Lantern Tree

M. Raoulee, Issue 03

Theo only heard about the treaty on the elevator’s news feed at work. Nobody was talking about it, not in the islands, where their warring mainland neighbors hadn’t done more than drive up the price of instant pasta bowls. 

He knew the tracker on his terminal would report him for accessing anything besides the invoice database, but he still read all the articles he could. It wasn’t just a ceasefire this time, wasn’t just an armistice. There had been parades and flowers.

Theo took a long look out the office window. He thought about the weekends of his personal exile that he’d spent at the beach. The warm sand and saltwater fizz had been nice enough, but the beach was not his home.

He left his letter of resignation on his supervisor’s desk before anybody showed up to complain about him misusing the network.

#

Theo had fled Illintash almost ten years before. The crisp, spring morning of his return found the white streets he’d chanced past as a child broken and impassable in places. Sooty voids lined neighborhoods that should have held shop doors and ivy as far as the hills.

He wandered along them for a long while that left his shoes gray, only tearing himself away to search for a junker. By afternoon one had sold him a mostly working pickup. Some of his other supplies were trickier. Theo fibbed about a bean species preservation project to get hydroponics equipment from the university. His shovel he stole from a Corinthal convoy. He called that poetic justice. 

Most of the seeds he bought on the way toward the border, some for more than what he’d used to make in a week, but they were good Illintash seeds. Theo drove with them stowed on his passenger seat. At stops, he patted their wrappings.

#

The countryside had been as thoroughly bombed out as the city in places— villages down to church spires and rubble, fields full of ash and lead, some roads destroyed. He had to navigate by GPS out into the fantastic nothing of it all. 

He’d known too that his homestead had burned. He expected ashes and mossed-over ruins there. He was not at all prepared to find a mechanical dragon’s skeleton sprawled across his property. It stared, huge and white and toothy across the rubble of the barn. The ground around it had gone sour and mushroomy between fragments of organic polymer circuits. 

The thing had taken out the lantern tree orchard. Only the scraggly, lonesome specimen standing over the dells remained.

Theo clambered up it, sloughing silver mold out from the rents in the bark. The heavy, reaching branch still held his weight, and at the end grew two thin-shelled, twisty-topped lanterns, hidden beneath a cluster of indigo leaves.

He had two little lights. They would do.

#

Theo slept under the stars the first night. The country quiet made him shudder, unfamiliar in his senses no matter how much he’d missed it.

As soon as dawn woke him, he tramped out into the ashy meadows. He dared hope and there it was after all— the seal had rusted around the lip, but held. Back in his grandfather’s lifetime, the well itself had been sunk deep in the bedrock. Now it overflowed at first tap, the water clear and sweet as tea. Theo splashed it all over himself before hiking back to the truck for the hand pump he’d brought. Once he set that, he drew a bucket and carried it to the dragon.

Its bones looked less imposing in the gentle light of the morning, so he strode along them and finally beneath the arches of the ribs, where he stood watching a flock of beetle sparrows gather to sing on the vertebrae overhead. If birds could accept the thing, Theo figured so could he. 

“You’re bigger than the house I was planning,” he told the dragon. The sound of his voice didn’t even frighten any of the flock away. 

#

Once he’d dug a decent toilet, Theo drove into town. He bought the biggest spool of builders’ thermoplastic sheeting he could find. 

The next few mornings he spent shimmying up the dragon’s ribs to weave. He probably should have had a net or a rope, but he’d never used things like that when he’d climbed trees as a child. The plastic thumped when the wind caught, and it took him a few struggles with the bones themselves before he realized he needed the diamond saw to cut them.

By midday, the beetle sparrows would return to inspect his work, and Theo would tie off to tend to jobs that gave him at least some shade. He dug out the detritus collected underneath the ribs— circuits, insect hulls, and filmy bits of dead leaves. The dragon’s biomechanical parts had decayed enough that he couldn’t tell the shattered processors from last year’s tickle grass. He did have to pull the remains of the control relays out of the skull with his truck, though.

