The Life and the Death

The trees talk. More than that, they socialize, perhaps more than we could ever imagine.

The trees talk, and today they talk of the biggest one of all, a tall green Maple who, despite her towering presence, mostly kept to herself throughout her 150 years of living. But today, the green Maple needs the trees. As she comes tumbling down, she considers staying that way. She’s not alone down there. There’s a deer, soaked in red, and a man, dressed in the very same shade. The man brandishes an ax, and he grins.

And then he doesn’t.

Lying prone, the Maple calls out involuntarily, and the trees respond. They reach their branches way down and lift the green Maple back up.

“You alright there?” ask those who help.

“Well you had a good run,” suggest those who don’t.

The old green Maple looks around at the trees, the trees she had always seen, but never known. She thinks about what she saw down there on the ground, the life and the death, things the talking trees know but do not understand, for they cannot help but keep their eyes fixed on the sun. Where else might a tree look?

So like she has done for so many days before, the old green Maple keeps to herself, sparing the trees of the knowledge found down below.

But that night, the old green Maple dips down below, hoping to relive the day’s surreal sights.

She lands with a thud against the soft, even greener grass, but she otherwise makes no sound. The deer remains, its flesh now twinkling under the light of the stars whose placement in the night sky the old green Maple had memorized a long, long time ago. The man remains too. He is joined by a woman, who has been shrieking since the old green Maple slammed down onto the dew-covered grass. Her head rests on the man’s shoulder, and both of their backs rest against the broad base of a younger, much more talkative Maple tree.

“Gabe, Gabe!” says the woman to the man, shaking him awake. The man named Gabe opens his eyes and leaps to his feet.

“Son of a bitch,” he says. “This is the one, babe.”

The old green Maple listens as the man named Gabe recounts the day’s events. “And then the thing just lifts straight back up. All the trees here, they helped. It was some kind of magic, I swear.”

The woman, unconcerned, pats the warm grass next to her. “I believe you, but can you please come back and sleep?”

But Gabe doesn’t want to sleep. He marvels at the old green Maple, pacing along the tree’s impressive trunk. The old green Maple then decides to do something she has rarely done before. The old green Maple speaks.

She speaks for the trees, but she also speaks for the fleshy deer and the dew-covered grass.

She makes the man an offer, to return in one month’s time, at which point the old green Maple would rise again, only this time she would bring the man named Gabe with him.

As night turns to morning, the wind carries the tree’s booming voice. It circles Gabe’s head, but sends Gabe’s babe running off, even deeper into the sun-speckled woods.

Gabe arches his neck upwards. “Up there?” he asks.

The old maple’s branches, already losing some of their vigor, begin to sway, a tree’s nod perhaps.

“It’s a deal,” Gabe says, latching onto a branch and shaking it viciously. Gabe looks around as the branch snaps, and quickly sprints away, the wind carrying him more quickly than his feet ever could.

And there the old not-quite-as-green Maple remains. She does not call out. She does not speak. She simply waits.

Oddly enough, over the coming weeks, the old Maple sees the man named Gabe several times. At least, she thinks it’s Gabe. There’s certainly a man, and he is always with a woman, a different woman each time. And as the weeks go by, more trees fall, their varying shades of green turning to varying shades of nothing at all. The old Maple, now entirely devoid of color herself, is joined by oranges and yellows, the colors she too once enjoyed whenever the season turned to Fall.

And through it all, there’s always a man, always a woman, always a deer, and always an ax. And beneath it all, there’s the grass.

One month goes by, and the man named Gabe appears once more, ready to claim his prize. In truth, the old Maple feels too weak to ever rise again. She calls out, but she knows deep down not even all the trees in the woods could lift her ancient soul.

Enraged, the man named Gabe lifts his ax high, and takes a powerful swing into the old Maple. He swings again. And again.

In fact, the man spends the next month crafting the old Maple into the world’s tallest ladder, determined to sit amongst the treetops.

But when the man named Gabe finally begins his long-awaited climb, he hears voices, increasing in volume with every rung. They simultaneously whisper and scream, confess and conceal. And when the man arrives at his coveted destination, he is greeted by a cohort of women, women he has come to know rather intimately over the past couple of months.

They smile. “Hey Gabe,” they say.

“Hey babes,” he responds.

“What’s it like down there?” they ask. Gabe glances back down, trying to remember the world he was desperate to escape. He examines his surroundings, desperate to immerse himself in this new world. He leans back on his ladder, and travels a few rungs down, resigning himself to his new home, trapped between two worlds in which he’ll never quite belong.