Mulberry trees (Morus spp.) are a species that are gender fluid—they may first be male, then female, then change back again. You can find individual mulberry trees that are dioecious—with only male flowers or only female flowers. But right next to such a tree might be a monoecious specimen, bearing both male or female flowers. And to add another veil of intrigue, sometimes mulberry flowers start out as one sex and transform halfway through the season.
*****
Renata trips over something. She hasn't been looking down, but up into the treetops, listening to what sounded like an entreaty from an intrusive bird. Now she is on the ground with a twisted ankle.
It's a mulberry tree, Renata knows that. It's filled with purple and red fruits, some covering the ground. The palms of her hands are dyed with the stain of the berries, almost the color of blood. So is her linen dress with the half sleeves and the calf length skirt. She winces slightly as she moves her leg. It feels like the pain is not as bad as she had expected when she fell.
She sticks her hands into the clean dirt around the base of the tree, getting the soil on her palms, and then rubs them together vigorously, trying to get some of the berry juice off before it sets and leaves her hands purple. Oh, well. Not clean, perhaps, but no matter. She looks around into the robust limbs above her to find the bird that was crying out and demanding her attention.
At last she notices that what she tripped on is what appears to be pieces of bone. They are large and small, white or yellowed, and rather aged looking, with bits missing that small creatures may have gnawed away. But they truly are dried up bones. The bony matter is strewn about under the creaking bows above. It is hidden to a great degree by the forbs and grasses flourishing beneath the tree.
She thinks she recognizes the bird that called out, but then not really. The call seems familiar but what it is she is unsure. Many birds sound the same to her. She has been so lost in reverie that most bird calls would impinge only slightly on her mind. This one has seemed more urgent as it brings her out of herself.
Out of her sorrow.
Yesterday the final blow had descended, the last thing Renata could bear. She takes a handkerchief out of her sleeve and dabs at her tears. She may easily ignore the sprained ankle as she considers her losses.
One more time she has lost the potential of a child. One more time. They have been trying for so many years. During Arthur's deployment the first time, then while he was at home between tours, then this last time while he was still away across the seas. She had wept as she considered how she could tell him this news one more time. She had been taking such good care of herself. So careful.
It's the worst thing to ever happen to anyone she had thought when she was home from the hospital rocking herself into a stupor of pity. Then the doorbell rang. No, she thought, peeking out around the curtain on the door. No. Not this. Not now.
She had opened the door shivering, her elegant arms encircling her bountiful bosom and holding her head up trying not to collapse as she faced the two men in uniform.
She doesn't remember a lot after that. She awoke this morning in her own bed and is now in the forest that stretches out to the horizon behind their apartment building on the outskirts of the base where they are stationed. She had dressed, waved off the attention of her next-door neighbor, and wandered down across a meadow and into the crunchy, restless autumnal woodlands.
She had not been feeling much of anything until the bird had cried out and interrupted her raging, raving thoughts.
She adjusts herself on the turf under the massive arbor and leans back against the huge trunk of the mulberry tree. She is so very tired. So tired. As her mind falls into a restless, relentless dream, she remembers. Magpie. It was a magpie calling down to her earlier. As if entreating or warning. And she now is out of this world drifting away in her dreamland, her fantasy land, where her visions of joy and hope still live.
Soft and tender is the sense of being caressed, gently and delicately touched, almost tickled. Her seemingly becharmed delusions entwine in her thinking and rueful contemplations.
Something is clinging to her as she slowly awakens. The magpie is perched upon her shoulder and is raptly gazing into her eyes, tilting its head back and forth, and finally it opens its beak and cries out in one of the many voices it has. An admonition, or is it simply a welcome? She can't tell but she knows she isn't afraid even when she sees the woody rootlets laid upon her ankle and somehow warming and soothing the pain. This is odd. Perhaps the oddest of all is that she doesn't really think it strange in the least. It seems normal. She's both worn down and borne up. She accepts the healing and soothing.
The pain is being tempered in the twisted joint but not in her wrenched and wretched heart.
The magpie hops down onto the sod and flicks its long tail feathers in a motion that seems to be gesturing to Renata to follow it. Looking back and then striding with its short legs up and over the large twisty roots and around the trunk, flicking a wingtip out and around, circling the tree so that she will follow.
She rises and passes around the broad girth of the trunk as it seems to spread apart. As she moves the heavy textured bark is drawn away from the living wood and its inner wood shrinks back and more inward, forming a chamber of sorts, open and airy enough to accept her into it and that is the first thing she tries. She sits upon a natural seat, worn and shiny, having apparently been well used in the past. Mosses and ferns surround her.
About this living entrance there are threadlike twigs flittering and fluttering in expectation. Renata is nothing if not confused but her curiosity makes her relax. The fluttering dies down as some tentacular filaments and vines quickly and with trepidatious need touch the pinkness of her cheeks and the curls of her jet black tresses. They retreat up to the lofty heights of the massive tree's limbs and branches.
