Laura O’Gorman Schwartz
The Lemon Tree
Runner-up for the 2026 American Literary Review Award in Fiction, Judged by Olufunke Grace Bankole
I hoisted a lemon tree onto my shopping cart and came away wounded. Eyes on the sunny fruit, I hadn’t noticed the thorns. The scratch in my forearm spilled out a stream of red, the heat of the blood immaterial in the hot afternoon. Singapore weather always hugged the skin.
“Aw, babe.”
Charlotte hooked two fingers around mine and pulled my hand away from my body to save my clothes. She fished an opened packet of tissues from the purse she had crocheted herself.
“Maybe it heard me laughing about how cheap it was,” I said, staunching the cut with a grimace.
The open-air garden center lay under a high roof of tin and tarp, both the staff and the merchandise comfortable in the tropics. Charlotte and I were pale, damp specters drifting through the rows, our hips brushed by leaves Jurassic in size and by explosions of orchids, swoops of purple and sprays of yellow. Plants that didn’t need shade resided on tiered wooden benches out front, shadowed only by a netted overhang. It was here that the lemon trees were gathered, like new arrivals at a refugee facility. Each was waist-high and only forty dollars.
Charlotte gave me a wan smile, not her usual one with dimples. As we moved towards the register, an orange hibiscus yearned after her, one leaf sticking to her long skirt.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“It’s a bit nonsense that humans think we can own trees at all, isn’t it? There’s no pretending they don’t belong to the earth.” Her English accent flitted like a hummingbird over the vicious rattling of the cart. “Still. Wish I could get one.”
“You don’t seem like you’re in a great space.”
“Why don’t we pop back to yours? I’ll clean you up and we can have a chat.”
In the taxi, we placed the lemon tree between us on the rubber-matted floor. The enclosed vehicle revealed its clean, citrus scent. Nervous in the silence, I nearly remarked on how cleverly designed the tree was. As a Los Angeles native transplanted to Singapore – different species of cities, but still cities – nature never seemed entirely real to me. That lemons really grew on branches, that seeds could actually become trees, that children really came from wombs. How much fairytale could I believe before it made me a fool? It would make far more sense for a sunny tree with inch-long thorns to be a parable. Or a corporate ploy. Yellow and green pop art. You bought the story of a thing before you bought the thing, a professor of mine once said.
Charlotte’s unpolluted faith in the natural world was that of a girl born and raised in the countryside, a wholehearted, fearless belief that frightened and enamored me. She was the reason that I could trust myself with a lemon tree when a year ago, I was still killing any plant gifted to me – drowned what needed to be dry, starved what needed to drink, set them down with no regard to light or shadow. I accrued a garden of ghosts, pots of dirt with rotten roots for hearts. The one exception had been the landlady’s hefty snake plant, which was the lone resident of the balcony when my husband and I moved in. It seemed content to be left to the elements.
It was only during the pandemic, with a complete lockdown imminent, that it clicked that that barren three-by-ten glass box was space I could use to expand my suddenly very small world. Charlotte had squealed when I asked her to teach me to garden. She arrived the day before lockdown wearing a silk mask and holding a baby green octopus in a clay pot. We placed it next to the grim snake plant and I pictured them fighting, the way the cats had after I adopted the second one.
“I always kill aloe veras. I fuss over them too much, so it should do well under your neglect,” Charlotte commented, leaning against the balcony rail and tilting her face to the sun. “You really do need this, babe. Nurturing plant life will balance the energy of your home. I tucked a cleansing quartz crystal inside the pot, too.”
A cigarette fumed between her fingers, the smoke riding the breeze inside. I let out a snort too soft for her to hear. My wonderful clear-eyed hypocrite, carrying her beliefs with the joy and artlessness of a child holding a balloon, putting her trust in all the strangest places. So gullible and such a consumer, taken in by Instagram ads and influencers – she believed too much and got burned, but somehow it never stopped her from believing more and again. She was a fool and I’d sneered about it, yet it made her far more alive, far braver, than me. Another parable I understood but couldn’t quite absorb. Maybe what I was hoping to learn from her was a type of blindness.
