shade
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Out on a Limb -Jenna-
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May 12 00:02 UTC 1996 |
OUT ON A LIMB
by jenna hirschman copyright (c) 1996
''I wish you would stop depressing everyone all the
time.''
My voice was as crisp and curt as my leaves, which
were about to fall off for the winter and leave me entirely
divested of glucose for the next several months. I hate winter.
Snow freezes everything upwards of six feet under, leaving me
working on bare roots alone. I've never been the most efficient
and logical tree, never claimed to be, so I don't store things all
that well. Some would say I was just under-evolved. I tend to
think it's more of a personality thing.
The tree I had been across from for the entirety of my
life was this weeping willow. He was tall and slender and
always crying. He was much taller than me, and his tears
blocked my light. Don't take that to be an egotistical statement.
I'm a tree, and blocking the light is light locking the fridge.
But worse than that, he was never depressed. He was
just depressing. Most of the other weeping willows I'd heard
whispers of at least pretended at misery. This one here, he was
just obnoixious, plain and straight.
At least he didn't play to the human-folk. Most trees,
even the odios ones of his ilk, act nicely around those motile,
all-powerful beings. He didn't inspire their children to tears,
though. He wasn't that sort. He was much more likely to inspire
fears!
All I could think was, he'd have some nonsensical reply
that I was supposed to find infinitely insulting, that I wouldn't
understand well enough to find insulting. I was smart, but I
wasn't very old. Not nearly as old as him. And my father tree,
from whom I'd finally inherited the land, had apparently told
him much.
His name was Away, and he didn't like me very much.
As far as he was concerned, I was a sorry inheritor of my
father's legacy. He had preached to me in my young days about
the problem with sex being that it always made a child who
resembled neither of its parents and thus annoyed them both
infinitely. I never knew my father. He was dead before I
sprouted.
Away was his name and that was all that mattered now.
I wondered if, when lightening struck him down hundreds of
years hence, I would do to his children what he had done to me.
It would only serve him right.
He breathed and inspected the ground above his roots.
''How many orders of french fries do these kids get in a shot?''
he asked.
Just as I'd expected, I didn't get it. So I ignored it and
watched the skyline. The sun was beating down on me,
warmining my leaves, feeding me. The ground was covered in
pine needles and underbrush that was turning a dull brown in
the November wind. Not that it had been any more interesting
when it was vibrant green.
Away was 50 or so years my senior, not that it really
mattered in this day and age, with the humans controlling
everything. Eventually the land would fall into the hands of
someone who didn't know what they were doing, didn't know
or care about the forest, and we would, inevitable, be chopped
down and chopped up side by side.
It was late afternoon, and all the children from the
nearby schoolhouse, that I could barely see from the top of my
leaves, were gone. Or if they weren't there they were
somewhere else today. Their abscence freed us entirely. We
could shout and yell, instead of burrying soft voices in the noise
of the wind.
Their were no curious humans to threaten us with
dissection. That was a nice feeling. Away and I ought to have
been at play with the other trees, dancing and singing around
the clearning. But he was particularly recessed from us today
and I couldn't just leave him there all alone.
So I stood beside him, and said ''Ah,'' clearly not
understanding his comment, and not making any effort to do so.
That was just about all I could think of to say to Away at all. If
you didn't know exactly what he meant, it was hard to make any
sort of intelligent reply and attempts were usually met with his
disapproval.
Away watched the river and I watched him. He study it
with an intentAway was watching the river now, studying it
with that frightening intentness that had always horrified me
since I was a sapling. Well, at first, it had only been horrific
because he was always staring at me.
He stopped doing that sometime during my second or
third year, like he had been weighing me up and decided I
wasn't worry of his attention. I didn't miss it. Now, he only did
it occasionally. When I was dancing with the others, having left
him here alne to ponder the world in solitude, or when I was
sleeping. Sometimes I'd wake up and his eyes would still be
fixed on me for a split second.
Away still studied me.
