Opercula

The teachers made a strong effort to create a respectful silence around me. They knew my classmates would talk. Would whisper. These teachers, the braver ones anyway, gave little speeches occasionally. They talked about “delayed development” and “transgenic differences.” How not everyone’s body will bloom at the same pace. They would talk about famous late-bloomers. Great, inspirational success stories. Sometimes though, they confessed, and they would always admit this last part almost under their breath, a strong voice collapsing into a whisper, a person just doesn’t bloom at all.

They were trying to ward off meanness. I get it. But meanness (and trust me, I’ve encountered it) happens outside of the gaze and earshot of teachers. Publicly, everyone at school’s a perfect angel, nodding along with the sermon. The worst offenders usually applaud the preacher.

I used to sit in class and daydream. Instead of focusing on what numerical identity the mysterious Secret Agent x had decided to assume today in algebra class, I would steal peeks at my blossoming classmates. I would notice Oleanna’s branches, the recent growth spurts on both sides of her body. They were long and luxurious, to her knees. Once again, she would be in season. She would bring forth the loveliest fruit. Just look at our yearbook if you don’t believe me.

She was probably the most fertile girl in our school. And I always ended up sitting near her. She wasn’t mean at all. Not publicly anyway. But still. Some days I hated her. Those were usually the days when I would catch a peripheral glimpse of her picking one of her juicy dark berries and tossing it back through her perfectly glossed lips. She knew how many guys and girls were transfixed in those moments when she would taste herself and then smile her mysterious Mona Lisa smile. Other days, I didn’t hate her at all. I admitted the truth to myself. I just wanted what she had.

Of course, my parents had taken me to the usual specialists. My siblings, my younger brother, my older sister, were both branched, and my older sister had never had any problem bear fruit. I was happy for them. My older sister wasn’t nasty about it at all. She’s even tried to help me, massaging my opercula. And my mother gave me the usual liquid supplements which are supposed to help the growth-challenged. We tried everything on the market.

The specialist doctors did all the usual scans. They said everything was in the right place. They did some exploratory visualization with fiber optics and newer technologies and then even gave me a dose of nano-bots to assist in my germination. They didn’t help at all. They told my parents it could come right at any time. Nobody knew why I hadn’t even been able to bring forth one branch from a single one of the many gill-like openings on either side of my body. I was a barren waste. My mother and father both promised they would never put me through the agony of transplantation. You could always tell when someone had transplants. There were horrible stories about what happened when the body rejected the branches. Sometimes they grew in the wrong direction, into the body instead of the world. Rumors abounded that those branches came from cadavers. Those were the fruits of the dead. Yuck. In the end, the medical consensus, the recommended course of action? Home schooling. Hide her.

I began to stay in the house all the time. I joined some support groups but this was on my phone, not in real life. I became close with some of those kids and even a few of the adults. Half would preach that were would be a cure soon. And about half would say we’re okay just the way we are. A few were just as silent as me. Being fertile isn’t everything, they would say. Food can be grown anywhere. We don’t even need the transgenic fruit to survive. For the vast majority of human history, people were not half-trees. Great minds and spirits of the past did not produce fruit. Well, not literally. Not on a single day of their lives.

True, there was that recent argument that Jesus had been the way we are now. “I am the vine and you are the branches.” And other quotes like that. “Eat of my body and drink of my blood.” I think it’s funny that today Jesus is always portrayed in visual art as a total fruiter, and yet when you look at the art of the distant past, he was just like any other human.

There are still countries, I would tell myself, that have resisted the transgenic revolution. These were usually smaller countries, many of them dominated by some of the newer religions that were catching on. I can’t tell you how many times in my fantasies I saw myself moving to one of those countries, perhaps finding my great love there looked exactly like me. I knew that when I was older I could always fall back on visiting one of those dating sites exclusively for the non-germinating. But I didn’t look forward to the experience. I tried to imagine myself falling in love with someone just like me. It made me feel so weird. It made me want to just float out of my body.