While she blurred the air with smoke, Charlotte unspooled a lesson on balancing water, light, earth, attention and – she pinched my side – patience. I’d married Kai Jun at 23, eager and unwilling to wait. I pushed us to move to his native Singapore when the job search in California dragged. I gave movies ten minutes to win my interest and I gave people roughly the same. The pandemic shackled me to the hours and forced me to face the breakdown of each day. I had no choice but to measure out patience along with water and fertilizer. I set reminders on my phone and texted Charlotte questions, and the aloe vera flexed out in all directions like a miracle.
When the lockdown loosened and the shops reopened, I discovered the garden center, only two bus stops up the road. Sweat rolled down my spine in merry drops as I browsed, elated and greedy. Charlotte recited plant names like spells, translating the language of their leaves and stems. She cautioned me not to buy the delicate English roses or bright little strawberry bushes, to instead search for flowers native to the tropics and for sturdy, sharp cactuses. I trailed my fingers over leathery succulents and fuzzy fittonia, no longer afraid to take them home.
My balcony swelled full, branches craning over the railing like patrons at a bar. It surprised me when the hibiscus and the wrightia grew big enough to require repotting. They weren’t merely weathering my attention but thriving under it. Point to the lonely, cement upbringing: how much I assumed people and even plants simply endured me. Kai Jun had begun untangling that knot in college and it was probably the reason I married him, but it was Charlotte who unraveled it.
Taking the lift to the twelfth floor, I wondered if the lemon tree could sense how far up it was. Whether it thought it was growing or whether it was clutching at its meager measure of dirt the way a scuba diver clings to a tank of air. I maneuvered inside the apartment and set it down inside the door, careful to avoid the thorns. As we slipped out of our sandals, my two cats began a thorough inspection of the new arrival. The little one circled the pot with cautious steps and wide, yellow eyes. The bigger one placed his front paws on the rim so he could sniff at a waxy lemon.
“Hello little fluffs!” Charlotte sang out, scratching both their heads with her manicured fingernails. “Could plonk the tree down anywhere really. Plenty of light.”
The living room’s south-facing wall was all windows, with the sliding balcony doors set in the middle. The white marble floor brutalized eyeballs in the afternoon. Kai Jun installed blackout curtains within a week of moving in. I tended to leave them parted around the balcony though, pleased to see the once empty glass sarcophagus brimming with green leaves and splashy flowers, crowded with so much life that there was no room for the lemon tree. The kitchen was separated from the airy living room by a countertop, one of the main reasons Kai Jun and I signed the lease: he could prepare meals for dinner parties without being cut off from his guests. I liked that I could fully fill my lungs in here. This pale, high-ceilinged space was nothing like the hunched bungalows and cinched apartments of my childhood.
The scratch on my forearm oozed a few wet, red drops, which struck me as performative. Charlotte and I stood at the kitchen sink, her hand circling my wrist and gently holding it under the running water. I had free reign to map her freckles, picking out my favorite constellation: the trio on her cheekbone. She’d been a model as a teenager and still carried herself like one, her eyebrows groomed and her make-up subtle. Her long, wavy black hair always called to mind the witches in my storybooks, so much more enthralling than the pink princess and the featureless hero. Charlotte’s full lips pursed in concentration as she patted me dry with a paper towel, rough in contrast to her moisturized hands. She wouldn’t hesitate to bury them in earth, scooping up pungent dirt to help me repot whatever witless plant I’d recruited for my balcony. Charlotte was both a lady and a wildling, while I failed to be either.
As she thumbed ointment over the wound, I realized she looked older than when I’d met her four years ago, at someone’s going away party, an evening by an acid blue pool at one of the many condos that expats migrated through. Several towers loomed overhead, peppered with lit windows. The barbecue pit had been one of six and the other five were filled with other parties. People crowded around tables laden with an increasing population of cans and cups.
Kai Jun had commandeered the grill, turning out seared steaks and moist chicken. He glowered at the cheap table salt and I smiled into my bottle of beer when he asked the perplexed host if they had any fleur de sel. As he launched into his lecture on salts, I moved away. I’d heard it before, thought of it every time my mouth met his skin, remembered the desert cool classroom in UCLA where he first poured his philosophy into my ear. While obediently studying engineering, he had picked up a part-time job as a line cook, rebelling against his preordained career one seasoning at a time. I couldn’t fathom wanting to create something as temporary as a meal when we could build dams and satellites. He taught me to notice the raw moments. In our whispers, all architecture was kaleidoscopic and every rule imaginary, and our lives were wide open highways. I tried to love a drop of flavor because it couldn’t be kept. Tried to avoid writing down the whispers and pinning down the destinations. But the way time took everything was monstrous. How each day forced itself on top of the previous one. How my mouth and stomach always ended up empty again.