And it made me nervous. It couldn't be good for me that
he would do something like that. When I aas younger I had
asked him why he studied me so incessantly. It was as if he was
going to write a book on everything he'd ever seen or heard in
our words, but had no pen and paper so had to memorize every
detail of everything. He never said anything that I qualified as
an answer, though he would reply. And you just couldn't ask
him more than a few times. He was nice to sit and look at,
especially when he wasn't watching, but no one, including me,
could just talk to him.
He wasn't like the mother Oak tree who was near
enough by me to the north to have a real, serious discussion
wth. She was hundreds of years old, and when she offered
advice, it was best taken. But she considered all of us her
children, and we were all happy to have that title. Except Away.
He didn't like anyone. I was the only one who'd ever heard
more than two words out of him and that was only because I
was next to him.
I recalled our first conversation of why he stared.
''Why do you watch me?'' I asked.
''How do you know I watch you?'' He asked, aloofly in
return. As I said, never an answer from him. Tom Stoppard
would have adored him.
''I can tell.''
''Why do you watch me, little one?''
''I don't. I don't even speak to you.''
''Don't you?''
''No. And I don't like you either. Not enough to watch
you.''
He laughed, the only time I've ever heard him laugh, and
then stopped speaking to me entirely for a long long time.
And now, the minute he discovered my eyes on him he
would do or say something so repulsive I shivered and looked
away. And it was probably better this way. Afterall, what did
we need to be watching each other for?
I hardly even looked at him. He had long delicate
branches, and was rooted solidly in the ground beside me. Our
roots were sharply entangled from years of growing side by side
and we fought for everything. His leaves were pale yellow and
mine were deep green. It was terrible, just to think of the two of
us even speaking to each other. A monocot and a dicot. I'd
heard that anyway. In some places the monocots and dicots hate
each other. But I'd never known that here. He was a far bit
taller than me, I had to stretch to see his upper leaves. I admit,
they were pretty, they way they glowed in the sun, and he
looked much better than me when the wind rippled his leaves.
''Acie?''
His voice interrupted my thoughts. I was surprised to
hear my name from him. And his tone--it shocked me even
more. I looked at him. He sounded almost anxious. He'd spoken
my old nickname, ''Acie'' being ''short'' for ''Ace Of Whatever
Suit Is Suitable'' which was my long name. I don't remember
how the other trees of the forest had gotten to calling me that.
But here was Away, calling my name, as though he was
afraid I'd wander off somewhere and not come back, which was
silly of him. I'd never ventured beyond the river and the
clearing, and he knew I never would, until humans dragged off
my carcass to be processed in their distant factory.
I'd never heard him sounding like that.
I looked at him, trying to hide my excitement at the
strange conversation. ''Yes?''
If he'd had a lip, like those silly humans, he might have
bitten it. Whatever the mental force that makes people tap their
fingers and chew their lips--it was what Away was eminating
from ever piece of bark, every twig, root and leaf on his body.
He looked at me, as he had not looked in many many
years.
''How long have you been here?'' he asked. Though, he
must have known better than I did. As always, he was trying to
impress one of his crazy points on me.
''Fourty-nine summers,'' I said. ''And you?'' My question
was pointed. I had never asked him questions, but if we were
going to have a little Q&A session, I wasn't just going to
answer answer answer, though he might have wanted me too.
He surprised me by directly answering. ''I am 135
winters old, according to Mother Oak and those who went
before her,'' he said.
When he said ''those who went before'' my eyes grew
large. I was extremely intrigued by the concept of trees elder
than those I knew, and what had come before. I was the fourth
youngest tree by the river and I had never met any of ''those
who went before.''
Suddenly, thing that had seemed beyond imagining
became thoroughly drawn fantasies, and Away was the only one
who could give flesh to them. Mother Oak, true, was older than
my oldest company, but she was reluctant to speak about trees
that had passed away, such as my father tree.
And so I asked Away, ''How old are the oldest ones, the
ones who are still here now?''
