Over the Yiousouri Tree

by Avra Margariti

3225 words

© 2024 Avra Margariti

There is a tree in the sea and it births monsters.

• • •

Or so Mana says as we lift the nets bulging with the morning catch. The nets are woven out of dried seaweed snagged against our boat, and old sailor-rope grown soft with the water’s erosive tongue.

What’s a sailor? I ask after I’ve spilled the writhing fish all over our boat’s curved belly.

Hush, Khore, stop with all these questions. You will know when you become Mana yourself.

When she bends down to retrieve the empty nets, the skin of her belly sags like rotten kelp. I touch my own stomach: taut, unwrinkled. Yet one day it will stretch, too, after I have given birth to her the way she gave birth to me.

The fish keep flailing — drowning — for a long time. The dawn crests above, while below the sea sways us. Mana uses her sharp fingernails to slice the fish bellies open for us to slurp our breakfast. The fish’s insides are white flesh striated with stubborn red life. I know if I don’t stop asking questions, it will be my skin those algaed nails dig into next.

So I let Mana talk about the tree under the water. How it grows from the bottom of the seafloor, its sturdy roots twisting down to the core of the world. One dark-wood twig snapped from the fragrant yiousouri is enough to heal all ills, even unmake life and death as we know it. But you must catch the tree sleeping, or risk its barbed branches impaling you. Gutting you like fish bellies.

Did our past selves catch it sleeping? I ask, although the answer is writ in the grooves under my fingertips — the wooden protection of our boat, dark and sweet-smelling beneath our bodies, and the bodies of every incarnation before us.

No, Mana says, smiling sharply at the sun that rises heated overhead, yet never once burns or blisters our bare bodies. All the mothers and daughters of our lineage, we made a deal with the yiousouri tree.

• • •

The fish and the birds and the seafoam are better storytellers than Mana could ever be. I move to the stern of our tiny boat while Mana occupies the bow. I mend our nets under the midday sun, and Mana picks at her teeth with a fishbone. Our vessel is so small, our legs still brush together in the middle, under the weathered seat and its oars frozen salt-stiff.

There is no room for secrets here.

Yet I have managed still to keep things hidden from her. How I have taught myself to speak the language of fish and bird and seafoam, the way she can read the wheeling movements of the stars when night falls heavy over our unmoving boat.

I lean over the edge of the stern and chirp wordlessly, my throat barely moving, my lips pressed shut in case Mana is watching.

• • •

Things the fish and the birds and the seafoam have sung to Khore:

Whoever heard of small girls spending their whole life on a smaller boat?

Whoever saw them drink water drained of salt, subsist on meat and seaweed, sleep a mere breath from the belly that birthed them?

Whoever thought girls could know fewer secrets than the fish and birds and seafoam?

• • •

The fish always mock me after I have killed one of their own. We used to pluck the bird feathers to sew into clothing, but I begged Mana to stop, not wanting the birds to silence their song around me in retaliation. The seafoam never holds any grudges, ever placid and impeccable.

Yet even the fish’s memory is short. By moonlight they will be back to serenading me with wet shanties dredged from the deep, about carnivorous mermaids and lost shipwrecks.

I know a mermaid is a half-Khore and half-fish. But what’s a shipwreck? I will ask and be told: it’s like a sunken boat but bigger, full of dead dead dead.

I ask the fish and the birds and the seafoam, did you meet the previous me? What was Mana like as a Khore? Was I a good mother to her? Did I ever sink my nails into her flesh to silence all her questions?

The birds take flight, wings skirting the water’s surface. They snatch the fish in their beaks and flap away to break their fast.

Neither fish nor bird replies, but the sea susurrates something close to pity.

• • •

A conversation, overheard by seafoam, repeated through various incarnations as many times as there are fish in the sea and birds in the sky:

When will we leave the boat? Khore asking Mana. Will someone find us? Are there more mothers and daughters out there in the deep vast blue?