A geographer's wish to write about the sense of place she feels might vie with similar feelings from an artist about to paint the ambiance and emotions of a place not often found and seldom duplicated and displayed. Both temperaments may be vital to a true understanding. At this moment Renata is neither a geographer nor an artist, although she has been both in the past. She is simply once again relishing a dream that she is floating into. One that is taking her away from her world of ugliness and deeply internalized shame.
Into a world of potential understanding. Perhaps even complete fulfillment.
The magpie skips away, gaining loft, and rises onto a lower branch to be nearby. It watches and waits, letting out a cry or two when it seems necessary.
And the Morus, in the family of Moraceae, awakens completely. And it questions. Has someone returned. Shall I tender hope and renewal to one who needs. Must I accept her as she is, or change her, this one who calls herself Renata. Perhaps restore her. So many decisions.
The mulberry wonders and envelopes this new one in its appendages. Twigs, rootlets, vines, tentacles, and flowing filaments all conspire and move to touch and, perhaps, transform this new one who bears an intense pain that needs soothing more, much more than the ache of a twisted ankle. Her twisted, broken heart may need healing within the tree's stalwart heart.
The mulberry tree is gender fluid. This is its choice as a species and as a figure of myth and monstrosity. It may be a monster if necessary to its own story. Whether a good monster or a bad monster is its choice. Its sentience was somehow its choosing in antiquity. So long ago that it does not remember its own beginning. It only knows that it thinks and it makes decisions.
Now it must decide what this little one needs. If it is to attempt the healing or not. And how it must be done. The judgment must be made if the one without hope is to now regain peace at least once more and become what she might be.
Morus must determine what is best for itself. For its own narrative and history. The magpie cries out in its branches. Giving out raucous and adoring advice. And Renata sleeps once again.
The magpie flaps its wings and takes flight, soaring over the forest, looking intently down into the woodlands and the meadows. And as it flies its visions are sent back to the mulberry. The tree sees what the bird sees. What this bird and many others see that have been welcomed into its swaying branches. It knows what is happening around it and is satisfied that nothing untoward is occurring in its land, this geographic setting that it rules with it own set of rules.
A crow is sitting in a lower branch of the tree. It crooks its head back and forth, gazing intently at the girl lolling below. As it watches closely the mulberry sends out tendrils and vines from its branches to touch Renata as she rests against the massive trunk above the greensward.
Tufts of soft plants caress her legs as she sleeps and the moving elements of the tree begin removing her clothing until her creamy flesh is free of the linen dress. Each under garment slides away as sharply tipped tentacles cut the satin material. She has no need of the bra and panties that have been confining her soft skin and firm body. Her shape emerges with its bounteous breasts and fecund femininity. Her vibrancy fills the tree with what it has learned to know as a deep and abiding pleasure. No other idea will suffice for it to understand fully.
Her raven tresses fall about her gently tossing head and her lips lift into a smile. Her tongue tip licks her scarlet lips. Tendrils have entered her silky hair, touching with confidence her scalp as others spread over her body. Her legs are extending outward with the knees slightly bent and falling apart. The cushiony velvet skin of her thighs quivers slightly. Her trembling toes extend and retract as if she is being tickled and she is placing each soft, delicate foot upon a cushioned pathway to paradise.
Every inch of her is examined and learned. Morus knows her intimately as the smaller filaments and larger tentacles writhe across and into each opening of any kind. Pricks are made with sharp, probing thorns that allow droplets of blood to ooze out and be licked up by mouth-like organs on the edges of vines that suck it into the tree's own vascular system of sap and plant fluids. Her body is known as others have been thoroughly comprehended over the ages of humanity.
And her mind is becoming recognized and celebrated in the heart of the arbor. With its thoughts it is searching and finding the places in the brain that need to be nourished and fed to become the person the tree needs. The areas of the mind that may be changed, or not, depending upon its monstrous motivations and requirements.
It has found the special places it knows well. The areas of pleasure--and of pain. As its ancient mind touches one spot Renata writhes in agony, but only for a moment. Yes, Morus knows that spot well. Many a time in the past has it used that knowledge to punish when it felt it necessary. Numbers of living creatures, human or not, have been condemned and crushed. Now, ever so gently, its thoughts caress places very near the pain centers but which will complete the cycle. And Renata's body twitches and moves spasmodically as the juices begin to slowly leak from her orifices.
The sexual fluids start to drip from her vagina, flowing salaciously past her vulva and dropping down to the grasses and soil beneath her, feeding the age-old plant with her feminine moisture. Her mouth drools with the unrecognized pleasure and her eyelids flutter as tears of final remembrance pass before her inner eye.