But then I was seeing something.

A pile of waste that had no cause to be there.

Pale branches, mostly yellowish and thin. Or rather, they would have been branches, but their colour and shape weren’t right. Where had they come from? From some strange tree since extinct in our garden? But there were so many of them, it made no sense that they’d all tumbled at once, in this close spot, and then stayed here.

I reached for the closest one, long and thick, and once I had it in my hand I felt a sadness seep into me. A puffing, breathy kind of sadness that a Cure might feel right after they finished crying.

Father said my name in such a way I knew it wasn’t the first time.

–What are these?

What I wanted to say: What are these, and why are they crying?

I held the would-be branch above my head and looked up over my shoulder, could only see part of him – he’d crescented his arm to push the prickle-growth further aside, but otherwise he wasn’t moving.

–I’d forgotten they were here.

I turned around fully then, though my legs were scratching pinker and pinker and my dress getting torn besides. Snagged in a swirl around me. He was looking at it in my hand, but making no move to touch it.

It was high afternoon now and the sun was an upturned bucket above us. I didn’t like the colour this branch turned when the light came through.

–What are they?

His nose moved a half-inch up his face, came down again.

–Your predecessors.

I knew what he meant. Right away I knew, but my thoughts kept darting around. I said

–They’re branches.

On one side of the branch I could see an indentation. A divot. Very smooth.

–That’s the problem. They should be bones.

And now he did move to touch it, taking it from me and moving his forearm slowly past my cheek.

–You can see – here, and he twisted its other side toward me, you can see here where it started to turn …

A bird in a tree, trilling. I thought If I ask him to stop talking he will.

–This happened a few times. They’d take on the colour or the shape or the density in places, and then they’d stop, and then nothing I could do would get them going again.

He tossed it back onto the pile. It made a tinny, echoey sound when it landed.

–Can you see the roots?

–But there’s so many.

–Where?

–Not roots. So many of these.

–You knew you weren’t my only try.

–Yes, but …

I wanted to say It’s not how I was made that bothers me, or that it took you so long to get it right. It’s that you left these here, not caring that I might find them. It’s that you tossed these half-formed things away without ceremony. That you wouldn’t pretend, even in these few moments, that any of it was special to you at all.

What I knew he’d say in return:

Sounds like a Cure’s gotten under your skin, Ada.

He was looking around for the roots again. Every time he moved he blocked a different side of the sun.

–Nothing sacred about birth, Ada. You know that. No matter the species.

–I know.

–Unspectacular business, coming into the world.

–Yes. I know.

These felled versions of myself. What about them could not cohere? What about them went wrong that the earth wouldn’t compact into organ or the branches blanch into bone?

–How many are there?

–How many tries? Including you?

I had a pain in my heart and put a hand there, heard myself make an angry bark of a sound, thinking heart was the wrong word to use.

–Ada.

–Yes.

–You know how you were made.

–Yes.

–You’ve always known.

–Yes.

–Help me find these roots.

I moved around on my knees, finding the risen roots and spending an hour singing them backwards and down. Back into The Ground, back the way they came.

That night I dreamt of my partial siblings. Dreamt myself crouching beside them and asking if they could hear me. Dreamt them angry at me for coming together, for walking around whole and entire.

What’s so special about you, Ada? Why do you get to be alive?

But I wasn’t born alive, I told them. I’ve only been alive a little while.

Meaning only since I met Samson, and then the branch-bones laughed at me. And well they might. It was a foolish thing to say, even in a dream. Foolish to fall in line with a Cure’s girlhood and imagine such feelings belonged to me. But I had been living a muted kind of life, and I had gone all this time without meeting someone who’d fall asleep, of their own accord, beside me.

Paula Greene

Go visit her now?

Oh, I think it’d be too much for me.

We’re all so old, now, and she still looks the same …

Besides, she stopped seeing to us after her father died, and there’s no other reasons to go there – you don’t exactly call in for tea.

–She must’ve liked him enough if she had a baby with him.

–I keep telling you. When Olivia looks at people she doesn’t see people. She sees means to ends.

–Why do you put up with her?

–She’s my sister. We’re orphans … what?