering curiously down the woman’s throat. Indeed, there appeared to be a flowering weed obstructing her esophagus, blossoming from within her. He was rather surprised she was still alive, in fact. She would never speak again, that much was for certain.
So the peasant’s last word had been “queen.”
The air was still and quiet. The commodore watched rivers running over the woman’s dirty cheeks. He was not sure what to say. Eventually he just stamped his cane and allowed his pity to drain away. “Until the morrow,” he said, “if you’re still around.” And he left her, limping inside to take his breakfast. Best to get on with the day, he figured, before his aches put him back to bed. Already his wooden leg was hurting, like it always did before a heavy rain.
She was sprouting branches by morning.
Unfurling wing-like from her spine, the crooked brown spears wended twisting patterns which shivered against the mountain wind. Her skin had hardened into the knobbled armor of an oak. Spores pocked her cheeks like pimples, and her roots had burrowed deeper, disturbing the ground, expanding like giant writhing worms beneath her.
The commodore finished two books before deciding to join her (it?) in the garden once more. It was proper, he supposed, to spare one last conversation for his guest. The instinct was a holdover from war. You did not let a soldier die alone if at all possible; you held them and told them it would be all right, even as they bled out. Surely this poor peasant—despite being a poor peasant—deserved the small kindness of someone’s company on the eve of her death.
“Big storm last night,” said the commodore as he entered his garden. “Guess the rain sped up your process a bit, lady. You’re halfway to becoming a full-fledged tree, looks like.” But he saw no sign of recognition on her wooden face. He limped closer, stepping carefully over an exposed root. “Hello?”
A tooth dropped out of her mouth, pushed from its socket by a budding mushroom. She was clearly more bark and sap than flesh and blood.
Already gone, realized the commodore.
“Perhaps I should have been kinder to you,” he said, detecting a hint of sadness in his own voice, but only a hint. He was mostly unshaken; he had witnessed deaths far worse than turning into a tree. He considered this woman lucky compared to the countless boys he’d seen blown apart by cannons. “Find your peace,” the commodore told her, standing in the tree-woman’s shade. It was not something he’d ever said to anyone he’d respected.
Her only response was a gust of foul breath hissing past mushroom caps.
That night brought another torrential storm, soaking the land, feeding the woman’s curse. By the next sunrise she was completely a tree, void of any human likeness except one knot in her oaken bole that looked perhaps like an eye. Starlings fluttered about the brittle fingers of her boughs. Chipmunks excavated hollows at her base, scurrying along her roots. She was tall and proud and sturdy and thick, and she was dead. Or, at least, as dead as any other living tree.
It wasn’t long before the commodore’s servants discovered a yellow pear-shaped fruit hanging from her canopy.
A ladder was fetched, and a place was set at the table. With fork and knife the commodore cut into the dream tree’s mysterious harvest, revealing the bleeding innards of a grapefruit, but redder, and seedless. “How can a fruit have no seeds?” he wondered aloud. There was no answer from his staff, all of whom eagerly crowded around to watch. Feeling trepidation, the commodore pushed his plate toward the closest of his servants. “You. Taste it first.”
The servant—a girl who’d never been singled out before—used the fork which was handed to her to take a small bite of the plump red flesh of the fruit. She sat and waited for something to happen, and the juices dripping down her chin looked like blood…
Not a minute passed before she was asleep, head resting in folded arms, a blissful smile curving her lips.
The commodore and the others watched the girl intently. Someone took her pulse. Someone shook her, but she only began to snore. Her peaceful slumber refused to be broken, until at last, nearly an hour later, the girl finally awoke of her own accord. “It was… beautiful,” she told the commodore. “I dreamed a different life for myself. I was flying, and my father was still alive, and—”
The commodore grabbed the fruit and sliced off another chunk. “No more for any of you. Hear me?” He took a bite; it tasted heavenly sweet. “The dream-fruit is my reward, and only mine. If I catch anyone else eating it…” But already his eyes were falling shut; his threats became incoherent mumblings.
Dozing in his chair, the commodore dreamed his first magical dream.
He was young and whole again, and certainly going to die.