He sensed the change as clearly as I did and looked at
me with all his sharp eyes. He must have known that now I was
interested in his knowledge and not him. And it must have
irritated him, but I didn't care because what he held in his
memories was more important than all of that.
''Green Point can't recall how old he is. He's the oldest
and he does remember learning English and French when those
two groups of people came here,'' Away said, blandly. He made
everything sound so boring.
And I was sick of it. He could have made it all the
colors of the rainbow and a few the earth had never seen. He
could have made it the river and sun and sky all together. He
could have made it a stream of nitrogen gas, and I knew he had
the talent to do so, and what did he make this story? Boring.
''Why are you always snapping?'' I demanded, made bold
by his show of emotion and this whole crazy conversation.
He gave me a brooding look. ''Why are you always
smiling? Don't deny it to me, little Ace of Hearts, don't deny it.
You have all the sorrow of the world in your eyes and all the
tears of the river and yet you always lay here in the sun,
grinning like you have nothing. Don't deny it. You might be sad,
one day, your leaves might be falling, your cork may be cut and
your leaf scars may be taking too long to heal. You might worry
that the humans are always here, watching you. But all I see
when I look at you is joy embodied. Every time you breathe,
you breathe in all the beauty in the world and every minute is
full of life--for you. Look at me. I am not with you--any of you-
-and you never even asked me why!''
He shouted louder than I had heard anything in a long
time. It could not be attributed to lightening or heat. It wasn't
that hot. It was November. I wondered if the humans would
come running out of their schoolhouse and factory to see what
had made the noise, only to find a bunch of trees, silent as trees
always are and go home puzzled. Maybe they would catch him
mid-sentence and we would all die.
I could see them running out of their tin-can gingerbread
houses with modern pitchforks and chainsaws to chop us down.
They would succeed. No one every tried to lie and say they
couldn't do whatever needed to be done.
But all that was immaterial. I lowered my voice, hoping
he would catch it as some sort of example. I turned to the
problem at hand, his problem. I thought about what he'd said
for awhile. Maybe all of that was true.
''So maybe I am happy,'' I said, and I would have tossed
my leaves if I'd thought about it. ''That doesn't make me a bad
tree. The last time I stayed and sat with you, you made it clear
you didn't want me aruund. You spent a hour making in
painsakingly clear that you wanted older and more depressed
company.''
''You get older every day,'' he snapped, and it was to
him what ''Maybe I am happy'' was to me. A statement of
acceptance.
I almost laughed at his statement. That it had taken him
this long to figure that out, or to be able to say that out
loud...But I didn't. He needed a hug, not laughter. But trees do
not hug. That is reserved for those soft-bodied humans.
There is another way, among trees. I twisted my lower
roots around his, where they already constantly touched and
cohabited, and offered him all the support I could give. It was
an issue of sheer psychic will. I shoved my emotions at him, and
could only hope he would be receptive.
Such behavior is not uncommon among the trees.
Humans would make more of it than there is to be made of it.
They would call it a symbol of love, a symbol of something.
Something you would not do to just anyone. They would not
understand what it is to be a tree.
And what it is, is much simpler. As a tree, I gave him
what he needed, despite our rocky acquantaince, despite the
fact that I was not the old, depressed, sophisticated company he
ached for. But a segment of me, the one full of imagination that
fancied me a human, thought of those human things.
''Shhh,'' I said, with a soft, voice that was particularly
willowly for me. ''No one will stop you from joining us. No one,
not Green Pointe or Setebos or Mother Oak or me would ever
wish your loneliness on you. You have always wished it on
yourself. We dance in the clearing and anyone who joins us
joins us. We rolls in the river, and no one stops anyone. Yu
have seen us there a million times. And don't you think some of
us wondered what it was that you felt that made you stay here
alone?''
''What I feel?'' Away said, chuckling cynically as soon as
his mouth was free of the words. ''None of you would
understand what I feel.''
