"The Treatment"

 

There was no building next to the parking lot. The only hint of structure came from the bushes planted in a line along each edge of the pavement, forming a perimeter. Errant branches like wires extended from the plants, tangling and knotting into each other and creating the rails of a botanical fence, a reminder to any visitors of the areas they may not visit. Something about it made a sliver at the center of Julie's core slow, just as her car slowed to take the right turn onto the driveway.

Julie urged the steering wheel around, returned the car to the mouth of the parking lot, and made another right turn, back onto the street she'd been traveling moments before. 

"What the hell?" Rachel said from the passenger's seat, pointing. "My appointment's and ten. And there's paperwork I've got to do."

"We have time," said Julie. "It's just--I want to get a cup of coffee with you before you go in. Can we do that? Do you mind?"

Rachel said, "Coffee. You really think my stomach can handle coffee right now?"

And Julie's hands, her knuckles night-white, twisted around the leather grip of te steering wheel as if she were kneading dough. "I know," she said. "I'm sorry."

The scenery outside, the trees and lampposts, old with all they'd seen, crossed Rachel's reflection in the window. "Tea," she said. "I can have some tea. Toast might be a good idea. Maybe an English muffin, I don't know." She shrugged. "I really don't knwo how this is going to go, you know?"

"I know," Julie said. "I'm sorry." No matter how many times she said them, the words never could make up for everything that was wrong.

The chairs in the diner booth had padded back and flat, hard seats--a little bit comfortable, but not entirely. Julie asked the waitress for coffee and, thinking of what Rachel had said in the car, an English muffin. Rachel ordered tea and an almond bear claw and lifted one of the short glasses of water brought for them to her cracked, grey lips.

"Why not, right?" Rachel said after the waitress departed. "I mean, I'm probably not going to be in the mood for a pastry afterward."

"It's whatever you want right now." Julie's smile was a thin film stretched across the surface of her face. "As long as it doesn't hurt you." The waitress came back with a mug of thick black coffee, topped with an iridescent sheen, for Julie and, for Rachel, a cup of tea.

They were seated at a table so wide that, if they were to try, they hardly would have been able to reach their arms across it. Except for a few stains and a chip that revealed layers of wooden pressboard, the tabletop was white, reflective despite the matte finish of its coating. It bounced cold morning light onto Rachel's skin as she rested her head atop her hand. Her skin bounced the light right back.

"You're having a pretty rough time with this," she said.

"I know," said Julie. "I'm--"

"If you say you're sorry one more time, I swear, I'm going to tell the cancer fairy to fucking visit you next."

"I'm scared," Julie said. The waitress returned. For what felt like a long time afterward, the English muffin and the bear claw sat on their plates between Julie and Rachel like two lonely islands in a hopelessly pale sea.

Julie reached out from her continent first. "I'm a horrible friend," she said.

"You'd be a horrible friend if you weren't afraid." Rachel pulled the bear claw closer to her and broke off a piece. "If you were happy about all of this? Then you'd be a horrible friend."

"I should be happy," said Julie. "You're getting treatment," she added when Rachel's eyebrows rose. "You have a chance to get cured. Like, completely cured. And I'm just sitting here thinking, 'Oh, but I don't know, I don't really get it.'"

"It's experimental. It's weird. Like I said, I have no idea how this is going to go."

"Then why aren't you worried? Why am I the only one freaking out right now?"

"Because your freakout's big enough to cover both of us." Rachel waited until Julie smiled and began to butter her muffin before she continued. "You know I'm terrified," she said.

"I know," said Julie.

"It's just that, more than that, I'm tired. Tired of being sick, you know? Tired of being tired, that's what they say."

"I know," said Julie.

For a while, they both looked out the window and ate in silence.

"It doesn't seem fair," Julie eventually said, "that you have to go through something so strange all alone."

This time, Rachel bridged the distance across the impossible-looking Formica-top sea between them: she took Julie's hand. "How can you offer to wait for me today and say I'm all alone?" she asked. "The parking lot's right there. I'm only walking a short way off. And all my brochures are in the bag. You can read up on the treatment while you wait, maybe make it seem a little less strange."

"I'm not just talking about the treatment," said Julie.

The words hung between them, heavy and full under the daylight. Rachel blinked as she smiled. "You," she said, "are a basketcase."

