The Tree
There had always been something odd about the tree. It was in the way its leaves moved in a breeze, how its wood was darker than it should have been, and how when I sat at its base all alone on a summer afternoon, I didn’t feel as if I was.
No other trees grew beside it, even if a forest surrounded it. It sat at the center of a living, breathing, healthy forest, but nothing lived within fifty feet of the tree. There were many theories as to why, because people liked to talk. Some said it was the soil, while others rumored that it was a prank by local kids who would dig up anything that took root near the tree just to scare people.
I had another theory.
I would go to the tree whenever I could, I was just drawn to it, like a moth to a flame. After many years, it became an old friend, something I could tell all my secrets to. So we sat, the tree and I, hour after hour, enjoying each other’s company. Even after all that time, I never could quite put a name to the tree, as one should to a friend. Perhaps that was because it was so much more.
It could act as shelter in a storm, shade from the sun, and provide quiet in a chaotic world. Often I would stare up into its branches and watch them sway back and forth. They danced for me in the wind, but it didn’t take me long to figure out why it moved differently than all the other trees. It wasn’t the wind that moved the branches and the delicate scarlet leaves, it wasn’t anything at all. The tree just moved.
Once, I fell asleep underneath it. When I woke, I found a branch lying beside me. The arm of the tree had not fallen, but simply drooped until it was on the ground next to where I slept. I ran my hand down its bark, until my finger caught on something sharp. Drops of my blood fell onto the leaves, but disappeared instantly, as if they had been absorbed. It could have been my imagination, but I swear the leaves shimmered that day in the fading sunlight.
My parents tried to tell me to stay away from the tree. Mostly because children often went missing in the forest, any trace of them ending at the edges of the clearing surrounding the tree. They were afraid of it, but I was not.
After many years, the forest was sold to a lumber company. All of the trees were cut down. Even the tree at its center, though it was rather a hardship. I was told that it had taken several machines and double the amount of workers to take it down. They had said it just didn’t want to leave. I believed them…I didn’t want it to leave either.
I mourned the loss of my tree for some time, and would return to the place it had once been on occasion. But it wasn’t the same. I determined that it had not been the spot, but the actually tree that had provided me with that feeling of belonging.
But a funny thing happened one day.
One afternoon in the middle of spring, three years after the forest and the tree had been cut down, I walked into a bookstore. I was immediately drawn to a section that I would have otherwise avoided entirely. Slowly, I ran my hand along the bindings of the books on the shelves. They were beautiful colors, with lettering in gold and silver. I walked along the aisle until my finger caught on something sharp, pricking it so that it bled. I plucked out the book that had cut my finger, and looked down at its face. It was scarlet, and where the blood stain should have been from my finger, there was nothing.
I smiled down at the book, no longer feeling alone in the empty store. When I opened it, I expected to see familiar words that would have been printed on the pages. Where the first lines of Genesis should have been written, instead, I found other things. There were names, faces, and dates. Flipping through, I began to see the secrets I had told to no one, but that didn’t surprise me. Narrowing my eyes, so that I could see the details of each page, I noticed that the script was written in that familiar scarlet I had come to know so well.
Of course I had to bring the book home with me.
I placed it on the window sill and opened the window. The cover would open, and the pages would dance in the breeze. But I knew better. It was not the air that made them dance, they just did.
Sometimes I had to lose the book in order to get it back. I would leave it under a seat at the train station, or next to a chair at the local library. When I found it again, there was always more writing, and more names. For the first few days after finding it again, it would shimmer, just like it had the day it first tasted my blood.
Before I passed away, I had to make sure some instruction was left with the book in my will. I stated simply, “There had always been something odd about the book.”
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