Theo traded them for a pair of ladders, a long one scale the dragon’s sides, and a smaller one he set up as a way into the skull. Once he got up there, he measured the eyes for window panes, then sat beside them for a while, pondering how exactly one put windows in dragon eyes as he toed some silvery scrap back and forth.

Without a clear solution— or glass, for that matter —he turned his attention to the half-circle bones of the tail. Flipped sideways on the grass, they made fine risers for his hydroponic spheres. Once he got those started, the air smelled green-soft with the promise of wheat and apricots. It lasted even into the next morning, when he ran out of thermoplastic.

Theo hadn’t made his way quite as far down the ribs as he would have liked. Still, the sun glowing through the translucent strands left him with a long, lovely, aching moment as he lay sprawled on his back underneath, knowing that he had shaped the space around him. 

He did climb up once more that day, just to mount his radio antennae on the dragon’s back. Music streamed around him for the first time since he’d returned to Illintash. On the shorter frequencies, people passed through each other’s ranges and laughed and wondered about all of the empty fields along the border, places just like Theo’s.

“Yeah, it’s gonna be years before anybody heads back there,” one of them said.

“Charlie-Eight-One-Romeo-Alpha here,” Theo interjected. “Are you sure about that?”

A humming silence followed on the airwaves. “We have a breaking station. Who the devil are you?” finally ended it. 

“Farmer from Illintash. Just got a roof back on my house. Well, sort of. Wanna come check it out?”

Every other station lit up in cheers. No one asked where he was, so they wouldn’t be joining him, but it sounded like there hadn’t been any proper new roofs talked about for ages. 

#

While he prepped the sternum for a floor, Theo talked on and off a while longer that night, into the next (further through the hours after midnight than he should have), into the days after when it started to rain. 

No leaks started in the ceiling, but the beetle sparrows came in to roost on the underhangs of the vertebrae, shaking off their wet casings and scrapping with one another as the storm wore on. When Theo started the saw, they took flight to the far ends of the skeleton.

“No, I’m not angry,” he told KK100 one drizzly afternoon. He was, he would have admitted, only half invested in the conversation. The rest of his thoughts filled with petulant birdsong given the racket overhead. 

“Why not? I mean, Corinthal firebombed your farm, they took my arm, and now there’s no plans to charge a single goddamn one of ‘em with war crimes. I mean…”

“Break,” said Theo, waiting with his finger on the transmit button. Saying “break” apropos of anything not an emergency or an introduction was poor manners, but still, he couldn’t pretend to be angry. “Ah, sorry. Thought I saw lightning.”

“Totally get it,” answered DMBL7. “I’ve had enough banging from on high for a dozen lifetimes.”

Theo dwelt on that point for a long while. He was fine living in the open air through summer, but now it struck him that any people he sheltered might not be. Some of them might need places to curl up and cover their ears. Maybe fixing a sitting room in the skull wasn’t as low a priority as he’d thought. Who knew what lonely person might wander over the grass and find his two little lights?

#

The cobb Theo made took well enough to the bottom of the skull, but the top layer of clay and stucco cracked despite the humidity. Theo mixed a smaller batch, added some mica, and filled the fissures with that. When he was done oiling the results, they almost looked like marble.

Theo had forgotten just how complicated floors could be. He took a break from them to put up a proper outhouse, then returned to the skull, where he fitted the dragon’s eyes with leaded scrap glass and covered the not-quite-marble floor with blue and green thrift store pillows, perfect for sleeping on. It was downright cozy, if he did say so himself. He made sure to tell other people, too.

“Eh, I just need someplace a little less rustic. Thanks, though,” replied the fifth or so voice who drifted through the radio conversation after he’d finished.

Theo wished them well and, leaning back in the branches of the lantern tree, considered everything he had to consider, which might not have been much but was still more than even the prettiest seaside city had ever offered him. 

In proper farmland, with lush fields and sleepless cows lowing in the night, lantern trees leached metal and acid from the soil. They lit the way along the road for anyone who needed them. They made even craggy stone apple orchards look welcoming.