And Mana staring off into the borderless distance. Stop asking questions. You will know when you become Mana, and I am Khore.

But will we ever leave? insisting Khore, curiosity a copper-blooded taste in her mouth.

Silence, as fathomless as the sea.

• • •

Mana knows how to read the approaching storms. The turn comes when the sky is gravid purple, and the waves fog right through like dead fish eye. The birds abandon us to look for shelter where trees grow in open air rather than water, on this thing called land. We have never once moved from where we have been anchored since the beginning. All that’s left are secret hoarded stories for me to know of that which exists beyond our boat.

When the storm comes, Mana shows no fear, so I swallow mine deep where she cannot grasp it. Neither of us gets sick or stays injured as long as we are cradled in the wood’s sacred protection. But we must not topple into the sea if we are to survive the coming storm. We do not bother to shelter; keeping warm, staying dry and comfortable, these have never been a priority. Mana uses our salt-encrusted fishing nets to tie herself to our vessel, oarlock to oarlock. Her body spreads out to span the whole scant length of our home, seaweed-tangled hair catching against the bow, ragged toenails scrambling against the stern.

It is my job to curl into her side like a nautilus in its shell; like I want to burrow into the recesses between her ribs where the elements won’t pry me away. I must hold through wave and thunder onto this body I despise, the only other body in the world. I once crawled from it covered in effluvia of blood and mucus. It will one day regrow inside me, a body I will have to birth and baptize in my own fluids.

• • •

There is one thing I know for certain. What every Khore knows, when it is her turn to become Khore. To be the one who does not the birthing, but the being born.

One day our roles will be reversed.

Mana will wither into old age, and I will let her body sink like an anchor dropped when that time comes. Then I will swell and swell under a pearl-string of full moons, rocked by our boat-cradle while mother turns to daughter inside me; while I become mother myself. I will be hungry, and I will eat the whole sea of its fish and its flesh, but I will be protected by the yiousouri’s spell. I will be alone while the metamorphosis takes place, but never will I be alone for good.

One day I will be the Mana and she, the Khore. The way it has happened too many times before us to keep count.

• • •

When the rain comes down in chilling sheets of water, it washes away feathers, scales, and days of accumulated filth born of our body functions. Mana’s breath rasps in my ears. The sound of it is more painful than the prick of raindrops on my naked back. It makes something inside me cower, my organs wanting to tuck tight against each other, my skin to shrivel small around them. The rain streaking my face masks the freshwater salt of my tears.

Yet there is a silver lining still. When the rain departs, and the sea is soothed again, it will have left behind a sparkling bounty of gifts.

• • •

A list of flotsam Khore found in the water, like many Khores before her:

- A minnow made of wood with a hook for a mouth. A lure, the flesh-and-blood fish offered. A false god masquerading among us.

- A message in a bottle, scrawled in loopy handwriting she didn’t know how to read. Yet she ran the bleeding ink across her skin, watched her magic-pristine body stain blue with someone else’s story, until she was marked with it all over.

- A round, serrated seashell, cold to the touch. An object for which she had no name, but the birds called a crown cap. Khore ran the sharp edges of it across her pale flesh while Mana slept beside her. She cut her fingers open, watching the skin knit together, yet the blood still seep through her pile of grimy treasures as if to say, it’s me, I’m me, I’m here.

• • •

A list of things Mana allowed Khore to keep in her side of the boat:

- Nothing but seafoam, dissolving between her twitching hands.

• • •

A dark smudge emerges in the horizon upon shimmery, after-storm wavelets. The nearer it draws, the whiter it becomes even as mist blurs its form; a sight at once strange and familiar. It is a boat like the one we occupy, but bigger, with pale, puffy clouds catching the wind. The clouds are set on wooden spires, branch-like and tall enough to pierce the sky.

It appears the storm has planted a seed of urgency inside me. I shout and jump and wave my arms toward the Bigger-Boat. “We’re right here! I’m here, come find me, take me with you!”