"I know," said Julie. "I'm--"

"--a very good, very neurotic friend who's going to pay for my breakfast and drive me to therapy," Rachel finished for her. Julie squeezed her fingers and felt her bones. "Come on, before I'm way the hell late," said Rachel. They stood up from the booth together and walked to the cash register arm in arm.

Julie parked the car two spaces to the right of the path that began at the east end of the parking lot. Rachel hugged her and set off on the path, which, Julie remembered from her reading, would lead Rachel to a glade a short way into the forest. The other details of the treatment Julie couldn't recall. Nor had she understood them when Rachel had tried to explain. On the other side of the lot's perimeter, the birch trees guarding the deepening path were slowly going white, their bark becoming a silvery skin starting at the branches' crowns. Julie didn't understand how birch trees did that, either. There was so much it seemed that she didn't understand.

At the edge of the lot, separating the world Julie knew from one she could barely imagine, a row of bushes sat with their branches entwined, as if they were holding hands.

"Fire"

 

He rarely thought about the trees in any of the lands their army crossed, but this one he liked. The way the thin, curved fingers of its trunk curled toward the sky made him think of fire, and fire he liked as well. He took his striking stones from his breast pocket and reached into the pouch at his hip for one of the wax-dipped wads of cotton he carried with him. Grinning, he broke from the line of freeriders and went to kneel beside the tree. It was almost as if its lines were meant to lead the flames.

"Sometimes on Those Summer Nights"

 

Sometimes on those summer nights, among all the shouts from the neighbors playing bag toss games in their driveways and the songs that fell in pitch as cars drove past the house, he would catch the sound of someone crying. He checked out the window a few times and once in the held-breath stillness of night even stepped barefoot on the lawn, but he never saw anybody. The only figure of any note was that of the tree, which stood in the middle of the yard, sticky with the sap that had built up inside it over the course of the spring and that was now escaping through cracks in the bark, unable to be contained any longer.

"Circular"

 

[Two other influences on today's post: 1) an image I saw, very similar to this photomicrograph, of bone tissue; and 2) Inger Christensen's incredible poem "alphabet," which I've checked out from the library.]

bones and branches, they both exist

with their circles of cells swirling

whirling in a time-wrought wind

round go the centuries of record

softly the days play a song

"The Echo Tree"

 

[A note about this post: When I began writing it, I had an idea of how the story would end. As I continued writing, I liked that ending less. I might be able to fix this, but I couldn't in the time I had today. So below is what I was able to get down of this story.]

The Saturday night before classes were set to start, everyone else on our floor left for a party at one of the nearby apartments, which meant that it was just Lori and I who went out to see the echo tree.

The echo tree was on the west side of campus, near the intersection of Howard and Taylor. It looked like an ordinary tree, except for one abruptly terminated growth about five feet up the trunk. That looked like the remaining nub of a severed branch, except that it was hollow at its core, leading a cavity within the trunk and giving the impression that the tree was whistling, or puckering up for a kiss.

Lori tilted her head as she examined it. "'I'm a little teapot, short and stout,'" she sang.

"Oh, please don't let this tip over and-or pour anything out," I said. "I don't care if it really is empty inside. It's still pretty big."

Lori snickered. "Hey, thanks again for coming out to see this with me."

"No problem. Like I said, I was curious, too. And parties--not so much my thing." Which was true, and which made my assignment to a roommate like Lori, a stranger until yesterday who seemed to feel the same way that I did about what the resident director had labeled "social endeavors," all the more surprising.

"I know," she told me. "I mean, I know shouldn't be shocked, but I am, I can't believe how many people are spending their first weekend at school doing who knows what stupid things that they won't even remember. I mean, new-found freedom and all, I guess, but...."

"Freedom, and learning who you are," I said, "not to mention the fact that we're about to spend our Saturday night talking to a tree, so if anyone's wandering the realm of stupid...."

The story behind the echo tree was that whenever someone spoke into its hollow branch, the tree spoke back--made sense, given the tree's name. The thing about the echo tree, though, was that what it said back was never the same as what had been said to it moments before. There were all sorts of theories as to what was actually happening: that there were pipes that ran underground between the tree and apartments across the street; that one of the frat delegations had slipped some kind of device inside and passed down the secret from one batch of conscripts to the next; that some of the city's homeless, known to shelter in the underpasses, were having some fun at the students' expense. The only one with any answers to share was the tree, and the tree offered only what it had been given to say.