The moon had set some time ago, so was only Theo’s lanterns now, twinkling beneath the starlit clouds. At least he had two lights, he told himself. At least he had two.

#

Eventually, Theo gave up trying to cover the roof in a traditional fashion. He also got good at making his own asphalt sheeting and shingles. They were probably still shingles, he figured, even if they had to be shaped like scales to cover the dragon’s frame. He began to suspect dragons were not supposed to become houses. This only bolstered his determination, and confused at least one person. 

“Umm, excuse me,” the radio spoke up one afternoon.

Theo clambered over to where he’d left the handset, lying on his back in the sunshine as he pushed the transmit button. “We have a breaking station. What’s your call sign, station?”

“I don’t know. I brought this damned thing with me in case I got lost and well…”

“Little lost?”

“Y-yes. Also, there’s a dragon.”

Theo’s first thought was that his dragon couldn’t be the only one, but when he peered into the distance he noticed a red coupe stopped at the crest of a nearby hill. “Oh, that’s me,” he said. “Come on over.”

It got so quiet that he heard the engine turn over even in the distance. The car crept over the grass, stopping on the flat stretch of dirt by the dragon’s head. A young man in a fine summer suit climbed out. He wore pearl drop earrings, and his eyebrows had been groomed to an arched severity. He stood at the dragon’s jaw, shielding his eyes from the sun. 

“Why haven’t you taken this thing apart?” he asked as Theo approached.

“No point in letting it go to waste,” said Theo, “or you muddle around out here with the road half gone. Where are you headed?”

“The road isn’t that bad.” The young man trailed off. A moment more passed before he lost interest in the hillside and addressed himself to Theo. “There’s supposed to be a graveyard out here somewhere. A big one for soldiers. I can’t find it.”

“Huh? I’m sorry. I’ve got no idea where that is.”

“I see.” Disappointment darkened his gaze, though his expression remained cordial.

“It’s okay,” Theo assured him, holding up the handset for the radio. “We can ask.”

“No!” The word fluttered up between them, and the next thing Theo knew, he had his visitor's hands clenched around his own. The sensation was startling more than anything else.  The young man didn’t have much to his grip.

Theo could have shaken free without much effort. Instead, he waited.

“No, thank you. I… I don’t want anyone to know where I am.”

“How come?”

“I left without asking permission.” It seemed like he should have glanced away again, admitting something like that in half-hearted, wispy tones. He didn’t, though.

Theo nodded. “You’re Corinthal gentry, so you’re supposed to have a chaperone.”  

“I am.”

“Well, I’m the person who’s building this house.” With that, Theo gently twisted his hands, shaking the young man’s as he would have with any other Illintash farmer. 

A beat of thoughtful hesitation followed before the visitor shook back. “In that case, I’m someone who wants to say goodbye to my brother.” 

#

Shadows yawned through the dells. Gisfrid watched the chirping beetle sparrows with a kind of clinical attention Theo wouldn’t have ascribed to anyone sitting on a picnic blanket. He was saying, amidst a quiet spell on the airwaves, “I thought that Mother and Father would want to go, or that they’d at least let me.”

“Everybody grieves their own way,” Theo offered. 

“But they wouldn’t even answer me when I asked outright.”

“That was shitty of them.”

Gisfrid sighed. “No need to be gauche.”

“Sorry,” said Theo. 

“Anyway, I tried to respect their wishes. I did. Our coachman though, he was always a bit soft when it came to my brother and I, fond of brandy besides. It didn’t take much to bribe him.”

“That was clever of you.”

It was hard to tell, given his makeup, if Gisfrid raised an eyebrow, but he glanced over to Theo regardless. 

“No sarcasm,” Theo said honestly. “For somebody who’s been cooped up his whole life to make it this far into the country, that’s a big deal.”

“I had to go, and that was… that is what it is now.”

Before either of them could put more to it than that, the radio buzzed with voices. Theo grabbed the handset and rolled closer to the antennae. “Yeah, I’m still here. Listen, I got some mourning to do.”