There was a breach in the hull. Water sloshed over the deck, pink with the crew’s blood. His crew. They were getting ripped apart. (Pirates.) Bullets and scattershot zipped overhead. The sea-wind howled; the wounded screamed; the commodore’s saber was slick with death. “Kill them!” he cried, hacking and stabbing his way through the churning press of bodies, the chaotic melee of a boarded ship, wonderfully bloody. But it wasn’t long before the fighting ebbed, and he was slowly surrounded by foes.
Two-legged, he stood his ground, brandishing his blade, daring the pirates to lick his genitals.
Upon being stabbed from all sides by bayonets and knives, the commodore awoke to find himself once again sitting at the table in his mountain villa. As he rubbed sleep from his eyes, his staff peered down at him with only mild curiosity. “It was glorious,” he murmured, as if one of them had asked.
And he took another bite of the bloody fruit.
A galley in a storm. A battle at sea. The commodore’s enemies swarmed his listing ship through a fog of musket-smoke, and he met them with weapons in hand, prancing through the fray, dancing to that tune he’d missed so dearly—the din of swords, the crack of cannons. Again he was younger; again, he found not one but both his legs beneath him, fully functioning. With saber and musket he cut down man after man, winning gory honor in the name of Her Majesty. But fight as he might, his ship was lost; wounded and surrounded, the commodore was forced to walk his own plank.
The drowning was unpleasant, but only that.
Suddenly he was awake again, sweating in his bed. His servants must have moved him. Outside, familiar birds chirped in the garden. The feeling of the dream—that sweet taste of war—faded away quickly, taking his spirits too, depositing a heavy cloud of depression to hang over the commodore, because now he was old again, old and lame, and his simple aches and pains—those stark reminders of reality—seemed far worse than drowning.
He stared at the plate on his bedside table. Most of the dream-fruit still remained. Eschewing fork and knife, he grabbed the entire fruit and ate it by hand. He wanted only to dream and dream some more…
Upon waking up again, his staff informed him that he’d slept three straight days.
The commodore blinked his bleary crusted eyes. The window was dark with night. A cup of tea steamed at his side. He coughed out a groggy laugh. “This time I died with a spear through my chest. A spear, can you believe it?”
His servants didn’t know how to react. With blank faces they stood mute around him.
Discouraged about waking up in the real world, the commodore rolled out of bed too quickly. (He was still used to his dream-body, young and limber and two-legged.) He managed to catch himself before falling, but suffered a wave of faintness. He despised this pathetic creature he’d become.
Motivated by his bladder, the commodore hobbled into the garden, fumbling with his breeches, cursing all the while. At first he resisted glancing over at the dream tree, afraid he might find its branches barren, yielding no more fruit. But after he’d finished peeing, he checked the tree, and was shocked to discover not just a few more yellow fruit, but hundreds.
Hundreds more dreams.
Summer crashed into the mountains with a wall of dusty heat. The nearby towns, even those which relied on tourism, closed down for the safety of their workers. Despite this, the commodore refused to lessen his staff’s hours; his servants worked long days carefully picking the special fruit. In the kitchen they baked single-serve pies, and the commodore gorged himself until his teeth were stained the color of dreams, which was apparently blood-red. For months the commodore subsisted mainly in his reimagined youth. During those few hours per day in which he was conscious, he drank tea and pissed and, occasionally, he picked up a book, but the written word paled in comparison to his dreamed-up fantasies, and soon he vowed to never read again, to which his servants breathed sighs of relief, for they had not necessarily enjoyed hiking into town in search of books, especially in one hundred degrees. The servants did, however, wish the commodore would share his dreams. But none of them were stupid enough to attempt to steal one. The commodore kept his dreams in a locked ice chest in the kitchen. He’d even hired a guard—an expensive guard—to watch over the fruit while he slept. And after a withering drought, it happened to be this same guard who brought to the commodore’s attention the fact that his dream tree was looking less than healthy.
Accompanied by his disinterested staff, the commodore shambled into the garden to inspect the tree. He hadn’t checked on it lately, but the tree did appear droopier than he remembered. Yes, upon closer inspection, some of its branches had shriveled, and there was significantly less fruit growing than before. “Haven’t you been watering it?” the commodore asked his servants, whose heads bobbed obediently. “Well, keep watering it, then! Don’t let the tree die!”
