Let’s talk about lemon trees. And how to make one. Contrary to popular belief, it starts at the molecular level, where things are brown and wild and spend a whole lot of energy smacking each other back and forth. Sometimes small things wriggle inside big things, other times big things subsume the small. Here we have an obsessive compulsive’s nightmare. Have you ever tried to wrangle a positive chain of humming carbons? Or called to an amino acid, run astray, in the hopes it will please come back. I recommend avoiding any employment opportunities at sizes below two Reynolds. Reynolds was a smart man who one day decided that it was his duty to stop the career genocide of chemists that things of small sizes was causing. So he invented a number and declared loudly that, beware, none should cross.

Before lemon trees were invented, the world existed just how it was now, but yellow tasted only of two things: butter and urine from a poorly hydrated animal. Portend was a man with a skinny disposition and a sweet tongue. He tended to be found slipping through narrow walkways or between two bars of heavily-guarded fencing. He also enjoyed the hot sparkle pop on his tongue when something very sweet sat on it. Swignogs, Tinkle-Inkles, Helenbowers, March-Forths, or a pinch of Oince, the whole lot could be found on Portend’s tongue at one time. His tongue was the flat earth to an evolved sugar-dom.

A knock on the head one morning led him down a dangerous thought strand. A strand that when you squeezed it felt ripe with paradigms and shifts and had a face that scoffed at modern medicine and the electric current. Portend, knocked so, wondered what it would be like not for his face to feel soft and warm from things sweet like Dingets and ToilToilToils, but rather were it to squeeze into itself, fold over and over, crease up in desperate pain. Perhaps a pain more evolved that the hotness of a red chilli, something more targeted and pronounced. If such a feeling existed, he said, he would call it Swang, for it made you swell up and do tight tango with the mouth. Like executing an entire ballet performance with only the fingertips.

In the town of Yousty there is a single port, that gorges itself with thrumming busy bodies in the morning. It holds tight to the tide, that port, for think how much water it pushes out and away so that it can keep all those busy bodies from falling it. What a selfless port.

Come evening, it is allowed to breath again, taking in the swell of each tide in its chest of wood columns, releasing it on the down beat. A pair of monks once sat on the port, so late into the evening even the moon had settled for the night. One monk said to the other, “Do you feel that? The port. It’s breathing with us.”

“Yes, as it comes up, so do I.”

“Yes, and as it comes down, so do I.”

“Yes, and as it comes up, so do I.”

“Yes, and as it…”

They continued this way until the sun decided it had had enough of this and hurried around the Earth to strike them both with a ray in the eye. One monk said to the other, “Do you feel that? The sun. It’s breathing with us.”

“Yes, as it comes up, so do I.” The other monk said nothing. They sat in silence for an entire day, the hubbub of port work around them, sailors stepping onto and over them, and neither budged. Then came the evening again, where the sun began its little swim in the dark. The other monk who hadn’t spoken yet said, “Yes, and as it comes down, so do I.” And he released his breath.

Portend, one hand on his lap, the other braced against some salty wood, sat on the edge of the port. “As it comes up, so do I,” he was saying to himself. It was one of the mantras his father had always taught him, it made the long days of fishing more bearable. In his lap he held a sphere. It was something waxy and looked like it had had a rough time in the geometric department. Parts that were out were smooshed in, some that should have been in were getting out.

“Evening fishing?” Every muscle electrified itself at the interruption, their group effort flung the miserable ball out of Portend’s lap and into the lap of the ocean. Portend resisted the urge to look behind him. “God, why’d you scare me like that? You could have given me a some warning.” The bulk of a large man lowered itself down beside Portend. The port breathed out.

“Looks like you just dropped your lucky rock, lad.” said the mountain of body.

“It wasn’t a rock. It was a swanger.”

The heft of the new man was driving the ports up and down bobs like cardiologist might study the pumps of a heart. He had become part of the whole tidal system now. He just gruffed a noise of a response. It said nothing against the swanger, but nothing in favour of it.

“My last one too.”

The man gruffed again and Portend scowled at the horizon in an attempt to squeeze something interesting from it with his mind. Then he looked at the man.

“Well,” said the man after a while. “Musn’t have been a very good swanger if it doesn’t float.” He clasped a hand around Portend’s shoulder. Each finger was a gentle lead pipe that Portend could have put the whole weight of his life against and not felt an inch of give. Portend just nodded and looked down at the black murk under his feet. When he spent too long building the image in his head, that dark black void that murmured underneath really shook him. He wondered how far his swanger had fallen now, if it would ever hit the bottom, or be knocked around, up and down by the things that swim down there.

“You ought to get back in to town, the harbour chief will be out here soon.” Portend continued to nod. He didn’t feel the despair he thought he would at the loss of his swanger. At the loss of a year’s work. He stood up with the large man, took one last glance down at that black basin that spoke in the lapping tongues of spittle and deep blue, then turned and walked back to the shore.