Away from the tables and the bon voyage crowd, a woman stood barefoot in the grass. Her frown flickered as her Zippo spit sparks without catching. I palmed a cheap plastic lighter from the counter next to the grill. After she let me cuddle its flame into the tip of her cigarette, she leaned her freckled face close to mine, breath ashy yet sweet with rum, and said my eyes were the best shade of grey.
Charlotte, British, two years in Singapore now, schoolteacher. Then she gestured at the glowing pool to introduce her husband, a former swim team captain built like a mangrove tree, who was the only one in the water. She referred to him as ‘my man’ and spoke about her marriage with an air of achievement. In between sips of smoke, she talked tarot with wide, earnest eyes and she loved that we were both Libras. My aura had screamed air sign right away. I listened with a smile, let her invade my space and touch my shoulder. Charlotte had been so entirely herself from the start that the minutes melted into one liquid night.
Some indeterminate amount of party later, Charlotte held up the keycard to the host’s apartment and asked if I wanted to help grab more wine from upstairs. We fucked on the guest bed, the sheets icy from air conditioning, her tanned thighs squeezing into the sides of my head. Being female, I didn’t count as adultery – yet she giggled into my neck for years afterward about how her husband still didn’t know.
Mine did.
Men liked to ask Kai Jun how he convinced me to open our marriage and they always appeared comically disappointed when he said it had been my idea. I was the type of air sign that didn’t stay in one place, hence the ease in killing plants with all their roots, but I stuck around Kai Jun the way a breeze loves a bluff, nourished by the salt of him.
Charlotte smoothed the Band-Aid flat over my broken skin and gave me another of those not-quite-there smiles, squinting in the white light of the afternoon. I pressed a kiss to her mouth, so hopelessly in love with everything I wasn’t. I wanted to be the human child stolen by the witch, lured in by her arcane knowledge and otherworldly beauty. I also wanted to be the witch.
We returned to loom over the lemon tree and decided that its fate lay outside the back door. An open-air landing separated my apartment from the neighbors’, a narrow and liminal space with the emergency stairwell and the trash chute. If I closed my eyes, the cement-warm breeze took me back to Los Angeles. A porous metal barrier circled a nook inhabited by bulky air conditioning units. By the ledge was just enough room for a few orchids and now, the waist-high forty-dollar lemon tree.
“It’ll need more than just rainwater,” Charlotte commented. “You won’t forget it out here, right?”
“Never,” I said, standing back to admire its green yellow, generous defensive, spiked and soft presence, a force of life against the concrete and metal.
The cats eagerly escaped whenever the back was open, despite having nowhere to go but the landing. We retrieved them and returned inside, then Charlotte and I slid the balcony doors wide to sit on the marble floor of the living room, our feet out in the sunshine, a bag of soft dirt and a bottle of wine between us. I liked spoiling her, giving her little gifts, languid afternoons and New Zealand sauvignon blancs.
The cozy greenery of the balcony formed a cradle. While we rehomed a purple hibiscus into a bigger ceramic pot, the heavy tropical sun sank behind an apartment building.
“Thank you,” I gushed. “Again, I mean. For teaching me how to garden.”
My own happiness always embarrassed me.
“Of course, my treasure! You deserve this.”
She kissed me sweetly but when she pulled back, a dim regretful look came over her. My gut clenched. I asked what was wrong, because I was a good friend who could tell something was wrong, she’d been too quiet at the garden center, and even though I didn’t want to know, I was afraid I’d guessed the answer, I needed to ask because I needed her to see that I was attentive and good. Good to her.
With wet eyes and a hot cigarette, Charlotte told me that they were moving back home.
Her mum lived alone in a village in Lancashire with a 6-day workweek, lingering COVID symptoms and bills piling up. Not that Charlotte and her husband would be able to contribute much cash, but at least they’d be there, physical bodies in the next room to stand between her mum and whatever might come next.
