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Cemetary Pears

October 31, 2025·22 min·1 clip

The narrator considers whether eating fruit nourished by a buried body is a form of cannibalism—then eats it anyway and receives the dead woman's memory.

The narrator describes growing up near a cemetery arboretum where labeled trees provide botanical knowledge alongside seasonal beauty. On one visit, they discover a row of unlabeled pear trees—labeled Pyrus nomenincinae, common name Farewell Pears—along a neglected lane at the cemetery's east end. An old man tells them the pears are delicious in autumn. When the narrator returns in autumn, they eat one of the pears from the tree over the grave of an elderly woman who was the first person to hold them as a newborn. The flavor is exceptionally complex and strange. Immediately, a memory floods in: the narrator experiences being the old woman holding that newborn with overwhelming love. After the initial shock and grief, the narrator decides to return and learn more of the woman's life through subsequent pears. When the tree's fruit is exhausted, the narrator begins eating fruit from other graves—experiencing a surgeon's confidence, a waitress being assaulted, a man's industrial injury, a woman's long hospitalization, childbirth, swimming off Capri, a child's joy in painting, a woman's first romantic encounter, and a religious experience in Carmona. The narrator reflects that every life contains both extraordinary joy and horror in equal measure. The last tree in the grove, however, holds memories so disturbing that the narrator vomits and does not return that season. Some years later, the narrator brings their future partner—who they know is the right person because her love matches what they felt in the farewell pears—to the tree over their nana's grave. The narrator places the single remaining pear in her hand and asks her to eat it. When she opens her eyes weeping, she says 'I held you.' They sit together in the autumn light. On the way back, they pass the old man who first told them about the pears—eating fruit from the grave whose pear had made the narrator sick. The narrator confronts him, tears down and destroys the remaining fruit, and they leave. By the following summer the final tree has been cut down. The story is part of Wrong Station's tenth anniversary season.

As heard by us

A graveyard fable about farewell pears and the ache of trying to understand the dead.

Cemetery Pass works best when it stays close to the physical world: the trees, the stone, the blossoms, and the pears give the cemetery a bruised, uneasy texture. That grounding matters, because the story's grief lands harder when the setting feels this specific.

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Why you'd press play

A pear tree turns remembrance into a trespass you can taste.

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