Our boat rocks from side to side with my choppy movements. Mana, from her crouching position, grasps my hip with bruising force to pull me down, hissing, “Do you want us to capsize and lose the boat’s protection forever?”

We tussle about the cramped space, our long hair — the same color as our waste we throw overboard — tangling together like clumps of seaweed. I bite and she claws and the cuts heal as soon as they appear but we still hurt each other. Still, we hurt.

By the time I manage to drag myself upright again, the Bigger-Boat is gone, vanished in the horizon’s dream-blue mist.

Is immortality really worth it when all we do with it is sit confined in our boat, watching the sun and moon vanquish each other every dawn and dusk, an endless loop for all our days?

But when I open my panting mouth to ask, Mana plunges my head into the sea. Shocking-cold saltwater rushes up my nostrils as she holds me down by the nape of my neck, the barnacle-encrusted hull scratching my face. I squint my stinging eyes, hoping for a glimpse of the yiousouri tree, but the seafloor is too swampy and far away. All my focus narrows to the ceaseless burn of my lungs. Mana only lifts my head back to the boat once I’ve stopped struggling.

She talks about storing the fresh rainwater for drinking, as if nothing happened.

• • •

There is no room for secrets here. There is no room for growth.

• • •

After a storm, the sky is changed, too. A black so clear it’s infinite, beset by celestial bodies. I stay up late to watch the stars tossed about like seaspray, like bloodspray.

I wonder, are there more daughters and mothers like us among the constellations? And if so, who did they make a deal with?

Mana sleeps curled around me: a heavy, oppressive weight. I tuck myself close to the boat’s concave wall, but it’s impossible to evade the body heat she exudes.

I ask the fish and the birds and the seafoam: why should she keep all the flotsam from me? Why can we not row to the unseen shore where all my grimy treasures come from? Why must I give birth to Mana, make her Khore, make her captive?

Mana and I have the same face, but it is not a face beloved. When I catch my reflection in the water, I’m less wrinkled and mean-mouthed, but it is still Mana’s features I see. And it is a face that revolts my stomach.

I think about the yiousouri, magical tree of the sea. How, to get what you want from it, you have to catch it asleep. Unawares.

• • •

Khore lied. There is another secret she keeps close to her chest:

When Mana sleeps, Khore plucks fish from sea and bird from sky. She takes serrated seashell, or crown cap, or her own overgrown fingernails. A string of giddy dissections: diminutive bodies sliced open while their hearts still flutter — not for sustenance, but to reveal their dawn-pink insides. While the fishbones are splinter-thin and prickle under Khore’s nailbeds, the birds have hollow bones, whistling like wind-song when she presses them against her tongue.

Khore likes to imagine it is Mana’s body, Mana’s bones.

The magical wood of the boat doesn’t heal her dissected treasures. They haven’t made a deal with the yiousouri tree.

The fish and the birds have short memories.

We do not forgive but, in time, we will always forget.

• • •

The net of dried seaweed and old sailor-rope coils around Mana’s wrists, binding them together so she will fish-flail, but not seafoam-float. When I use all my meager weight to push her overboard, she doesn’t have time to wake up, cling to the hull, or take me down with her.

She sinks. Not even bubbles remain of her under the gutted sky.

I stretch across the boat and for the first time since I was small, I can spread my arms out to their full wingspan without touching the flesh of another. My heart sings light as bird-bones.

I am no longer Khore. I will never become Mana.

I simply am.

• • •

I wake up to my belly bulging like nets with the morning catch.

Despite being left to the mercy of the elements all our lives, we have never succumbed to rain’s rattling cough or the sun’s burned-flesh caress. Wooden splinters were always ejected from our bodies; cuts by scale, talon, and fingernail closing over moments after they appeared.

I asked Mana once, do we die of old age like the birds do? She sucked her lips and stared off into the cloud-haze, then down, where the yiousouri slept in sand-mired dreams.

