Tree Man

[Savidbor]

Tree Man


They call me Tree Man. While they point their little fingers and laugh, they call me Tree Man. As the stones fly at me from below and they search the ground for more, they call me Tree Man. All day they look up at me, eyes squinting from the illuminating glow which surrounds me. They call me Tree Man. The tree is tall and strong, its mighty arms branching out into the sky, protecting me. My eyes, they burn of the deep green which colors the leaves that give shade to the unwelcome guests below.

The glow recedes until they can no longer distinguish me from the leafy canopy. I like this. It isn’t long before they leave me of their torments and return to their warm homes. “Goodbye Tree Man”, they say. I like the darkness that hides my face. I like how the shadows make me a part of the great tree. The glow is gone. It is cold as the wind rushes through my hair, rustling the leaves, but I do not shiver. A tree does not shiver. Sometimes a bird will land on my leg or shoulder, but I do not move. A tree does not move. In the night, I am the tree. There is no Tree Man. In the night, there is just Tree.

Something hits me hard in the back, and I wake up. My eyes open but squeeze together as the blazing sun overwhelms my vision. The glow has returned. The children, they see me. I look down at them, far below me, and watch as another stone is let loose in my direction. It misses, but I know it will not be the last. Already they are pointing and laughing; always laughing. I don’t care though. Night will come, and while they toil away in the dim glow of their homes, I will be at peace. I will be the tree.

It whistles through the air, and I turn my head to receive a sharp stone in the cheek. I can feel my skin break, a weakness in the glow of daylight. Come nighttime, my skin would be hard, bark, but not now. Wetness slowly expands over my face, dripping rhythmically onto the branch of which I am standing, painting it red. With my hand I touch my face, and it too turns red. Down below, they are edging away from the tree as the blood falls like singular raindrops from the sky. They curse at me, waving fingers and shouting angry words. One boy, off to the side, takes out a small knife. I watch him. He has brown hair and dark eyes. His face looks angry as he steps forward. It is the glow. It makes them crazy. Never does it happen in the dark, the shadows, where it is forever peaceful. His steps are slow and deliberate, his eyes locked on mine. I watch him, unsure and yet sure all at once. His mouth twists into a smirk. He raises the knife and presses it into the tree.

I can feel it growing inside me, the heat overtaking my senses. I feel the pain, not in my cheek, but in my soul. I am the tree. The stone, now red, lies at my feet. I take it. He is still there, below, violating us. A young demon he is, and so I take aim and release. I hear the whistle, but he does not, so intent on his destruction. I watch it hit him. It makes a loud noise. I can see the blood as he falls. They stop cursing, and all is silent as they look at their fallen comrade and then up at me. Shock and terror mask their faces when they see the glow that surrounds and suffuses me. The boy’s eyes are closed, but he makes strange noises. Still watching me, they pull his limp form away from us, but I do not care. His knife, it is on the ground, half covered in leaves. The tree will heal. We will heal. I can feel the glow shrinking. The shadows have begun to change me once more. Down below they see this, and once again they are frightened. They run away, carrying their friend, the demon. They called me Tree Man, but today they finally understand; I am the tree.

 

[Savidbor]

They called me Jacob as I first breathed in the life giving air having been pushed out of the warmth of my mother. “He’s a boy. We will call him Jacob.” My memories are strong, thick and far reaching as the roots of a great tree. My mother was a beautiful woman with soft blue eyes, my father, strong yet kind. That first day he held me while my mother slept. We were both born that day. A tree planted behind my home by my grandfather. A tree for the baby to grow old with he had said.

Our village was small and isolated. The men, my father included, fished the river while the mothers and daughters weaves in the village green if the weather permitted. In the early years I would sit at my mother’s side and roll around the soft green grass. Beside me would be Rachel, a little girl who had been born shortly after me. Together we played in the grass, scrutinizing the thin blades which we tore out of the earth. There was one time that a worm came within our grasps, and we tugged at it from either ends until it split down the middle and spraying us both with worm insides. We cried. Our mothers came to us and gasped when they saw what we had done. They hurried us home that day to clean the blood and dirt off of us. We left the worms alone after that.

As I aged my father paid more attention to me. He would take me with him in his fishing boat. Sometimes I was allowed to bait his lines, but usually I just watched and napped. He never minded and would wake me when the day was near end. With the transfer to my fathers care, I saw less of Rachel who had become my favorite childhood playmate. We still spent time together, but only in the evening or on my fathers rest days. Our favorite game was hide-and-seek. We would play behind my house; the small tree always the base.

Together we grew. Our bodies, lives and games changed. I had grown taller; taller then my mother, though my father still stood a head above me. My muscles were strong like his though, from the daily pulling and hauling of the fisherman’s life. Soon I would have my own boat. Soon I would be married to Rachel. She had grown too, into a beautiful woman. We no longer played hide-and-seek, but instead spent our time over a board and stones under the shade of the tree which had outgrown me in our seventeen years of life. We played every day, neither of us winning many more games then the other by capturing each others stones on the board my father had made me on my sixteenth birthday.

Mother was crying when we were wed. It was a small ceremony, meaning that the entire village had come to witness Rachel and I promise our selves to each other. My clothing that day was gray trousers and tunic sewn by Rachel’s mother while her dress had been crafted by my own. It was under the tree that we first kissed as husband and wife.