I held Charlotte’s hand, gazed at her while she gazed out at the forest of condominiums and the creamy evening sky.
“Never really felt like I lived here anyway.” She exhaled smoke. “These six years have just sort of felt like one long working holiday and now, visit’s over and it’s back to real life. I’m coming down to earth again. Mum’s got a garden and I’m going to have a go at planting vegetables. I’ve felt so stuck here, unable to put down real roots, you know? Well, you married a local, so I suppose you wouldn’t. You’ve committed.”
Hurt, I swallowed the last warm mouthful of my wine. The humid air slicked over my skin and congealed in my lungs. The wound from the lemon tree stung.
I loved this city. The quiet intelligence of its design, the necessary shade provided by precisely placed trees and overhangs, its streets swept, its trains high quality toys. While Los Angeles melted outwards in cement slabs, a dominion of asphalt, grey for miles, Singapore threaded gardens along footpaths and fined you thousands for littering. I resisted the urge to point out to Charlotte that the ploughed and planted English countryside was just as domesticated as Singapore. Her darling grass fields were graveyards of crushed forests. At least a city was honest about what it had taken for itself. And Singapore was a city aware it was married to the jungle, that without it, the island would drown in floods and burn up in the heat. You couldn’t lean on ghosts.
Before she left the country, Charlotte gave me all her plants. There weren’t many – her apartment was cramped and its light limited – only a few ugly cactuses that I repotted into exquisite stained-glass containers and the Devil’s Ivy, which I placed high on a bookcase so the vines could drip down.
We had the goodbye party by their condo pool. You always met someone new at these things, common social ground for expats, bon voyage and welcome, but I wasn’t in the mood for the merry-go-round. Drunk, I tucked my tears into Charlotte’s shoulder, incapable of letting her go, everything she’d smoothed out crinkling up into a tight knot again.
Kai Jun, my salt collector, held me for the entire taxi ride home.
It was a repeat of lockdown: Charlotte again became untouchable and scentless, sealed behind screens. I hit the nursery like an addict, accumulating succulents, herbs, perennials, sprouts, flowering shrubs, beautiful ceramic pots and all the necessary dirt to rehouse my purchases, compelled to change the landscape of the apartment, to fold life into every blank corner. For every plant that died, I bought a replacement. I checked on the lemon tree twice a day even though it meant retrieving the cats each time.
In bed, I huddled into the warmth of my marriage. My head resting heavy on Kai Jun’s barrel chest, I studied the three variants of ficus and the vining philodendron that I’d arranged against the far wall, their striped leaves large and striking, their roots trapped in glossy black pots. It was like I’d lined them up to be shot.
Kai Jun rubbed his thumb over mine, looking away from a cooking show on his phone to smile at the dirt under my nails.
“Do whatever you need to,” he said.
“I’m just redecorating.”
“She was basically your girlfriend.”
“Did you see the notice downstairs?” I asked. “They’re going to repaint the whole building starting next week.”
“Hon…”
“I know. I just… I can’t yet.”
Polyamory didn’t work if we didn’t talk. Kai Jun and I usually laid bare our injuries and complaints over breakfast, bemoaned the poor bedmanship of a date or yet another stranger’s lecture on how ethical nonmonogamy was a fairytale and our marriage was a myth. As though all marriages weren’t myths, a communal story we inhabited to shelter from the world’s unbearable incoherence. What made one fairytale truer than another?
How often it was re-told. How thoroughly you believed it. How it guided the decisions you made.
I would hand over my knots to Kai Jun again at some point and I would feel better for it. But not yet. Talking about Charlotte now would relegate her to a detour or a B-story. Someone to get over. A character to recount after the fact. An anecdote about an English girl I bought a lemon tree with.
The painters arrived each morning with rigging and helmets, all men in their twenties imported from Bangladesh and other parts of Asia to do labor that white girls in white buildings did not do.
Orange and black nylon ropes measured the air from the roof to the ground. I’d go to the bathroom and see their grim outlines through the frosted glass of the window in the shower, which I was using as a greenhouse for cherry tomatoes and sweet peppers. The stark lines of shadow swayed behind the pots, making me think of nooses and hauntings but also of a sea snake I saw winding up to the ocean’s surface during Charlotte’s birthday weekend in Indonesia last year.
