The pip sat snug in the girl’s ribcage. The graveboy had thrown the core in there as they put her in the warm ground. It was July, and close weather for burying bodies. He thought nothing of it as he tipped his cap to the sun, and offered the skeletal remains of the apple to the earth.

And there it stayed, until the August storm churned in. The water lay in a thick layer atop the crusty earth, then gradually eased itself down the clefts and gullies, edging aside the loam. A few raindrops, still smelling like the troposphere, found their way through shroud and soft tissue to the pip. They wrapped themselves around it like a water blanket. The pip smiled to herself, for she finally felt pulpy again, as she had in the apple, before it withered away.

She stretched out shoots which found themselves between the buried ribs. Each green whip squeezed, pliant and young, around bone—the calcified sternum and scapula and clavicle. Summoning her strength, the pip pushed her whips out until they cracked open the ribcage. The chest parting like birth.

By the next summer she was three feet tall, and thought of herself as Pip. She was unsure other trees gave themselves names, but with her roots entwined with the remains, she had come to have something of the girl about her.

The girl had never run—her joints were swollen by rheum, the physician had said. It suited Pip, for she also could not run. Sometimes the wind would thrash her small frame, and she would imagine the motion was running. But on still days, she could only waver.

Sometimes memories would stir in her sap. Of the girl in a wheeled chair in a garden, or the boy who pressed his mouth against hers. Pip knew he was the only one who had thought nothing of her bulbous knees. She wished for fingers so she could hold his hand, the way the girl had done.

In such ways the girl ghosted Pip, but she welcomed it. What joy to know the life of a tree—pollen and bumblebees humming along her limbs—and the secret fancies of a girl. The rememberings of sugared lemons on her girl tongue after the boy had touched the pip of her small breast.

Pip savored it all, even the final moments.

The recollections of the girl’s demise, a wasting disease that swallowed her up. The way the girl lay in a shaft of sunlight on the bed and watched a blossoming tree bough from her window, knowing she would never see it bear fruit. The way the girl knew the boy was standing there, below that same tree, looking up at the window, as she passed.

It was in her third year—four feet eight inches tall—that the gravediggers came for Pip. “Won’t do, growing here,” the old man grumbled. He took his spade and severed her roots. Pip cried out with her silent voice, sent panic through the fine hairs that fanned through the soil. But nothing answered—the nearest other trees being a knot of three-hundred-year-old Yew, too fuddled by time to listen to her young cries.

“Will it bear fruit, ye think?” The graveboy leaned on a headstone nearby. He’d grown three years taller, and had a down of hair on his lip now.

The old man shrugged. “If anyone wants it. Could ask the rector if there’s space in his garden. Don’t believe he’s partial to apples though. Sin and all that.”

The boy pulled an apple from his pocket and polished it on the coarse hair of his shirt as he considered Pip.

“Reckon it’s a Ribston Pippin? Or Egremont Russet?”

Just Pip, the tree cried, mute.

The old man paused his digging and wiped a sheen from his forehead.

“Apple fancier are ye? Worse things to occupy a lad. Can’t say I know what kind it is, but get that fruit out ye hand and take the spade if ye expect coin this day.”

They worked at the soil and pried Pip from the girl’s bones. Her grief was as raw as the severed roots.

Then with a final heft, the boy hauled her from the ground with a tearing sound.

“Leave it over there and fill in the hole.” The old man sat on a low wall with a pipe in his teeth. Its smoke fell on Pip where the boy lay her, stupefying the bumblebees. The open mouth of a gargoyle dripped rainwater onto her from the church roof. She listened to the graveboy work and ached. For her own life cut short, and for the girl whose life had been cut short. The girl who had birthed her, and from whose breast she had been wrenched.

The old man put the tools away then, and the boy, out of earshot, wrapped gentle young hands around her stem and considered her.

“Reckon ye will bear fruit yet, lil’ Pippin. Reckon ye will.”

It was intimate, the way he held her, and Pip remembered the other boy. The boy who had thought nothing of bulbous knees. The boy who had seen the girl, who had stood beneath the tree as she passed, and had borne witness to it all.