The storm had snuck upon the village without warning, and I found my boat foundered near the far side of the river forcing me haul it out and into the muddy bank. The rains and winds were hard and made return impossible. I was forced to wait the storm out with the hope that my beloved would not worry. All day the tempest raged while I huddled under my overturned boat, waiting for the relentless assault of wind and water to end. Lying under my protective shell, the rhythmic percussions of rain drops nearly perforating the underside of my boat lulled me to sleep. I dreamed a strange dream that day. One of being lost in the river as the monstrous waves tried to pull me down to the cold beneath. I cried out with each upwards surge of the rivers wake, gasping for air before being pulled back down until I no longer reached for the surface; I no longer crier out. The storm raging above did not reach me as I lay on the river bottom, and so I had accepted my fate. I had stopped fighting. Finally, I was at peace with myself and the world and ready to let go.

At first I had thought the whisper was the spirits coming to take me away, but as the voice grew louder I recognized it as that of my beautiful Rachel. She was calling to me; her voice showing me the way home. The lethargic calm within me vanished and the struggle renewed. The river had taken advantage of the ceasefire and taken hold me so strongly that I had not the strength to reach the surface. To reach Rachel. Exhausted, I stretched to touch her voice, praying for the spirits to let me go when I felt a shifting in the water around me. From the submerged earth grew a tree, my tree. Before my eyes it stretched above and reached out to the surface. CLIMB. And so I climbed, my fingers digging into the bark. The tree grew as I climbed, lifting me out of the river, my head breaking the surface allowing my lungs to scream for the air they so desperately needed. “Jacob!” A clap of thunder erupted in the sky, and I heard her voice no more as my eyes shot open.

I woke, wet and cold. The sounds of the storm were gone, and so I pulled myself from beneath the boat. It was near dusk. Carefully I lifted the boat and flipped it right-side-up again, careful not to step on any of the hooks left in the mud. After picking my tackle and lines out of the riverbank, I pulled the boat back into the now mildly choppy waters and rowed back across the river to my village.

I reached familiar shores with a red sky behind me. I made sure that I pulled my boat well up onto the bank before leaving it and my supplies to dry out overnight. I neared the village shortly and saw that the entire village seemed to be in the village green, watching something. I came up behind the crowd quietly, but I was soon seen and assaulted with gasps and shrieks. As I passed the villages I had know all my life, they backed away from me until I found myself in the center of the green where the master councilor of the village stood with his son. It was not him that the village was looking at though, it was the ruined bodies his feet. Staring back at me through dead, sightless eyes was my Rachel. On either side of her were her parents, and then my own. My beautiful mother never to smile again, and my father, so strong in life, his body lay limp. I raised my eyes from the dead towards the soon to be dead. Standing beside his father was Simian, and in his hand was a bloody hand-axe. I spoke, my voice dark and deep like a beast. “What have you done?” The entire green shuddered as I spoke. The knuckles on the hand-axe went white. Whispers of demons spread through the crowd as I neared the butchers of my family.

“Jacob stop!” demanded the councilor. “Rachel was possessed! Screaming into the river, calling the storm from hell to kill us all! We had to stop her!” I looked into his eyes, my own burning with the fires tormenting my soul. He looked down, unable to meet my fury. I raised my hand over the corpses.

“And these, your friends, our parents, were they also possessed?” I had spoken but the councilor refused to look at me. Simian stepped forward and spoke for his father.

“Yes Jacob. They tried to stop us. It had to be done!” I heard him, but his words had no meaning to me. I moved quickly towards him and saw the fear enter their hearts and they backed away from me. I was faster though, and with the reflexes of a river man, the axe fell from Simians broken wrist before he could turn to run. Before he could scream. His eyes went wide with shock, and stayed wide as my hands encircled his neck. I squeezed, crushing the life out of him. His father who had turned to run stopped at the crack of his son’s neck. He stood there frozen. I dropped the dead weight to the ground and lifted the axe from the red grass. The councilor had finally pulled his eyes free of his dead son and began to run from me. I gave no warning. I simply raised the axe high and let it fly, the spinning half-moon blade flicking in the light of the fiery sky as it spanned the distance until burying itself within his back. He fell, never to rise again.

The bodies were heavy. I carried them one at a time to my mother and fathers home. The villagers had disappeared behind the safety of their own walls, barring the doors and hiding the children. It was with my fathers shovel that I dug a grave under the tree, one large enough for my family to rest comfortably. The moon was high when I was finished. My eyes became wet as I laid my Rachel into the cold earth. In her arms I placed her wedding dress as well as the pieces to the game we had shared with each other in childhood. With my father I put the still bloody axe in his hand. If the murderers were ever to return, he would be able to protect the family whom I laid in his case. My tears fell heavily as I covered Rachel and our parents with the dark earth, and as I cried did the sky cry with me, hiding my tears with its own, cleansing me of the blood and mud of the storm from my body. It crowned the freshly dark grave.

My family was buried and I was alone. Setting down the shovel, I lay my head against the wet trunk of the tree, my salty tears running down the grooves of the trunk. CLIMB. I climbed slowly, up the tree, my twin. I climbed until I reached the branch I had climbed to as a child. I curled there, my body against the tree, my head against its face as the shadows of the night enveloped us. And so there I stayed in its cool embrace, such as that which my loved ones rested in. I was hidden from those who had stood so idly by. And so time passed. They called me Tree Man. Jacob has been forgotten. Jacob died a long time ago. Now, they call me Tree Man.

 

[physics23]

Damn. That was good!