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Description
The December before Autumn was born, her mother planted a cherry tree in the southwest corner of their back garden, just short of where the shadows cast by the tallest firs on the hill fell.

"Don't waste your time," the neighbours said, shaking their heads. "Nothing will grow in this climate; wait until the springtime, at least."

But Autumn's mother paid them no mind. "A life for a life," she had insisted, watering it with care and tenderness every day, even when the ground was frozen solid and she could barely bend over to break through the thick mantle of ice. Then, when her stomach was so swollen that she could no longer stand, she would sit on the porch in a wicker chair, lost beneath the swathed layers of woollen blankets, reading aloud from her collections of Shelley and Wordsworth and Keats.

And miraculously, the seed that was to become the cherry tree survived the frosts and found its way into the first bloom of the following year, so that both the tree and the girl that had been cultivated with such care were born together, two lives twinned from the moment that they broke through to take their first simultaneous breaths of spring-laced air.

From that day on, interlinked by birth, the cherry tree had become Autumn's personal haven, the place she always went to, to seek the lucidity of thought that comes invariably with silent solitude. It was there that she had sought comfort after her mother's passing; there that she had overcome the fear and embarrassments endured by every schoolchild; there that she had learned to come to terms with her first heartbreak. And so, naturally, it is the first place she goes to when she discovers that – at the enviable age of eighteen years, seven months and twenty-three days – this autumn will be her last.

At the age when her sisters are learning how to live, Autumn has to learn how to die.

"Autumn is the season of wisdom," her mother had once told her. "It's the time when the indolent hazes of summer are swept away and the air is cleared, cool and fresh, revealing what can only be understood with time, with maturity."

But Autumn disagrees. No amount of wisdom, she thinks, could ever teach her how to die. Not her mother with her almanac of quoted words, or her father with his sad grey eyes forever gazing into the memories of the past, or her sisters with their youthful innocence and shameless naïveté. Not the nurses at the hospital or the elderly doctor with hands crinkled like vintage paper, with his litany of well-rehearsed phrases, verses of "sorry"s strung together in a helpless rosary of repeated apologies. But she knows better than to blame them; it's not their fault anyway.

"I think there's a lesson of life that I've missed, somewhere," Autumn confides solemnly to the tree that shares her birthright, while she sits and watches her sisters braid flower chains in their pastel-print skirts. "I don't feel like I'm dying."

Quite the contrary, in fact; she feels more alive than ever, every nerve in her body suddenly more alert, as if her body was aware that the only way to compensate for its limited time was to heighten every sense awareness by a hundredfold. She can feel the rough tree trunk digging into her backbone, the scaly bark sharp and defined against her illness-emaciated body. Her retinas sting with the clarity afforded by the last embers of the summer sun, the faded yellows and lilacs of her sisters' dresses suddenly dyed into vivid bursts of saffron and violet. It's as if she's living all the rest of the owed years of her life in one go, images from the past and present and future, dreams and memories and fantasies all superimposed on top of each other in an overwhelming cacophony of life.

"Tell me," she says quietly; "Is this how you feel, just before every winter?"

The cherry tree answers her by shedding its first leaf of the season.

"Autumn, Autumn," her sisters chant the next day, when they see her sitting all by herself again in the lonely shade of the cherry tree. "Come play with us."

"I can't," she says, but she doesn't tell them the real reason why. After all, how can you explain something when you don't understand it yourself?

The cherry tree responds with a second leaf that pirouettes for a moment on the stagnated breeze before landing right next to the first one, two crisp sheaves of green, stained an intense crimson by bright sangria splotches.

As Autumn's health slowly drains away, so it is accompanied, as on so many other occasions during the brief procession of her life, by the cherry tree's own shedding of leaves, at the steady, even rate of one per day. Autumn's sisters – who, by this point, finally understand why she won't come outdoors to play with them anymore – trade their summer dresses for woollens and pattern-knit scarves, yet out of an unspoken accord of reverence they avoid jumping on the cherry leaves which have piled up but which have still been left unswept.

By the fifth week, Autumn is already too weak to sit up for more than an hour at a time, and the first signs of an early winter chill begin to permeate into the core of her heart like liquid ice seeping beneath her fevered skin. On the forty-sixth morning, when Autumn's father carries her, wrapped in layers of blankets, out to the wicker chair that had resided on the porch ever since Autumn's mother placed it there eighteen years ago, she is surprised to find that the cherry tree has undergone a drastic change.

Overnight, an entire shower of leaves had fallen, revealing the helplessly stark, bare branches underneath, shivering with cold. The lost leaves are pooled by the roots of the tree, arranged in a chromatic array of colours, in all the brilliant shades of every sunset that the world has ever seen. It is only then that Autumn finally realises that death isn't really something that you learn; it is only through learning how to live that you can accept and embrace how to die.

And she finally understands what the cherry tree has been trying to tell her with its wordless gestures of sisterly love no less dear to her memory than the eternal daisy chains braided and left on her pillow by two other girls in saffron and violet dresses. In a rare burst of health, an interlude of painful brevity, she gathers together all the countless sheaves of vermilion rust and ripe persimmon and burnt sienna, an entire rhapsody of nature's spectrum layered and spread out at her feet, and she knows she's finally ready to decipher the untold secrets that death has already begun to whisper to her in his foreign language of evening shadows and dawn mists.

"So this, I suppose, is your answer, then," Autumn says with a sad smile, trailing her hands along the cherry tree's trunk, leaving smeared trails of crimson where the barbed bark rips open her tender fingertips. "A life for a life," she says, unknowingly echoing the words her mother had left behind on a winter's day eighteen years before, like footprints pressed into thawing snow; "After all, it's the only fair price to pay."

