The Grafting

I’ve been sleeping like a drowned man lately, sinking into black water and surfacing only to gasp. The nights used to be a refuge, a place where my mind could wander free. Not anymore. Now they’re a series of small violences, a door that opens onto a room I can’t escape. I tell myself it’s just stress, the aftermath of the fire that took our barn and everything in it. But I know better. The dreams are not just dreams. They’re messages, and I’ve been reading them wrong.

Three nights ago, I found myself in a vast orchard, the trees heavy with fruit I’d never seen before—globes the color of old blood, their skins swollen with a kind of inner pressure. The air was thick with the smell of rotting sweetness, and the ground beneath my bare feet was soft and loamy, giving way to my weight like flesh. I walked between the rows, touching the trunks, feeling the bark rough and warm, as if they were alive with a fever. In the distance, I saw a figure standing under one tree, but when I approached, it was just a scarecrow, its straw limbs stuffed with something dark and glistening. I remember thinking, ‘This is not my orchard,’ and then I woke up with my jaw clenched so hard my teeth ached.

Last night, the dream shifted. I was in a house, but not mine. It was a clapboard farmhouse, long abandoned, with windows like blind eyes and a porch that sagged under the weight of honeysuckle and rot. I walked inside, and the floorboards creaked beneath me, each step sending a tremor through the walls. The rooms were empty except for the furniture draped in white sheets, and I could hear a faint scratching from the attic, like claws on wood. I climbed the stairs, compelled by a force I couldn’t name, and when I reached the top, I saw a door slightly ajar, spilling a sliver of golden light. I pushed it open, and there was a bed, and on the bed lay a woman—or what was left of her. Her face was a smooth, featureless mask, and her chest rose and fell with a ragged rhythm. I leaned close, and I saw that her skin was covered in thin, pale threads, like the roots of a plant, burrowing into her flesh. One of those threads twitched, and it reached out and brushed my cheek. I woke with a scream stuck in my throat, my body drenched in cold sweat.

I tried to tell my wife, Sarah, about the dreams, but she just patted my hand and said, ‘You need rest, Frank. You’ve been working too hard.’ She doesn’t see the way I flinch at every shadow, or how I’ve started checking the locks twice before bed. But last night, something happened that I can’t explain. I was in the orchard again, but this time I was not alone. There were others—men and women, their faces blank as the woman’s, their bodies covered in those same pale threads. They moved slowly, methodically, like they were tending to the trees. I saw one of them pull a fruit from a branch, and when it came away, the skin of the tree split, oozing a thick, dark sap. The figure pressed the fruit to its face, and the threads on its skin seemed to drink it in, pulsing with a sickly light. And then, one of them turned to me, and the empty place where its eyes should have been fixed on me with a terrible intent. It raised its arm, and the threads on its wrist unfurled like tentacles, reaching toward me. I backed away, but my feet were rooted to the soil. The threads came closer, and closer, and just as they were about to touch my skin, I felt a searing pain in my left hand, and I woke up.

This time, the pain was real. I looked at my hand, and there was a mark—a thin red line, like a paper cut, running across my palm. It itched and burned, and when I touched it, I felt something moving beneath the skin. I didn’t sleep after that. I sat in the kitchen, watching the sun rise over the fields, and I saw that the orchard in my dream had been our own, the one that burned. But in the dream, the trees were thriving, not charred. I remembered the fire, how we’d lost everything that year, and how I’d found a strange seedling among the ashes, with leaves that unfurled like fingers. I’d planted it, thinking it was a gift, a sign of rebirth. But now I wonder if I planted something else. I wonder if the dreams are not just visions, but a grafting—a union of my mind with that tree’s alien consciousness. And the pain in my hand feels like roots, burrowing deeper with every passing hour.

Tonight, I will not sleep. I have a hammer and a can of gasoline in the truck. I’m going to find that sapling and cut it down, burn it, and scatter the ashes. But as I write this, I feel the mark on my palm throb, and I see in the mirror that the veins in my arm are slightly green, like new shoots pushing through dark soil. I don’t know if I’ll make it to the field. I don’t know if I’m still in control. But if you find this, know that the dreams are not just dreams. They are invitations, and I have already accepted.