Ana steps from the shade of the weed-strangled wordtree. The child chews its fruit in glorious sunshine, her tongue drenched in lexicon. Diphthongs roll deliciously around her mouth like marbles. The berries burst with assonance. Sweet, succulent vowels with a tart consonant rind, soaked in knowledge and nourishment for the soul.
Across patches of bone-white earth and ink-black roots, Ana’s friend Noam struggles to pick fruit from a sagging branch. His night-dark hair sticks up at angles like tangled roots, his leg knotted as a storm-bent trunk.
Closing her eyes, the sun’s warmth on her face, Ana licks up the fruit’s alliterative allure from her fingers. She takes a bite of another berry, but it tastes bitter. Sticks in her throat as she swallows the new word.
Spitting out the pit, Ana spots Noam close to another wordtree, one bearing false fruit.
«Noam, c’mon! We’ve taken too much,» Ana calls, and brushes a ringlet of coffee-colored hair behind her ear. In the corner of her eye, she notices the slang-weeds tightening around the wordtree’s trunk and feels regretful, sorry for the threatened nymforrest her father tries to protect and wishes she could help.
Noam’s crooked leg dust-clouds as it drags behind him. He wipes the fruit juice from his mouth with this sleeve and takes Ana’s offered hand, his palm warm and oily but comforting. His features pure innocence.
Once punctuated with blue-black flowers, the thinning nymforest is grammarless now, choked with slang-weeds. On the verge of being lost forever. They walk in silence until Noam snaps it like a rotten branch: «Ana…You think the false fruit can cure someone?»
«No. It’s forbidden, Noam. Poisonous! The Elders told us.»
«But, maybe—»
Ana’s father, tribe leader, appears in the distance. Noam’s hand slips free from her grasp. «Later, Ana.»
«Okay. Later. »
Face weary, Ana’s father meets her, and kneels as if the nymforrest’s weight is resting on his shoulders. «What word did you learn today, little one?»
«“Endangered.”» The word sticks in her teeth as she remembers the fruit’s bitterness, its sickly taste.
Father nods dejectedly. He stares at her hard. «I hope you didn’t take more than your fill.»
Using all her will power, she imagines the clean taste of the word “truth”. «No, I swear!»
«So why are you sweating?»
A droplet falls from her brow onto the dusty earth. Ana holds her breath.
Father’s stern face cracks into a smile. «It’s okay, you’re learning, child, but we must be careful. Now, let’s get back before Mother hunts us both down,» he says and winks at her.
They tread back home, Ana in her father’s giant shadow, wanting to understand and unburden him. «How can we save the wordtrees, Father?»
«Doing what we’ve always done, darling. Plant more letter-seeds and saplings, spread the words through our stories. By not giving up hope,» he says, and they fall quiet as the nymforest.
#
At dusk, the narrative tribe gathers around the first wordtree that drips with the blood sun’s last light. The nymforest’s story is shrinking, the Elders say, splintered to tinder and sapped words. The slang-weeds have taken root and will destroy everything we know and value.
#
The next day, Ana’s hands are caked in soil and seed-letters when she finds Noam approaching the poisonous fruit. He plucks it from a low-hanging branch.
«Noam, don’t!» she cries.
His henna eyes hopeful, he swallows hard, and his neck bulges as if it’s stuck in his throat. Noam looks shocked as he digests what he’s eaten, his expression frozen. He snaps out of his stupor and scrambles over to Ana. She thinks his leg is fixed at first, but it’s knotted as ever. Breathlessly, he says: «The wordtrees aren’t dying, Ana! They’re…adapting.»
Noam falls. Ana casually helps him back up, careful not to bruise his pride further.
«I’m fine.» He brushes himself down. «The fruit isn’t poisonous, only truthful. The Elders can’t accept the change.» His tearful eyes lock onto a broken branch straight as a letter “I”. Noam binds it to his leg with weeds. He rises, head raised high, and strides forward.
Ana gasps. Her legs weak, she struggles to soak it all in. «I-I have to tell Father. The Elders have to now they’ve been wrong all this time.» The forbidden fruit bears truth, she thinks, a seed of an idea to set Father free from his burden.
They walk home past weeds they thought spelled the nymforest’s end. Wordtrees with non-indigenous germinations, loaned branches, flexible grammar-structures, and hybridized wordfruits.
On the threshold of their village, Ana notices a budded shoot and a change takes root inside her soul. Her mouth waters at the thought of new words, of nourishing wisdom. Heart swelling, she senses new stories growing around her.