The Orange Tree by Danielle Sherman

You are an orange tree a woman planted many years ago. But first, before that, you are only a tiny seed she lays softly into the cradle of earth and loam she dug for you in her own backyard. While you sleep dormant, she hums lullabies. The sky wheels above you like a mobile with many moons. 

When you sprout, she laughs in delight. It rains and she sits beside you anyways, singing aloud now. At other times she talks. Someday all I’ll eat is citrus, she jokes. Once you grow I’ll live off the land. And she gently pats the soil into place around your roots until you are warm and snug, until her fingers are caked with dirt.

In turn you stretch forth branches, sprout leaves. She gives you a trim every season or so, happily wiping the sheen from her forehead as she works the shears. You grow. A pair of birds considers building a nest in the crook of your branches, but you tremble your limbs until they fly away. Other trees look after birds, you know. You do not want any.

The woman who planted you builds a wooden splint when a spring storm almost cleaves you in two. She carefully secures the stakes until they press like an embrace, and you grow upright again. She rakes your shriveled leaves into plastic bags in the autumn. That winter you try to offer her oranges, but none mature—only dry, green bulbs that wither when they fall to the grass.

Later the two birds return, not to nest but to peck at the failing fruit of your boughs. The woman who planted you sees this, and shouts until the assailants fly away, but they come back as soon as she goes inside. So she stays in the sun to guard you. She paces through the backyard for a while, reading something. The next day she spends hours brushing white paint to your bark and tying red cloth around your branches with painstaking delicacy. The day is hot and sweat films the furrows of her frown as she strains on a ladder, reaching as high as she can.

So the birds leave you alone, but your bulbs stagnate and plummet and rot anyway. They split open and brown. The woman who planted you has to come collect them; she flinches away when she sees the maggots writhing out, hurls them over the fence like touching them stings her skin. Arborists come a few weeks later to prod at your roots and slice at your leaves.

You try to grow, although there is not much rain. Your yearly blossoms slouch feeble and dull. The woman who planted you examines them with her arms crossed over her chest. The next day she staggers through the yard carrying a sack of mulch, the weight of it compressing her straining hands into white fists. She flings the feed around your base, not humming. A bird with a twig in its beak alights on one of your branches with interest, and you exaggerate your wilt until it ruffles its feathers and flies away. 

Citrus season passes again and you have nothing to show save for the yellowing spots on your brittle leaves. The woman who planted you rips one off its stem and studies it in her hand, her eyes hard. Afterward she attempts to construct some kind of irrigation system around your roots. She scatters sharp metal instruments around you, uses them to plunge and hack at the grass. Her hair plasters against the tight line of her mouth. One of the tools wrenches out of her slick palm and leaves a gash in the skin there and she swears loud enough to send the birds skittering out of all the nearby trees. 

You are an orange tree a woman planted many years ago, and you still have not given her any oranges. You provide her little shade as she stands beneath you, glaring up into the gaps between your sparse leaves. Damn thing, she mutters. She spends an hour tending to you, looks as if she would rather burn you down.

The sun begins to set. Its light reflects off your white paint, off the metal instruments that still lay strewn beneath you like the corpses of fallen bulbs. At dusk, two more birds, new to the neighborhood, flit back and forth through your canopy with keen curiosity. They chirp to each other, tug at your little red threads. Then they move on, and you are relieved that they do, and grateful that you never take them in—perhaps because you suspect what would happen if you did, the inevitability of caring for something so much and for so long that you begin to despise it. 

Danielle Sherman is from Phoenix, Arizona and studies creative writing as an undergraduate student of Emory University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Alloy, Kalopsia, and The Helix, among other publications. She served as Editor-in-Chief of Polyphony Lit and is currently an editor for the Lullwater Review.

13 October 2023