encounters · 2 min read ·
The Pale Orchard
Each tree grows in the shape of whoever lies beneath it. Do not count them.
Beyond the old city wall, past the last bus stop and the shuttered abattoir, there is an orchard nobody planted.
It is beautiful in daylight. The trees have bark as white as birch and leaves that turn silver when the wind lifts them. In spring they flower briefly, a pale pink that smells faintly of hospital soap. In autumn they give small, sour fruit, warm to the touch even on frosty mornings.
It is only when you walk among them that you notice the shapes.
No two trees grow alike. One leans with its trunk folded at the middle, like someone sitting with their head on their knees. One rises in a long curve with two branches reaching forward, like someone running. One is low and wide, bent over a hollow in the ground as if shielding it. There is a pair, close together, whose upper branches have grown into each other and cannot be separated.
Murrow's old people say each tree grows in the posture of someone buried beneath it, unrecorded, in the hour they died. Nobody has dug to find out. Nobody needs to.
In 1994, during the Blackout Census, many of the city's census takers were found here at dawn — not among the trees, but as trees: new saplings, waist-high, white as paper, each bent forward over the ground with one branch held out flat, the way you hold a clipboard. Their forms were found completed and neatly stacked at the orchard gate. Every household in Murrow had been counted. The numbers were very large.
There is one rule about the orchard, and the Archive repeats it on every map: never count the trees aloud.
Clerks ask why. The answer the Archive gives is procedural: because the number of trees is a record, and records spoken aloud are binding. Count the trees and you will have registered the total. And the total, once registered, must remain correct.
If there are three hundred and twelve trees and you say three hundred and twelve, then three hundred and twelve it must stay. If you miscount — if you say three hundred and thirteen — the orchard is obliged to make you right.
The Bureau of Quiet surveys the orchard every year, from a helicopter, in silence. Its reports are classified. But the pilot who flew the survey in 2019 left the Bureau shortly afterwards, and the only thing he would say about it, to anybody, was this:
"There's one more every year. And they always lean toward the city."