He ended up chewing the rag, mostly about someone else’s father’s military career. The war reached further back than that, into other conflicts, into families who had lost children a hundred years before and still knew their names by heart.

No one that evening seemed to have much idea about any graveyard. When Theo turned to Gisfrid to check on him, he saw his company nibbling his previously neat fingernails. 

#

Gisfrid bit and bit. The beetle sparrows lost his interest. He wore his nails down to ragged nubbins before the sun ever set, his lips turning reddish from the scratches one nail had left as he worried another.

“Of course I want to go,” Theo was explaining to a traveller, their side of the conversation full of crackling static. “I mean, graveyards are just really quiet family reunions, right?”

Before he got an answer, Gisfrid reached over and flipped the power switch on the radio. “Why do you keep making a fool of yourself like that? I may not be one to talk…” He shook his hand out at that. “…but it’s embarrassing.”

“Oh,” Theo replied. “Just trying to be neighborly, I guess.”

“I’m not your neighbor.”

“Sure you are.”

“You don’t have any neighbors!” Gisfrid got to his feet to point that out. “You live in a junk heap in the middle of nowhere!” 

“Hey,” Theo countered, “the house is a work in progress.”

“You probably can’t grow anything in the dirt here ever again!”

“I'm working around that.”

“And it’s my fault!” 

Rather than answer, Theo stared up at him. He pointedly placed his hand on the radio.

“And you just… you just… you’re…”

“Not gonna get anywhere blaming people for things they didn’t do with their own two hands,” said Theo. “That’s real shitty.”

Gisfrid went pink in the face, sputtering. “You… jerk!” The ‘jerk’ part cracked off of the empty countryside.

“Heard that one before. Now, sit down and accept your help, neighbor.”  

There was something theatrical and still utterly defeated about the way Gisfrid slumped back to the blanket. After though, his shoulders shuddered with a stretch not quiet repressed. “It’s not going to work, is it?”

“Well, let’s see.”

#

Conversation on the radio died down and finally went out. Night washed in. The hills turned violet, except for the clots of silver wreckage out in the distance. Gisfrid reached his bitten hand towards the stars. He said nothing. He barely even breathed as Theo led him to the lantern tree.

The two fruits shone softly golden in the night. As Theo climbed to their branch, the vinegar paste he’d made to quench the mold came off on his clothes. He cut the larger fruit free, the stem breaking and the flesh lighting up like the heart of a fire. With it in his grasp, he jumped to the ground. “It won’t last long,” he said, “but take this out in the grass. Say everything you need to say, and when it goes out, you can bury that instead.”

Gisfrid hesitated despite the look of wonder on his face.

“That’s one of the things they’re for,” Theo explained. “They mean anyone can live anywhere, and we can all find each other no matter what.”

“Even the dead?”

“Well, if I was a ghost, I’d go looking for one.”

Gisfrid nodded. He snatched the fruit close to his chest. His soft leather shoes made no sound that carried on the breeze, not as he marched out into the hills.

Theo lost sight of him when the lonely glow of the lantern fruit passed into a dell and out of his senses. He wondered over the remaining light; the time he’d been away; the fact that he was the only one of his family standing there that night; but finally his last light where it hung. Someone else might see it on another night. One lantern would do as well until then.

When Gisfrid returned, his eyes were glassy. He smiled anyway, settling himself between Theo and the dragon. Their silence ran deep into the cricket trills around them.

Theo eased it apart with, “You know, if you want to stay here for a while, just to clear your head, you’re welcome to. There’s kind of a lot of work is all.”

“It’s work I have no idea how to do.”

“I could show you. I’d be happy to have you if you’re up for it.”

“We just met!” Gisfrid blurted out, leaning in closer as he did.

The two of them hung there like that for a moment. “You know, I said that to the family that fostered me too.”

“Did they know you were going to leave them?”

“Of course. I never made a secret of that part.”

“And that’s just fine I suppose.”

“That was what we were too each other.” A wistful little grin stained his lips. “As for you and here and all that good stuff— why don’t you sleep on it at least?”

