Revenir | Beneath the Hawthorn Tree

Of cycles of life and grief and powerlessness

Hello and welcome to the Fiction Section of The Untangling. Just like in my main publication, these stories centre on themes of identity and what it means to be human. Main genres are literary and slipstream fiction and fantasy written with a lyrical and poetic writing style.

You are reading a standalone story from Revenir, an anthology I co-wrote with my son, who died in 2021. The stories explore the human experience and delve deep into themes of love, loss, and the search for meaning. Written in a haunting, lyrical style and set in a single fantasy world, this collection is for readers looking for character-driven stories with strong emotional resonance.

I remembered him in the flowering of the hawthorn tree that stood beside the path we used to walk near our small village, a witness to all we once said in days gone by, in distant memories faded with the passing of time. The sun had risen and set a few hundred times since. The details that had once surfaced in my mind in vivid color now dimmed and paled.

When we met, the wind adored him. It lifted his dark hair until it looked like ripples upon water under the light of the sun. And I thought I could stay here for an eternity, to learn of him, to run my fingers through the crevices of his spirit until I knew every corner and strand, read the secrets in the turns of his mouth and unravel the locked doors of his mind.

He loved to touch the tips of our fingers together. He said it felt to him like a touching of kindred souls, one that did not need intertwining to know they belonged as one.

But I learned that this to him was a veil, for he could not bear for another to draw near.

When we became lovers, the earth whispered of him. I watched the way his feet would strike the ground as he ran. The dust followed after him, lifting as a cloud until my eyes could no longer perceive the details of him whom I then knew so well: the dark freckles dotting his arms, toned by long hours by the fire hammering iron, the single dimple beneath the upward turn of his lips. Yet by then I knew him by the rhythm of his breath, the sound of his voice, deep and unbroken.

I loved him, the blacksmith’s boy.

He would wave to me as I laughed behind him, point to the hawthorn, and say, “Come now, before the last petal falls.”

And I would follow.

But always we returned to lie beneath the tree as twilight fell, his arm a pillow for my head, our faces raised to the heavens through the lit branches. When summer drew near, white petals rained upon us as snow. I wished often that the moments would slow, that we might linger there and never part.

“Do you suppose the seers read the future in the stars, truly?” I asked.

He turned to me and traced the line of my jaw with a finger. So light, so light. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. Such things are too lofty for we who till the earth. Survival is all we seek. Yet some are fighting now, fighting for rights even people such as us deserve.”

A hardness laced the softness of his words even then, though he breathed them as a sigh. I touched my fingertips to his but could not unravel the mysteries hidden behind his eyes.

I gazed into their deep pools that I thought I knew, and a sadness tainted my heart where before there had been only the joy of knowing, of belonging.

“What a burden it must be,” was all I knew to say.

Then words fell from his lips like the cascade of sparks I'd watched leap from his anvil—bright, dangerous, beautiful in their rebellion—words he’d held back from me but could no longer under twinkling stars and talk of seers in their towers.

“Suppose the seer is looking at the heavens as we do now. What does he see? Our little village of lowly townspeople who sow seed and hope for enough harvest to pay the taxes and feed ourselves? No, he serves the whole of the land.”

I threaded my fingers through his, wound them together. He did not pull away.

He sighed, rested his head on mine. “The travelers today came from the city. They grumbled under their breaths thinking we would not hear. Dry bread when they are used to fine rolls dripping with butter. Their clothes, though dusty from the road, were made of finer cloth than I’ve seen. I watched them pinch Savi’s bottom as she poured their water, watched one of them splash her in the face as he demanded wine she did not have.”

I turned my head up toward him. The night veiled his expression from me. “They are brutes and they are gone now.” I kissed his bottom lip. “This is enough.”

He kissed me in turn. “Yes.”

In the end, the key to all the things he could not say ever eluded my grasp.

I wanted—oh, what did I want? A love that might transcend the daily toil for bread, that lifted my heart from an existence of want, to contentment. I did not fear the downtrodden life I had been given, nor did I fear the silence promised to those of my status.

Mine would never be a story carved into stone or spun into song, nor remembered through the passing of the ages.

What I feared was the silence of those dearest to me, of their drifting away.

When the autumn came, the leaves of our hawthorn turned the color of crimson, such that at dusk it looked as though the setting sun had set it ablaze. I saw rising anger knitted about his brows, a fiery storm that I could not quench with soft words. For I could not change the place we had been allotted, could not give him the freedom for which he yearned.

His was a spirit too high to be chained to the meagre lot we have, as was his misfortune to have been born among the lowly.

