Secondary Writer’s Anthology
SECONDARY ENGLISH
ALIEN HARVEST Atakan Y Year 11
One night, the hum turned to words. The colonists gathered in silence as the fruit sang. “Southern trees bear a strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the root.” Captain Elliot ordered an immediate investigation. Dr McRae, head of xenobotany ran endless tests. No speakers; surprisingly, no tech interference. There was just silence during the day and that voice at night. They tired cutting one down. Inside the fruit was nothing. No seeds, no flesh, just a strange darkness like staring into something ancient, forgotten and cold. After that, the voices grew louder. The children were the first to change. They started dreaming of fire, of ropes, of screaming. They drew pictures of the trees, not just standing but remembering. Their trunks had faces and their roots had hands. The kids whispered names in their sleep. Names no one in the colony recognised. Then the trees whispered. “Abram Smith”. No one on the colony roster matched. Synapse-7 ran a cross-century search. Earth records showed 2033 African Americans lynched. An obscure, ancient fact. No real answers.
The next night, “Thomas Shipp.” More names, more vanished people pulled from the forgotten shadows of Earth’s history. The children began to chant the names in their sleep, their neural implants glitching flashes of fire, taught rope and static. The colony doctor disconnected them from Stellar, but the images kept running, dark silhouettes swinging beneath the trees. One child murmured in her sleep, “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.” Havey, the tech officer installed jammers around the plantation. For two days they had silence. Then the trees moved. No footsteps. No roots, but somehow, they were closer, standing beside shelter domes, near the solar banks. The jammers were fried. Havey was found inside the AI core, suspended from the ceiling, veins threaded with silver scars. A replica fruit shaped exactly like him swayed gently nearby. After that, nothing worked. Power grids flickered, Synapse-7 froze mid-sentence. Earth command stopped responding. The atmosphere shimmered with static.
McRae stopped eating. He sat outside each night carving names into the fruit. Each name matched a person erased from the records. Their lives returned only through whispers and the void. Then the trees spoke again, “witness”. The word echoed through the entire colony. In every comms unit, every helmet, every dream and under every image, another line played softly, “Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck, for the rain to gather, for the wind to suck.” The next morning, the plantation was even larger. The fruit no longer hung, they floated above the trees in the sky, orbiting like moons, glowing softly. The trees no longer sang, they waited. The colonists tried to leave. Their transport ship The Endurance ignited its boosters, but just as they lifted off, the ship stalled mid air. It did not crash. It remained suspended in the sky as the trees and their fruit whispered a last verse, “Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.” The colony vanished.
They said the trees bloomed where the bodies fell. The planet was E-27, twenty seventh attempt at a human colony after Earth choked on its own history. Colonising had gone well, with oxygen, rain and crops. But the fruit – the fruit wasn’t planted. It grew by itself. It appeared overnight. Dark, heavy, shaped like nothing found in Earth’s seed banks. Each fruit hung low, like it remembered something, avoiding the sky like it was ashamed. The skin was almost black, glossy and veined with something silver, like old scars. The trees grew near the edge of the colony at first, taking advantage of the southern breeze. Then, slowly they spread. They didn’t move visibly but they arrived in places where they hadn’t been the night before. The colonists ignored them at first, too focused on survival, but then the fruit began to hum; soft, low. A sorrowful kind of music. It didn’t come from the air but from within, like the sound grew inside.
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