Two Trees

An Original Short Story

‿︵‿︵୨˚̣̣̣͙୧ - - ୨˚̣̣̣͙୧‿︵‿︵

Happy spooky day. A little thrum that I intend to submit to a couple of contests—on va voir! NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow, and I’m working on a little factum for the Ontario Justice Education Network’s Charter Challenge. I’ll be a busy little mole rat in the month to come.

‿︵‿︵୨˚̣̣̣͙୧ - - ୨˚̣̣̣͙୧‿︵‿︵

There’s a house across the street from me that has two trees in its front yard. One is a sapling planted by the city—the mayor sponsored a bylaw stating that plots where it is viable for trees to grow are legally required to have them. Such was the case for my neighbours across the street—the older man who owned the house was harsh and a bit mean, the sort to spit on homeless people, but the bylaw officers and the homeowner’s association made him comply, so he complied.

There had already been a tree in the yard, an old oak that had seen better centuries. It was suffering from the early stages of root rot and would likely be cut down within the next fifteen years or so, but it was hearty enough otherwise. An array of squirrels had made their homes among its knotted branches, and sometimes from my bedroom window I would see woodpeckers hammering their little beaks against its stout trunk, or squirrels either trying to couple with or kill their rodent compatriots. It was dying, yes, but it thrummed with life. The baby tree that shared the yard—a little oak sapling—had been planted by the city’s arborists about ten feet to its left. It still relied on the steely trellis to stand upright, and the small leaves that had only begun to sprout from its feeble branches went to red and brown at the beginning of the month. They now decayed around its base, adding to the mulch and wood chips scattered to ensure its growth and vitality. 

Every year, the wife of the man who owned the house across the street derived great pleasure in decorating it for Halloween—something that I, even as a small child—greatly displeased her husband. They had children themselves—two boys—but they were about ten years my senior and I did not know them well. The youngest had just started college, leaving them empty nesters. I knew that because my father had helped them pack his things when he was moving out over the summer, since there was much to pack, and my father considers himself a Good Samaritan and neighbour, a true suburban family man. He had had me help him with it, and the entire time I loaded boxes into the back of the small uHaul, I stared at the trees—the old one and the young one; they were brimming with the sort of fragile life that hung in the balance. One rotting, one sprouting, both vulnerable. 

The missus of the man’s house was a devout Catholic who enjoyed dabbling in pagan decorum when it reached the shelves of JC Penney’s. Their vast lawn was always cluttered with all sorts of spooky paraphernalia; the red brick porch strewn with gauze spiderwebs, large plastic cauldrons filled with plastic bones and plastic organs, and a litany of homemade tombstones bearing epithets that were as pun-ny as they were macabre. Barry M. Deep, Dedonna Rival, Myra Mains, Diane Makepeace, Xavier Breath, and Wynt Missing… these names danced through my mind, even after their relegation to the bowels of the garage once October had passed. I did not find these additions as troublesome as the witches, though. 

The missus of the house had one particular decoration that disturbed me greatly. It was a tarp of a witch, flattened—the missus and her husband would wrap it around the great girth of the tree’s trunk, striped-stockinged legs splayed, straw hair fried. They attached a broomstick to it that jutted out just so. The gag was that it looked like a witch who’d crashed into a tree while flying about on her broom, something that I’m sure elicited a dull chuckle from anyone who had never seen one before. I didn’t find it funny. I didn’t find it funny, not even a little. I thought it was wrong. After all, Joan of Arc had been burned for being a witch, and there was none so pious and devout as her. The irony of the missus’s Catholicism was not lost on me in this instance, but it disturbed me nonetheless. 

On her own, she was forsaken, the poor woman of the night. I tried to console myself with the isolation of the incident whenever I looked down at the tree from my bedroom window, seeing her there, strewn to the wind, faceless, nameless, meaningless… just green skin and buckled shoes and nothing else. The image of her suspended death drove me to tears every night when I struggled to sleep. I never named her, as it was not my place to. Whatever name she had had in her witchy life was not my concern. 

The addition of the second changed things. 

My mother had been wiping a bit of snot from my face one morning before school in mid October, the day after the neighbours set up their Halloween display. I was sniffling like wild, and whenever my nose crusted up, I would get this awful, awful rash. While we stood pithily in the driveway by the station wagon—my nostrils nigh on bleeding from how hard I was trying to sniffle the stuff back up into them—I saw the second witch. Hugging the trunk of the little oak sapling that had just been planted in the yard only a few months past was another tarp-like mockery of a woman, her flailing plastic arms quivering on the trellis that the baby tree still clung to, her broom jutting out from between her striped-stockinged legs. 

I felt my blood turn to ice, my hands to flame. As my mother damn-near suffocated me with her tissues, my chest swelled with an ache that it had never known before. One witch dead was a tragedy. Two witches dead was a threat.

 Two witches dead, whose bodies had been crafted from polymers and paints.

Two witches dead, strapped to two trees that were as near to death as they were far.

I still cannot recall what came over me then. I still cannot recall exactly what it is that I did. All I know is that I saw that those two witches’ bodies did not remain strung around those two poor saps of wood. I remember the sting of the steely trellis in my tender hands in sharp contrast to the roughness of weathered bark. The screams of my mother, of the Catholic bitch and her Catholic bitch husband, the screams of others whom I could not identify were my life dependent on it. The names on the faux headstones—Barry M. Deep, Dedonna Rival, Myra Mains, Diane Makepeace, Xavier Breath, and Wynt Missing. The scratch of dried snot around my raw nostrils. 

Those were the names I knew. I did not know the witches’ names, so there was nothing to remember there. For that, at least, I am grateful. 

‿︵‿︵୨˚̣̣̣͙୧ - - ୨˚̣̣̣͙୧‿︵‿︵

Word Count: 1136