But dying it was, and watering it didn’t help. (A brave gardener was fired after being heard saying, “Might as well water a log.”) But the gardener was right: the tree didn’t have long. Its bark peeled like puzzle pieces, revealing a bole chewed and riddled with termite enclaves; its once-mighty boughs now sagged, shedding twigs. Soon enough the tree stopped bearing fruit. Only a couple dozen small seedlings clung on, and none were even ripe. In a last-ditch effort, the commodore sent a letter to an esteemed arborist in a neighboring county, beseeching his help to keep the magical tree alive. But the arborist wrote a curt message of refusal, having heard about how the commodore treated his workers.
So the commodore decided to implore the aid of Her Majesty. He figured he had, after all, spent most of his life (and now most of his dreams too) fighting in the queen’s name, and regardless of how much he’d enjoyed it, maybe she still owed him. Dictating to a servant, the commodore stated how honored he was, of course, to be surprise-gifted a dream tree by the queen. “But now,” he continued sadly, “it seems the tree is on its last legs—or roots, as it were. That is to say, my dreams are dying, Your Majesty.”
After the letter was sent, the commodore stationed runners at the mountain pass to watch for couriers. But weeks turned to months, and when the runners finally returned, they bore no word from the queen. She had still not replied when fall blew through, wet and bitter, and by then the commodore was left with only four fruit to eat.
Four dream pies.
Which became three after supper one night.
The dream began as they usually did; he was a soldier again, young and healthy, aboard some vessel at war, butchering the queen’s enemies. He bathed in hot splashes of their blood; he was unstoppable. And in this dream, battle after battle, he survived. He became a war hero. Rumors circulated that he had slain a thousand men. He was awarded every medal, and, unlike in every other dream, he eventually retired to a quaint mountain villa. There he lived the rest of his life in peace, until he died of old age.
At which point the commodore woke up.
“By god,” he said, rubbing his eyes, “that’s the first time I ever lived through the dream.” He chuckled and slurped a cup of tea. Then he thought about what he’d just said.
Hundreds of dreams, hundreds of deaths. Out of all those deaths, what were the chances of actually living, of making it to the end?
I’m currently living that dream, the commodore realized. The dream where I live…
But living a long life had never been the goal, he reminded himself. Victory wasn’t defined by making it to old age.
Yet he couldn’t help feeling just the slightest bit thankful that he was, in fact, alive at the moment, and not dead. After all, if he hadn’t made it to old age, he would never have been able to consume all of these wonderful dreams, these fantasies which grew in his garden.
Or used to, anyway.
It was that cold and windy time of year, when leaves collected in piles on the ground until the servants made them disappear.
The commodore bundled up in a fur coat and went to check the dream tree for what would be the last time. He had hoped the wet season might heal the tree, but instead the tree just seemed to be drowning in a puddle. A shrinking, spindly thing, the plant’s health was far from failing: it had clearly already failed. With each passing minute it seemed to move rapidly away from the definition of a tree and closer to what one might refer to as a rotting snag.
“I’m sorry,” the commodore said to the tree, though he wasn’t sure why. For a long while he just stood in the garden, his breath clouding around him, staring at the tree, the tree staring back. What was he apologizing for? He had no idea, only a feeling he should be sorry for something.
He pulled his coat tight. The wind was chilly as guilt. The garden’s beauty had faded to weeds.
The commodore turned his back to the tree. He tried not to think about all the fruit which might’ve grown if he’d only been paying more attention to the tree’s condition. How many dreams had he lost out on? Already he missed his sword and musket, the sweat and the piss, the death and shit, having two legs again…
But he had only three dreams left now. Three magic fruits baked into three little pies…
When a servant arrived to announce a visitor, it had just begun to rain. “She comes bearing the queen’s seal,” the servant explained. “It’s another plant-woman. I saw a vine sticking out of her neck.”
The commodore gasped. Could it be? Had the queen sent him another tree?
Immediately he promised himself he would take better care of it (her?) this time. He would water it diligently, growing hundreds more dreams; he would allow himself to forget about his first dream tree, the one he’d managed to kill. A smile crinkled his fruit-stained lips; he was going to dream again, dream and dream—by god, he loved the queen. In that moment the commodore might have kissed the servant who’d delivered the news, until he realized the servant was just stupidly standing there, waiting for instructions, and the commodore exclaimed, “Well, bring in my replacement plant-woman! What are you waiting for?”