Description
The December before Autumn was born, her mother planted a cherry tree in the southwest corner of their back garden, just short of where the shadows cast by the tallest firs on the hill fell.

"Don't waste your time," the neighbours said, shaking their heads. "Nothing will grow in this climate; wait until the springtime, at least."

But Autumn's mother paid them no mind. "A life for a life," she had insisted, watering it with care and tenderness every day, even when the ground was frozen solid and she could barely bend over to break through the thick mantle of ice. Then, when her stomach was so swollen that she could no longer stand, she would sit on the porch in a wicker chair, lost beneath the swathed layers of woollen blankets, reading aloud from her collections of Shelley and Wordsworth and Keats.

And miraculously, the seed that was to become the cherry tree survived the frosts and found its way into the first bloom of the following year, so that both the tree and the girl that had been cultivated with such care were born together, two lives twinned from the moment that they broke through to take their first simultaneous breaths of spring-laced air.

From that day on, interlinked by birth, the cherry tree had become Autumn's personal haven, the place she always went to, to seek the lucidity of thought that comes invariably with silent solitude. It was there that she had sought comfort after her mother's passing; there that she had overcome the fear and embarrassments endured by every schoolchild; there that she had learned to come to terms with her first heartbreak. And so, naturally, it is the first place she goes to when she discovers that – at the enviable age of eighteen years, seven months and twenty-three days – this autumn will be her last.

At the age when her sisters are learning how to live, Autumn has to learn how to die.

"Autumn is the season of wisdom," her mother had once told her. "It's the time when the indolent hazes of summer are swept away and the air is cleared, cool and fresh, revealing what can only be understood with time, with maturity."

But Autumn disagrees. No amount of wisdom, she thinks, could ever teach her how to die. Not her mother with her almanac of quoted words, or her father with his sad grey eyes forever gazing into the memories of the past, or her sisters with their youthful innocence and shameless naïveté. Not the nurses at the hospital or the elderly doctor with hands crinkled like vintage paper, with his litany of well-rehearsed phrases, verses of "sorry"s strung together in a helpless rosary of repeated apologies. But she knows better than to blame them; it's not their fault anyway.

"I think there's a lesson of life that I've missed, somewhere," Autumn confides solemnly to the tree that shares her birthright, while she sits and watches her sisters braid flower chains in their pastel-print skirts. "I don't feel like I'm dying."

Quite the contrary, in fact; she feels more alive than ever, every nerve in her body suddenly more alert, as if her body was aware that the only way to compensate for its limited time was to heighten every sense awareness by a hundredfold. She can feel the rough tree trunk digging into her backbone, the scaly bark sharp and defined against her illness-emaciated body. Her retinas sting with the clarity afforded by the last embers of the summer sun, the faded yellows and lilacs of her sisters' dresses suddenly dyed into vivid bursts of saffron and violet. It's as if she's living all the rest of the owed years of her life in one go, images from the past and present and future, dreams and memories and fantasies all superimposed on top of each other in an overwhelming cacophony of life.

"Tell me," she says quietly; "Is this how you feel, just before every winter?"

The cherry tree answers her by shedding its first leaf of the season.

"Autumn, Autumn," her sisters chant the next day, when they see her sitting all by herself again in the lonely shade of the cherry tree. "Come play with us."

"I can't," she says, but she doesn't tell them the real reason why. After all, how can you explain something when you don't understand it yourself?

The cherry tree responds with a second leaf that pirouettes for a moment on the stagnated breeze before landing right next to the first one, two crisp sheaves of green, stained an intense crimson by bright sangria splotches.

As Autumn's health slowly drains away, so it is accompanied, as on so many other occasions during the brief procession of her life, by the cherry tree's own shedding of leaves, at the steady, even rate of one per day. Autumn's sisters – who, by this point, finally understand why she won't come outdoors to play with them anymore – trade their summer dresses for woollens and pattern-knit scarves, yet out of an unspoken accord of reverence they avoid jumping on the cherry leaves which have piled up but which have still been left unswept.

By the fifth week, Autumn is already too weak to sit up for more than an hour at a time, and the first signs of an early winter chill begin to permeate into the core of her heart like liquid ice seeping beneath her fevered skin. On the forty-sixth morning, when Autumn's father carries her, wrapped in layers of blankets, out to the wicker chair that had resided on the porch ever since Autumn's mother placed it there eighteen years ago, she is surprised to find that the cherry tree has undergone a drastic change.

Overnight, an entire shower of leaves had fallen, revealing the helplessly stark, bare branches underneath, shivering with cold. The lost leaves are pooled by the roots of the tree, arranged in a chromatic array of colours, in all the brilliant shades of every sunset that the world has ever seen. It is only then that Autumn finally realises that death isn't really something that you learn; it is only through learning how to live that you can accept and embrace how to die.

And she finally understands what the cherry tree has been trying to tell her with its wordless gestures of sisterly love no less dear to her memory than the eternal daisy chains braided and left on her pillow by two other girls in saffron and violet dresses. In a rare burst of health, an interlude of painful brevity, she gathers together all the countless sheaves of vermilion rust and ripe persimmon and burnt sienna, an entire rhapsody of nature's spectrum layered and spread out at her feet, and she knows she's finally ready to decipher the untold secrets that death has already begun to whisper to her in his foreign language of evening shadows and dawn mists.

"So this, I suppose, is your answer, then," Autumn says with a sad smile, trailing her hands along the cherry tree's trunk, leaving smeared trails of crimson where the barbed bark rips open her tender fingertips. "A life for a life," she says, unknowingly echoing the words her mother had left behind on a winter's day eighteen years before, like footprints pressed into thawing snow; "After all, it's the only fair price to pay."