"Runaways"

 

Moira swore that no one could have heard her crawl out her bedroom window. Her parents certainly wouldn't have. They never listened, just called instructions to her while they balanced their checkbooks or filled out forms for work, telling her to clean her room, or do her homework, or change bratty little Liam's diaper, though at least they never told her to change Grandma's. But it was just an endless sea of chores with them. When she sneaked through her window that night, it was as if she broke through the surface of the ocean, although she made her escape very quietly, taking care to avoid even breathing too heavily.

Which was one reason she was so surprised to find the ash tree from her front yard, labeled by the people from Public Works with a tag that read "65," following her down the sidewalk.

Moira had sat in Sixty-Five's shade enough times to feel certain that the tree meant her no harm. It was the only fact that she felt certain of when, hearing its roots tap their way over the cement like the feet of a thousand tiny insects, she turned around. She made a few stuttering attempts at a sentence before whispering, "You're not supposed to be here," thinking both of her belief that she had left the house in secret and of the tendency of trees to remain in fixed locations.

Sixty-Five remained a few feet away. It tipped the uppermost part of its trunk to the right as if asking a question.

"Trees don't move!" Moira hissed. Sixty-Five replied by slowly waving its branches, giving the impression that a small wind was stirring them.

"You know what I mean," Moira said. "Trees don't get up and walk. They have roots."

A larger branch swung around until it was pointing at her chest.

"Me? I don't have roots. I have my family. Not like they're going to notice I'm gone or anything. Not till they need the toilet cleaned or whatever."

Somehow the branch curved inward so that Sixty-Five appeared to be pointing at itself.

"Trust me, they'll see you're missing," said Moira. "But I'm not as big as you are. And no one there cares about me."

As soon as the words left her mouth, Moira saw Sixty-Five's leaves droop. At first she thought that the tree was tired of arguing, which was confusing, as she always imagined that a good shade tree was nothing if not patient. Then Sixty-Five began to back away, and she realized the weight of what she had said. All those days before, with Sixty-Five looming high above her while she sat in the yard, Moira had assumed not that the tree cared about her, but that the tree was just being a tree, indifferent to anything she did or wanted.

She had made similar assumptions about her parents.

Once she and Sixty-Five were back in the yard, Moira dropped to her knees and patted the dirt back in place over its roots. It turned out, as she saw the tree's wings unfold like moth wings in the moonlight, that the work wasn't so bad after all.

"Six Little Trees"

 

[Just being silly today. I had the lovely little song "Ladybugs' Picnic" in my head when I came up with this, to give you an idea.]

Six little trees, all bound in their plastic; 

Six little trees, stacked nice and neat.

Six little trees got out from their package;

Six trees stood up without any feet.

Six little trees, set free on the sidewalk;

Six little trees, dancing on the lawn.

Nobody told the trees to stay put;

Now all the trees are gone, gone, gone.

"A Hole in My Heart"

 

The tree was sure it knew what the girl was going to do. Through all the years of her climbing on its branches and hiding in its shade, it couldn't help getting to know her a bit. And she had been storing her journals in the hole in its trunk ever since she was six. When she tucked the knife inside one morning, next to all the yellowed notebooks, the tree understood immediately the choice she had made. As soon as she left for school, it began to cry. All that time, it had been so certain that it had kept her safe.

"Just a Trim"

 

More and more people had been walking beneath the spruce tree ever since she got her lower branches cut. It bothered her. Other perennials in the area tried to be encouraging, telling her that the trim simply made her, in a very literal way, much easier to approach. And to be fair, the tree did find herself listening to the people talk as they passed, hearing them speak with delight about how nice it was, now that spring had arrived and homeowners had begun maintaining their landscaping in earnest, to be able to enjoy all the greenery around them. The spruce tree merely wished that she could remind these people that she was the same tree that had been rooted there for people's enjoyment for years, just with a new cut, and that she was as green as she had ever been, which only made sense, as she was an evergreen. But the people continued to walk by and comment on all the lovely things they had never seen before, and the tree, being a tree, said nothing.