The servant hurried off, and the commodore was left alone in the garden. In that silence his smile faded. He remembered his last dream. The rare dream, one out of hundreds, in which he hadn’t died, only retired; the dream in which he’d actually survived…
The commodore looked around the cold, withered garden. He touched the nearest wilted leaf of some half-frozen weed. He wondered if it was real, this weed, this garden, this winter’s freeze, or if everything here was a dream.
Living the dream, the dream where I live…
When the queen’s second gift was ushered into the garden, the commodore was leaning on his cane beneath the dead tree. This plant-woman looked as impoverished as the last one, he noted. Her shirt was ripped and poorly patched. She wasn’t even wearing proper shoes, just pieces of leather strapped to her feet. And aside from the neck vine, there was also a flowering tendril sprouting from the region of her belly-button.
The commodore cleared his throat. “Let me guess. You’re here to fulfill your end of a bargain struck with the queen.”
The plant-woman looked startled. “The queen also said I might be able to convince you to give me samosas—”
“They are already on their way.” The commodore rapped his cane against the trunk of the dead tree. “Why did you agree to this?”
The plant-woman’s eyes were red from crying. “My family needed help, and I’m the eldest child.”
“There is some honor in that,” the commodore admitted, wiping rain from his face. A drizzle had become a downpour. He debated inviting the woman inside, but the servants were already arriving with umbrellas. One of them carried a tray of hot samosas and cucumber water. Also sitting on the tray, per the commodore’s request, were his three remaining dream-fruit pies.
“Each of those pies is a free ticket away from this life and all its suffering for a little while,” the commodore told the plant-woman. And it gave him great pain—a worse pain than any battle wound, even his leg—to say what he said next: “Take all three pies, and leave here, if you’d like. I won’t tell the queen. Go enjoy your last day or so.”
The woman hesitated, then took only a single pie. “I won’t have time for the others,” she explained. She gathered up all the samosas too, bundling them up in her shirt; she left without a word of thanks, her dirty feet padding across the garden. But at the courtyard gate, she stopped and turned back around. “Are you going to come find me and pick my fruit?”
“No,” said the commodore. At the time, he was being honest.
“I don’t believe you.”
“If you need to be sure, you can throw yourself into the sea. Then I’d never have a chance of finding you.”
“Ah,” said the plant-woman, “but if I were only driftwood, what would I see? Better to grow tall and see far, old man.” Then she was gone, leaving the commodore alone with his servants and their umbrellas in the garden.
On the tray, two pies remained.
The commodore grumbled, “Split the dream-fruit however you see fit.” And he hobbled away, letting his servants fight over their fantasies.
The commodore did eventually give in to his cravings, and sent riders to comb the land for a tree bearing yellow fruit. (The plant-woman couldn’t have gotten far in her condition.) Yet his men found no sign of the magic tree. Once winter’s fog had lifted, the commodore sent riders out again, and again they returned empty-handed. So it was, the commodore gave up on ever learning where the second woman had planted herself. He was convinced she had not thrown herself into the sea, but was rather feeding some other fortunate soul’s sleeping desires.
Before he finally died (boringly, of old age) the commodore wired money to the families of both trees. Not as much money as he could have, though. Merely a gesture. Sort of a tip. Thank you for the expensive dreams. He did not remain in contact. Nor did he, in the end, feel sorry about anything he’d done. He spent his last spring in comfortable chairs with nice views, given up on rekindling the vigor of youth; he lived at peace, hating every second of it. He began to forget large chunks of his life, and ultimately he remembered nothing special about that rotted snag in his garden, which never again bore fruit. But to his last breath, the commodore never forgot his youth, when he’d served aboard steam-chugging warships in the service of Her Majesty.
By god, did he miss those days.
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Jake Stein lives in Portland, Oregon, where he concocts strange tales on his laptop and spends too much time at bookstores. His stories have appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and lots of other awesome publications. You can occasionally find him fumbling around Bluesky (jakeiswriting.bsky.social), or check out storiesbystein.wordpress.com. |