THE ORCHARD

Description

The sun is hazy, wood pigeons call, Widower Clara crouches down, her arthritic fingers brushing flies away from rotting apples. Her little grandson plays quietly with a ball. A watering can with an insecticide stolen by Clara’s daughter, Eve, from the GM lab where she works nestles by an apple tree.

Clara examines a collection of deformed flies on a tree trunk. Everything is oddly silent. The flies buzz… a burst of spores explodes from their abdomens. Clara staggers back, coughing as spores rapidly bury under her skin and disappear.

Close to a breakthrough at the GM lab, Eve won’t be back until the next evening. Clara dozes before the TV oblivious to the veins dilating and pus-filled blisters on her hand. The news reports Extinction Rebellion demonstrations.

Next day, Clara is violently sick a sticky brown mucus. Frightened James tries to help but Clara is no longer herself. Petrified James huddles on the floor...Eve is frantic to get in... James cries Mummy! Eve bursts into the hallway running to James and sees...her mother silhouetted at the top of the stairs, frozen in a grotesque mutation. Spores burst from Clara filling the air...all we can hear are James’ terrified sobs.

Biblical Connection

GENESIS 3:6 The Fall Is this theologically speaking where sin began, and the breakdown of creation and the environment? When Eve took the apple, giving it to Adam this could be seen as both greed and consumerism, as from this point man needed to cover himself knowing good and evil. God ask’s “where are you” exposing their environment and the importance of where they are. They had everything, but still wanted more. This story looks at this from a modern perspective, of our poor stewardship and moral decay of the Earth, and how this has led to pollution, resource depletion and climate change, and its connections to where we are with this global pandemic disaster today. In our story Clara’s competitiveness to want to win and have the best fruit, using untested genetically modified fertilizer with devasting consequences on both herself and all around her…The Orchard is my Eden. We look at how we are tampering with nature, with no respect for the forests destroyed, or soil stripped of nutrients just to fulfil our world’s consumer needs. We are a world wrapped up in destroying creation and the garden of Eden that was given to us.