The painters’ similar disregard of gravity made it easy to pretend our apartment was underwater. A reverse aquarium. If I opened a window, everything would rush in and I could swim out in any direction.
In truth, the outside of the building had to be dry as bone beneath the unyielding July sun. It hadn’t rained in weeks. The glass-walled balcony trapped the gluey sunlight and kept it close. The cats sprawled out to bake on the wooden planks for only a few minutes before retreating inside to cool on the marble. Although the cactuses thrived, popping out blossoms to gobble up the light, no matter how much I watered the cosmos and the angelonia and the spider flowers, they fried. The iresine wilted so dramatically, it was almost accusatory.
I ended up near tears every afternoon, with a vodka soda on the couch. Hidden by curtains and safe in air conditioning, I squinted out while the painters slapped blinding white across wide walls in the endless glare. It was like a medical procedure, the way the men worked on the outside of the building with tools and buckets while we were inside, the toes of their boots tapping their way down with the gentleness of a doctor’s prodding. Is there pain here? How about here?
Three days after they started painting, the lemon tree vanished.
It didn’t seem like the kind of thing a man would steal, especially if he had to then descend to earth with it. The orchids remained on the ledge, untouched. I leaned over them to search for splattered remains below. I peered into the neighbor’s air conditioning nook and glanced into the stairwell. Panic started to wisp together in my chest, the way sugar collects into cotton candy. I’d lost something impossible to lose. Been made a fool of somehow.
Confused and upset, I hunched into milky coffee in the kitchen, the half-full watering can abandoned on the counter.
The sound of the front door startled me. The cats’ thrilled, insistent meows announced the arrival of our cleaner, Htun.
“What you want?” She cooed. “Breakfast, is it?”
Her words always somehow contained a smile, like the shape of her mouth was designed for laughter instead of requests for more bleach. After she greeted me and divided a can of wet food between the cats, she cheerfully commented that most of the painters were from Myanmar. I made a noise of interest, swallowing down the stone in my throat.
At first, I resented that Htun liked to make small talk. I was skittish at the power imbalance, especially because we couldn’t be more than a few years apart in age. She was the most regular visitor to our apartment these days, but she wasn’t a guest. We called each other over whenever the cats did something cute, but we weren’t friends. We were employer and employee, Kai Jun said with a shrug. As though it was simple to maintain a cool, professional veneer inside my own home with the person who washed my underwear. I wanted to tell her I didn’t mean to be here.
Loud slaps drew our attention towards the open balcony doors. The painters’ ropes whipped the building. The movement manmade, the pull of hands rather than the wind. A bucket rose into view and bumped against the balcony’s glass banister. A helmeted head followed, then a man’s torso and legs.
The painter glided over the railing and alighted onto the wooden planks. A small cactus tipped over in surprise.
Just like that, there was another person in my apartment. He was wiry and mustachioed. He didn’t spare me or Htun a glance as he assessed the strips of exterior wall on either side of the sliding doors, which needed their second coat of white. I wondered how long it took for the magic of being at bird-only height to fade into the daily grind. And for our homes, so sacred, so personalized, to blur into the background.
My bigger cat, a tom I called our trans-dog, plodded towards this stranger who had emerged from thin air. Nose high with curiosity, the cat sat on the border between the balcony and the living room, studied the man for a moment, and then flopped onto his side for a belly rub.
Htun gestured to the cat with a laugh and began chattering in Burmese. He replied. An immutable division dissolved. This man could step onto the living room’s marble floor or step over the balcony railing to stand on nothing. He was a bird. A celestial. And Htun had forged a link between his realm and ours with no effort at all.
I considered asking her to ask him about the lemon tree, but it seemed inappropriate to interrupt. I’d be wasting a visit from an angel on a petty complaint, one that wouldn’t translate well. I could picture Htun’s puzzled expression as I fumbled to explain. No matter how my chest tightened, it was an incomprehensible, silly loss. The kind of problem you invented to keep yourself warm. A human could never truly own a tree anyway. It was its own creature. Besides, I could just buy another. I could afford to waste time and water on it. I could even pay Htun to nurture it for me.