Gisfrid lifted his hand and his ragged nails to his mouth, then pulled it away again, nodding.

They went back into the house, small moths chasing their footsteps. Inside, they left their shoes at the bottom of the ladder into the sitting room, and they climbed. As Theo put on a more or less clean shirt and shorts, Gisfrid gingerly hung his suit coat on one of the bone nubs poking out along the back of the skull. The two of them stretched out in the pillows, an arm’s length and sheet rumples between them.

“Goodnight,” said Theo.

Quiet lingered after that. He figured Gisfrid must be too tired to answer. He could hardly blame him. In fact, it brought him a certain confidence in his ability to make a dragon skull comfortable. 

“Umm…” came a shuddery sigh beside him.

Blankets billowed around the rush of movement that followed. Gisfrid slung his whole skinny self around Theo, where he lay, whimpering into the pillow they had come to share.

Theo rubbed his back until his breathing evened out, until his hands had stopped clenching and his heartbeat settled.

#

Gisfrid drove off into the misty edges of the morning. Theo appreciated that he took the time to say goodbye, and that he accepted a basket of sesame ration bars. He could have been out there by himself with nothing to eat but the last of his stale croissants.

It hadn’t even been a full day with someone else, but even the clicks and chirps of the beetle sparrows sounded so lonely without another human voice close by.

“Well,” Theo said to himself, “At least somebody stopped in.”

Scratching his head, he turned back to face the dragon and he wondered if he’d even have more than the sitting room finished by the end of summer.

It was worth trying.

The irrigation on the apricot seedlings’ tank whistled as it turned on. He whistled back.

#

The first night Theo spent alone again, a storm flitted across the house. Given the sound of the rain, he didn’t sleep too badly. The second night came after undoing all the little stirrings in the dragon that the wind left, besides making preparations for next time given a sticky gray riding the horizon through that day and the next. Soon his recollection of company began and ended with the fact he’d had any at all.

So, he worked. He worked until his fingers were battered and scarred. He finished the sitting room long before the first leaf turned amber on the lantern tree and he told himself that someone else would enjoy it beside him— it would just be on another afternoon. 

Meanwhile, Theo couldn’t put a front door on any structure with a head, so he installed two side doors at the chest. Building out the space between the ribs to make them flat so that they would even accept doors proved a challenge. But after quite a lot of sanding and bracing, Theo had two steady, stucco-covered walls.

He needed a lot more: the rest of the bones were still only covered in sheeting. But for right then, Theo took an awl and drew a lantern tree fruit beside one door. 

Someone in the city might still remember how to make glass lights that looked the same. If he couldn’t find one… well, it would be what it would be.

“We have doors,” he told the radio, which was white and dusty by that point. He’d had trouble resisting even distant conversation for the past few days or weeks, since he’d had anyone drift off to sleep in his arms. 

“Do they lock?” asked DMBL7.

“Well, yeah. But mostly because I wanted locks. Call me new-fashioned.” 

“November-Echo-Alpha-Romeo-Five.” A third voice interrupted, tones measured and careful.

Theo swallowed and pressed the transmit button once, then again when the first didn’t seem to have taken. “We have a breaking station. Go ahead NEAR5.”

“I’d be happier with a lock, personally. I’ve never not had one.”

“Makes sense.”

“Besides, I…” A sigh, or a brush of evening breeze, caught the other microphone.

The same thing happened to Theo’s.

“May I come over?”

“You two know each other?” asked DMBL7.

Theo banged a chalky palm against the transmit button that time. “Yes!”

Somewhere not too far off, he heard an engine crackling. He tore off towards the sound, trying not to laugh as a red coup pulled onto the top of the hill. Gisfrid fairly fell out the door, but once he caught himself, he ran, too.

They met in the sunshine, not quite halfway. Theo tried to wipe his hands on his overalls. Gisfrid held his out anyway. Their fingers laced together, then their arms, and then all of them together in squeezing and laughter and the grass torn up as they spun.