“The Blood Tree,” by Aimee Parkison

Description

Silvia’s husband Raymond is baffled and worried. His wife has begun walking in her sleep, wandering far from their bed, getting lost and tangled in the lush gardens and vegetation of their humid suburban home town. She’s visited by clouds of insects, her body is changing, her desire grows more complex, and Raymond feels himself ever more enthralled …

In Aimee Parkison’s sensual, surreal eco-fable “The Blood Tree,” the Earth’s defense against climate change and ecocide is an act of seduction — and transformation.

Silvia stopped sleeping. After laying awake one night, she ventured into the dark backyard at sunrise and encountered a sculpted body of branches in bloom, spun with honeysuckle, behind the shed: a masculine head carved of curious mist crowned by yellow dahlias, hands of lilies with metallic green hummingbirds flitting over fingertips of fungi.

Like a man, it was walking behind the neighbor’s shed in the shadow of white figs.

The figure caught Silvia, held her down, and kissed her sharply with a thorny tongue that placed a seed inside her mouth. It held her mouth shut until she swallowed the seed. Or so Silvia said, pointing to the backyard outside the kitchen window.

“That’s where he disappeared, into dahlias, to become a pile of yard cuttings.”

Aimee Parkison is the author of seven books and has won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. Parkison is Professor of Fiction Writing at Oklahoma State University and serves on the FC2 Board of Directors. Her newest book of fiction, Surburban Death Project, a collection of stories, will be published by Unbound Editions in 2022. More information about Parkison’s writing is available at www.aimeparkison.com

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