Within the palm of his hand, he held catastrophe, though I did not know it then. And when I tucked my hand into his, I did not know that he gave the heart of it to me. I could only look up at him, try to read the storms collected into the downward turn of his lips. By then he had cast his gaze far off, and daily he slipped further from me.

“This is enough,” I would say, but he would no longer reply.

I did not yet know he was lost to me even as we spoke. Whispers of the young seer’s impending death crept to the far corners of even our remote home. The wisdom of the stars was to be left to a girl younger than I. My blacksmith’s boy still hammered iron at the heat of the forge, the smell of burning metal lingering in his hair and coarse tunic whenever I buried my face in it.

But he was no longer making spades and pitchforks for our farmers in the fields. Even as I flitted to him, I snatched glimpses of steel before he shut doors behind him.

“Those are not for your eyes,” he said.

“Then?”

“I cannot say. One day, perhaps, you will know.”

I sought answers but feared his wrath. I longed for the simplicity of our early romance, longed to pull him back from the destruction he now pursued. What were the battles of lords to our townspeople when we had our own cares to tend? Yet what words could I voice to assuage his desire for a world unknown to us?

My brother found me when I lay on my cot one night, sleep elusive. “Your lover has gathered villagers to his side. He meets with them long after the sun sets when all the world is still. There are rumors, rumors of uprising in the east. I think he intends to join the rebels. If these whispers have reached our ears, sister, then be assured the elders in their high chairs will have heard of them.”

Fear pounded in my ears and silenced my tongue. Clouds hid the full moon’s light from illuminating my brother’s face. I heard judgment in his voice; he declared my love foolish.

“Will you not stay his hand?”

Tears stung my eyes at his reproach. I could but hide my face in the pillow, for I had long lost the power to sway.

In three weeks, the blacksmith’s boy had gone.

“I will make for you a better world,” he said before he left, “and we will be together at the dawning of a new world.”

I grasped his hand, a vain attempt to cling to one I loved and once knew. “Stay,” I pleaded.

He did not.

The storm broke upon us soon after. It came on our village with a fury we did not understand.

It will be long until I forget the screams that ran through the air as soldiers rode through with their swords. They wanted the names of insurgents foreign to us. No shrieks of denial could appease their demands. How were the near-starved fringes of the kingdom to prevail over disciplined regiments? I ran past the barren hawthorn tree, covering my ears. Savi’s body lay sprawled on the ground at her doorway, her legs bent in strange angles. Orange flames light up the sky, larger than any bonfire.

When it was over, I looked over the landscape of devastation. Where once there were flowering buds of springtime and simple joys, now lay scattered remains of the life I once had. Death, which had before been a distant specter that was to us a quiet slumber, was now a picture of blood and tears. Only a remnant was left to give witness to the generations of ages past.

“Remember this mercy,” the captain said before he led his troops away.

We who survived hung our heads. The scent of blood and burnt flesh wafted across the cold air.

Those who remained could but bury their dead as the ground began to freeze—and bury their grief. Time did not stop for hungry mouths. We breathed ashes for weeks My brother’s face held a haunted look that would never leave him.

And never did I hear even a whisper of what had befallen my blacksmith boy.

I learned more of the wider world than I had cared to know, of cycles of life and grief and powerlessness. I learned of prison walls erasing the memory of those locked within, and willed my recollections of the way our fingers touched and his dimpled smile to carve themselves into my heart. Hoped he had died and not been left to this fate—of being forgotten.

The ground beneath my feet seemed to speak to me of him. I soon found that I liked to walk with feet bare, to feel the earth pressing against my skin as a caress. And the tree, the tree, barren now against the winter sky, beholding the story of our love and its loss.

I remembered him in the flowering of the hawthorn tree. Yet springtime would nevermore hold the same promise of future hope it once did.

For he was gone.

The Story Behind the Story

While writing this story, I didn’t intend for it to become one of social injustice and oppression, but it ended up that way somehow. These themes do tend to sneak their way into many of my stories, though I don’t consciously put them in. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

What I really want to portray was the gradual separation between two lovers when their ideologies and paths diverge. The female narrator wants a simple life where she can live in peace with her blacksmith boy, while he is discontent with their lot in life. Both of their desires are valid, which I believe makes their losses all the more tragic.

We hear, of course, of the dramatic break-ups that end in bitter explosions and flames. What about those that end quietly, when two people simply want different things and drift apart?

Obviously, this story meandered from my original purpose, since it did end in flames, albeit not entirely of the couple’s own making. In truth, the quiet splits render screams just as loud, but are sometimes not given the same weight or language as their counterparts. Perhaps I did this pair a disservice by allowing the story to turn somewhat political. Perhaps unconsciously, I gave them the flames they needed to rage and wail for the breaking of their love.

What are your thoughts?