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The grass, trapped beneath the moon, turns from green to white. And the rain. The rain falls softly. Inevitably. But tonight, tonight, its softness doesn’t caress, not even when I press my cheek against the window pane. We used to sit here, together, above the garden, talking words that never matched the eloquence of our bodies. And now. Now that you are gone. I stand naked and closed and there is a sadness heavy as a child at my hip. And I wait. I wait for your ghost.

The others left a few days ago, your sister and your mother, taking their tears and their memories, leaving me and the house crouched in darkness. I cannot bear to turn the lights on, you see; the surgical blaze reminds me of the hospital, reminds me of your doctor, his eyes floating in pity. So I stay wrapped in twilight, my pacing feet filling the empty spaces with echoes of the past. Soon I will have to return to the world, the world of wants filled with a future devoid of you. But I don’t want. Don’t want the banality of loneliness to replace this pain. I am not ready to relinquish the yearning wisdom of your hand in mine to death. Not until I have seen your ghost, not until my dreams render you whole again.

But your ghost doesn’t come. Every day you are slipping, fading from our house, traces of your touch turning to dust and still your ghost doesn’t come. I keep the windows closed, I try to keep you here with me, but all I seem to capture are the shades of the children we never had, the people we never became, and while I battle these unhappy shadows, trying to make room for you, the wind steals your smell. Only in the bedroom, standing at the window, looking down into the garden you loved so diligently, is there something of you here with me. I have let the garden overgrow, your flowers tumbling, the grass long and unkempt, foaming with autumnal life. But the lemon tree remembers you and has shed its leaves in mourning, its branches bare and grey against the night sky. It stares up at me, pleading and accusing, pulling at me with tender longing and I know I cannot resist its call for long.

Every day you are slipping, fading from our house, traces of your touch turning to dust and still your ghost doesn’t come.

I haven’t put on proper clothes since the funeral and instead have been living in your pyjamas, but the rest of your clothes sit in neat piles in the cupboard, row after row of muted masculine cottons and wools, browns and blues, awaiting your return. Tonight I am wearing your favourites, the worn ones with blue stripes that we bought together. I have had to roll up the waistband and they are gathered snugly below my belly button, the shirt hanging to my knees. The envelopment comforts me, keeping me safe, close to you, but even they cannot resist the pull of the lemon tree. Despite the rain and the cold and the dark, it beckons me outside, into the garden and I follow its call. The mud squirms between my toes as I walk to the shed where your tools are lined up like expectant soldiers. I lift the shovel, a heavy yellow handled weapon and step back into the rain. I don’t have a plan, but then plans have not served us well in the past and the tree is small, its branches broken. It died young and because of that is both harder and easier to bury. The shovel is unwieldy and jerks in my hand, but the earth gives way easily, great clods of it loosening as I dig.

It is hard work and soon my shoulders ache, the muscles of my arms straining. I haven’t done anything physical for months and this sudden movement is shuddering. Blisters form on my hands as the handle slips in the rain, but the discomfort is reassuring. I want to finish this, to lay the tree to rest. What started as a scar in the grass is growing, stretching and gaping in front of my feet as I work. My breath is struggling against my rib cage and I know I will have to stop soon, but I don’t want to, not yet. I think I am crying, but it doesn’t matter. I have to stop, to stretch out my back, but the hole is not big enough, not yet. I gulp the air and stop. It smells wrong. There’s something there, something, someone here with me and the lemon tree. Something dry, something human. Cigarette smoke.

I look around until my eye catches on a tall figure standing at the edge of the garden, by the gate that backs into the woods, a small bud of red gleams as he inhales. It’s not you, but I can tell it’s a he, even in the darkness that much is clear. What is he doing here so late? I feel something lurch in my stomach. Fear? Anger? Then I recognise him, it’s our neighbour. I don’t know how long he has been watching me, but I don’t mind. He opens the gate and walks towards me with the elongated steps of the very tall. I who am normally so self-conscious don’t feel shy at this intrusion, it feels right somehow, right that someone should be here as a witness. Someone I hardly know. A middle aged man, divorced with receding hair and a daughter who plays the piano badly on alternate weekends.

Can I help?

The voice is stretched, hollow, but it doesn’t condemn me with pity. And yes, yes I need help. I hand him the shovel in silence and he accepts it in silence, his eyes flicking between my face and the hole beneath the tree. I nod. He has surprising strength for someone who seemed less than strong in daylight hours, I had always thought he was an academic, and not only because he is living here in this university town, there is something about the abstract look in his eyes, the slope of his shoulders. He works smoothly. An academic who likes to garden perhaps? Cutting into the earth with grace, cutting and lifting, his narrow face pale beneath pale hair reflecting the moonlight.

As he works, the call of the tree weakens, subsiding into the surrounding soil. The earth is piled up in mounds, the roots of the grass exposed and white under the light of the moon. It’s silent, no birds or insects, just the wind and the rain, broken by the breathing of the man as he works, low and regular. The hole is very big now, the tree suspended above it. I walk around the tree, your pyjamas dragging in the mud, and try to push. It bends slightly, bristling against the delicate skin of my palm, but it doesn’t fall. Our nameless neighbour, I am sure you would remember his name, stops digging, and wipes his hand across his face marking it with a smear of earth before tracing my steps. Standing next to me, so that we are almost touching, he lifts the shovel and digs it in, digs it under the tree. It shivers with the impact, but doesn’t shift. He repeats the move, this time bringing the shovel down with a crunch that makes me flinch, but it’s still not enough. A third time, and finally with a deep yielding sigh the lemon tree collapses, collapses into the grave we have dug for it.

It lies there, your lemon tree, dead, but no longer pleading, no longer tired, no longer sick. My bones cannot hold me and my knees sink into the mud, beside the tree, so close that I can reach in and touch it. And I do, running my hand along its spine until my fingers find something to grip and I break off this small branch.It snaps easily, the earth sticking to my fingers, my toes, my hands holding to this dry piece of your lemon tree. Then, I don’t know why then, why at that moment I look up. I look up at our bedroom window and see you. A still figure in blue striped pyjamas looking down into the garden. And still, even in stillness, you have the most beautiful smile. And so I sit at the grave we have dug in our garden and despite the cold, despite the darkness, despite the taste of blood in my mouth, despite the aching weight of my arms and my blistered palms, despite all this, the rain caresses. The rain caresses and I say goodbye to your ghost. And this man, this stranger who does not seem strange in my grief starts to fill the grave with soil, sliding blocks of mud over the lemon tree, replacing the grass, returning it from white to green.

FADHILA MAZANDERANI, 28, spends up to six hours a week writing. She is a PhD student and research assistant at Oxford University but finds that work disrupts her creative rhythm. A supportive writing group, encouraging family and an overactive imagination help her writing. She writes on notebooks, paper margins, receipts – anything that is easily lost –but mostly on her laptop, late at night or early in the morning. She dreams of finishing her PhD and getting eight hours sleep each night. ‘The Lemon Tree’ is her first published work.

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