Actually, if I emigrated to one of those non-transgenic countries, my foreign love wouldn’t even have opercula. He would be a “skinflint,” to use the horrible term the fruiting use to insult the fruitless. Would I be as accepted as I am? Would my love want me to undergo painful surgeries to remove my opercula, so my body would look like the cultural norm? Wouldn’t my lover want my body to look like a body he grew up fantasizing about?

Things all sped up when my sister had gone from being engaged to actively planning her wedding. I can still see my mother and her sitting before that glowing screen, oohing and aahing at the various wedding dresses with their golden and silver body trellises. There were nectar supplements to assure a bride had a bountiful harvest on her body for her wedding night. Some brides-to-be grew their branches very long in the back in preparation for the big day, so they could be woven into the train of the wedding dress. The groom would then harvest these on the honeymoon. Some guys got so hot for that ritual. They would trade stories. I hated overhearing those conversations.

I remember the day I left. I had been watching a scene in a movie in which a very beautiful young man was sunning himself on a dock. He was about my age. He was famous. He was absorbing the light he needed to complete his natural fruition. His branches were strong and wiry, like a second musculature outside his already chiseled body. He had gone through his latest seasonal flowering and now he was bearing fruit. Some sort of miniature pear-hybrid all over him. I had to turn it off. Because I imagined the look he would give me after seeing my body. And then how quickly his gaze would avert itself, knowing where not to look ever again.

I went into the river on a summer night. It was warm water, or warm enough anyway, and I had no fear of drowning. Like virtually all non-germinaters, my malfunctioning opercula hid functional gills. True, these were vestigial, but I could submerge for extended periods. This is why people like me had even been banned from the Olympics. Our unfair advantage.

I had swim googles on. And a strong waterproof flashlight I had only recently purchased. I wondered what my family would make of that, when they saw the last purchase I had made. I hoped they would not follow me, not create embarrassing MISSING notices. I wasn’t missing. I was gone.

I swam towards the Deadlands. The area of no video cameras, the area we are forbidden to inhabit. The area which the last great war had destroyed. It had once been a metropolis swarming with life. It was a long journey, but I made it. I didn’t really care what happened to me then, the night I swam away, but that has changed now.

I had to leave the river and walk the last fifty miles or so. Down the dead highways. I thought they were pretty. The desolation. The wildflowers everywhere taking back the roads. The animals come to look at you. They’re no longer afraid.

I don’t want to go back. This is home now. My problem now seems small in comparison to those faced by the war survivors here and those crazy enough to come live here. I’m able to help people here. People with greater challenges than me. Skinflints abound, but so do variant transgenic beings of all stripes. We have a loose form of government that’s almost no government at all. We are blocked from receiving news from the outside world. Our technology only operates within the Deadlands. The outside world doesn’t want us to know anything.

I hope my sister had a beautiful wedding. I hope she has a lovely marriage. I hope her children bear fruit and their children bear fruit. “Long vines to you!” as the wedding toast goes.

One night the jamming of signals they do out there must have gone down. Because an iffy signal bled over onto my screen and we were suddenly watching their t.v. for a short while. Instead of our home grown programs. It was a beauty pageant. A glittery affair. Vines everywhere. Some of my friends were over, and their children, and we all gathered around to watch the girls strut and flounce to show off their fruits.

Many of those in the room had never even seen fruiting bodies. There were squeals of laughter and disgust from the kids. Parents chided them. These older ones looked at my opercula in the flickering light from the screen and deeper lines formed in the brows of some of my friends. “You okay?” they asked, as true friends do.

“Of course I’m okay, stupid!”

We all laughed.

Later that night, after they had all left, I went into my bedroom at the rear of my house, and sat on the edge of my bed facing a pier mirror. That mirror which had just always been here in this house that we found, that was ours for the taking. That mirror which had probably belonged to someone who died a hundred years ago. I like that mirror.

I no longer wear the clothing they wear in the outside world, with openings for branches. I wear whole garments now. But I was naked.

I held a pair of pruning shears in my right hand, and as I looked in the mirror, I clipped each branch that had begun to grow from each operculum.

I felt good doing it. And then my lover came into the room. He was monstrous. He was beautiful. He was the sun in the night.

“Do my back, darling…please?”

He smiled as he took the shears tenderly from my hand.