Now my body cracks under the sun’s glare. When I touch my forehead, it’s hot with fever, a migraine pulsing ruthless undertows behind my brows. I feel like an octopus being slammed against the gunwales to tenderize for dinner. Has our — my — boat’s protection ceased to work now that the circle is broken?

The cramps come next, rope-twisting my gut. Salt rubs my lips to bleeding scabs. I soil the wood under my body with foul fluids I am too weak to contain. Vomit sour water over the side of the boat, but the expulsion does little to temper the unfamiliar pain.

Is this my penance then, for daring to seek something better for myself? For breaking a pact sealed, like my fate, long before I was born?

I sleep and wake regardless of the sun and moon’s trajectories. I dream of Mana’s body bloating in the sea, a waterlogged carcass swelling in concert with the distention of my belly, and the moon. Her death-reek that only the fish can smell, reflected in the odors and discharges of my body. I’m too weak to separate salt and water for drinking, so my throat lining grows gritty scales, rasping with each labored breath.

Often, I am dragged from half-dozes, thinking I can feel ragged fingernails scratching my stomach from within.

Mana is no longer here to hold me down. Yet I am more flightless than ever. Even the birds swooping pitying patterns above me know this.

What if I have not shattered the circle, but merely cracked it?

• • •

I beg the fish for gills, flopping beseeching on my belly like one of their own. The fish merely watch me thrash, refusing to divulge their secrets. Perhaps their flesh remembers the collective trauma of my dissections, even if their minds have forgotten.

So I hack at the gunwale with my splitting nails, until I hold a dark splinter of yiousouri-wood. I plunge the splinter into my flesh, jagged edges slicing gills on either side of my neck. Like Mana’s scratching fingernails, I think as blood drips down my naked chest to pool in the swell of my belly. The blistered skin ripples from within like the wave-tossed sea. I keep the piece of sacred wood in my mouth for added protection, let its blood- and salt-sharp tang coat my tongue.

I need to know what happens under the water, what has become of Mana’s body. Maybe the seafoam will whisper a ritual of old to put her vengeful spirit to rest.

For the first time in my life, I dive over the side of the boat. Before, I had to haul water inside its hull even for a wash, lest I travel too far from the magic of the yiousouri wood. From Mana’s control.

Despite my weakened state, the saltwater doesn’t choke my nostrils and throat. The splinter sings in my mouth. It vibrates like it recognizes the tree from which it came, the mother it will return to.

I let it lead me to the yiousouri tree, sinking down murky depths where even the boat’s shadow merges with the mire shrouding the sunlight. And as I descend, pushing down against my belly’s unwieldy weight, I look around for Mana’s body, or what the sea has left of her. The fish crowd me in clusters of slicing scales, their eyes flashing lightning-white like they know things I ignore.

When the yiousouri tree comes into view, I clench my teeth around the splinter in my mouth until it slices my tongue. The dark, redolent wood emerges from the sand of the seabed tentacle-like, stretching its knotted forks toward the water’s surface. And in every barbed branch lies snagged a body. Their waste-brown hair floats in twisting tendrils in the currents, their naked skin tinged the blue of dreams. The skin of their bellies sags like rotten kelp.

Oh, how the fish, the birds, the seafoam must laugh at us.

All these impaled bodies — with their eyes closed like they are sleeping, and their sternums red over the heart-wound where the wooden spines protrude — they wear the same face, perfectly preserved. It is Mana’s face. And it is mine.

Life stirs in my stomach in concert with the yiousouri tree feeding on the dead.

Hush, Khore, you will know when you become Mana yourself.

The circle is not broken, but drawn anew: a pound of flesh paid by reincarnated instinct.

A new covenant with the yiousouri tree.

• • •

There is a tree in the sea and it births monsters.

• • •

Or so I tell Khore as we lift the nets bulging with the morning catch.