As she chatted away in a language that sounded like unknotting silk, I suspected that she too had the power to slip out of gravity. That it was just me stuck to the ground, my roots rotting.
The following week, I shuffled out back to drop a milk carton down the trash chute and was surprised to find the door to the emergency stairwell fully ajar. My smaller cat darted through it without hesitation and spirited herself down the steps, periodically pausing to slide her flank against exciting new filth. I followed at a casual pace to convince her that I was joining in on the adventure rather than angling to stop it.
The exterior wall of the stairwell was composed of rectangular, cement pillars that allowed in light and air. The pleasant smell of paint lingered. Every surface shone a blinding, new pure white. And here the little lemon tree was, one floor down, a native of this blank space, a ghost of itself, its leaves shriveled and white, its thorns as prominent as bones, its lemons tight sour fists stubbornly clinging to their branches.
When I gripped the rim of the mud red pot and lifted, it immediately cracked into handfuls of sharp pieces, as though the tree had been so desperate for water, it had sucked the moisture from the plastic.
A childhood memory found me: a beautifully illustrated book of myths from around the world that included a story about a man gifted three lemons, each containing a princess. Although explicitly instructed not to cut the fruit open until near water, our hero goes ahead and fucks up twice. Two girls are born dying of thirst and they dry up like seeds. Finally, he finds a river, splits open the last fruit, and the third lemon princess gulps down enough water to become human-sized and wife-shaped.
I wondered whether the story’s hero kept the dehydrated remains of the women he’d lost. Had he reined in his impatience and earned all three princesses, would he have considered it adultery if they all slept with one other? What bitter bright language was spoken by girls who emerged from lemons? Maybe this was why parables failed to move me in the right direction – the construction of the sign interested me more than the meaning of the arrow.
Rather than wither from the lack of attention and water, my lemon tree had instead hardened. Stripped of the shroud of leaves, in its nudity it was all thorns. If I intended to break it down and throw it out, it would fight me. Avoiding the sharp points, I took hold of the base of its trunk and returned it to the ledge looking over the city. A breeze rushed through the nook, teasing rain for the first time in a month. The orchid petals trembled like uneasy aliens. I collected the cat and retreated indoors.
That night, a wild storm thrashed the building. Rain howled at the windows like static on high volume. Kai Jun and I woke around 2:00am to an ungodly battering. The painters had finished their work but their equipment had yet to be disengaged from the condo’s exterior. The metal cradle swung on its ropes, the wind slamming it into the freshly painted wall over and over, the sound in all caps and accompanied by lightning as consistent as a spotlight.
Kai Jun put on the kettle in the kitchen and blended chamomile leaves with lavender. The cats had melted into the shadows and, despite the finite space of the apartment, would be impossible to find until morning. I huddled into my phone, pillows propped under my head.
The power of the rain had been one of the few things Charlotte extolled about Singapore, the wildness of the weather contrasting the mild-mannered and well-engineered city. I messaged her in the dark, describing the onslaught of the thunderstorm, so loud and so close as to be in bed with me.
My night was her day. My today, her tomorrow. The distance cleaved our calendars, stitched the hours over themselves, folded time. Her roots were sinking back into the grey-green countryside and I was committed to the tropical sky. She relished common mythology and I picked it apart. I hadn’t been a good enough friend. And yet Charlotte whispered back about gentle unrelenting mist, how English weather seeped in instead of smacked down, how she no longer felt wholly at home there.
A few days later, I sent her a photo of the lemon tree.
It still resembled a frozen white bolt of lightning. But around the base of its trunk and from the knots of its armed branches, a few slim, green limbs stretched into the air. Their thorns were young and soft, their lemons still daydreams.
Born in Ireland, Laura O’Gorman Schwartz grew up in Tokyo, Singapore and New Jersey before returning to live in Singapore in 2012. Her queer identity sounds like algebra: bi-demi-poly. Divide that by being apagender and add in her trans nonbinary spouse (married 13 years). She has two cats and too many cactuses. Laura is a graduate of Bard College and the Writers’ Institute at CUNY. Her short fiction has appeared in FIVE:2:ONE, Thoughtful Dog, The Shanghai Literary Review, Wraparound South, Ruminate Magazine, Ohio State’s The Journal, The Birmingham Arts Journal, and Whisk(e)y Tit.