I coughed. The air was cold and dry and his statement
was absurd. ''Try me,'' I said, attempting not to shout,
attempting not shake and scream at him. One screamer per
conversation is a good limit. And he wasn't planning on
relinquishing the role to me. If I started screaming too, it would
just escalate into a fight and the humans would come and find us
in mid-sentence and that would be that.
Instead of saying something sharp and incomprehensible
about french fries and teenagers, Away made sense.. At last, I
realized just what and who he really was.
''I used to be a man, with legs and arms and ahard that
beat and beat for years and years. And then one day, some
bastard decided that a war would be a nice thing to have. After
awhile, I got used to the killing, got used to all of the
decorations of war. But I never learned that my life was nothing
to nobody, and I never learned that I was going to die at the
hands of someone else's soldiers. Most soldier's just don't.''
At the beginning of his monologue, I didn't believe him.
But, by the time he'd whittled through it, using a word I'd barely
ever heard, my eyes misted over and I only wondered how he'd
gone from being a human to being a tree.
The important thing was that, once, long long ago, he'd
been something else. A man, of all things, a soldier. No doubt
he spoke of the U.S. Civil War, which had happened before my
time.
As a tree.
I was crying in silence then. He couldn't have
understood how well I would know what he meant. I almost
burst out and said that I comprehended him fully, and he could
go back to being miserable and isolated now. Before anyone
said anything at all, the dreams I'd had as a woman pounded
through my xylem and floem like they were arteries and veins in
a soft human body all over again. All those foolish human hopes
and dreams. Love, death, war, justice, righteousness, hate
suddenly returned--with their accompanying fantasies--in full
force.
I sagged. I was changed. I had forgotten and now was
forced to remember all that had been and now was not. A great
weight had been returned to my shoulders. But it had always
been there, I had just hidden it deeply. And when you hide
something, so deep you don't even always remember it at all,
there's something a little wrong with you, even though you
sometimes don't even realize.
''I know what you think--'Oh, gods. And, to think, I've
sat with this mad tree! Some unpure killer killed in his own
war'-- But that's not it, little Ace of Spades. Not it at all. It
wasn't my war! I didn't start it. I didn't have slaves, and I didn't
try to kill anybody who did. I don't like death. But I've killed
people. And I was killed. I deserved it! You're right, everything
you think is absolutely right!''
His speech was moving, but hypocritical. I swallowed
the lump in my throat and grinned, and it was like nothing ever
happened. All those human feelings surged again, but that didn't
stop me from being myself.
''Shut up, Away,'' I said, without the slightest hint of
anger. I came right out of my wooden tree body--just a spirit on
a chilly November afternoon. But my spirit was what was inside
the tree, a human being, like any other.
I knew I had a soul, because that, and my lovely tree,
were just about all that I had left. All that I had had since I was
imbibed into the seed of my father tree, who was indeed my
father though, my genetics were all the ones I'd inherited before,
when I was just a human.
I walked over to Away's tree and collapsed at the base
of it, throwing my arms around it in a real hug. Of course, souls
don't have to walk, or even really move. But, I'd been human
for a short, impressive while, and nothing--demons from hell,
river spirits, angels from heaven--were going to chase it away
from me. Once a human, always a human, that's what they say
down by the river.
I looked at his trunk, and saw a human face recessed
into it, staring out at me. I peered into his eyes. They were a
hazel color, green and brow and grey with all the tones of the
forest and the river and I liked them.
''My name is not Ace Of Whatever Suit Is Suitable. My
name is Zinnia Jane Stein. I was almost killed in 1942,'' I said. I
could say no more. I did not want to think about what had
caused my survival. Did not want to think about it at all. ''One
morning, I just wandered out of the hospital and...ended up
here. But that's obvious, how else would I be here if I wasn't
here? There was a young sapling here, dying. She hadn't the will
to live here, she was younger and weaker and sicklier than I. In
the night we talked and switched places. She died in my useless,
emaciated body. I live.''
I leaned against him, placed my hands, pale human
hands, against his face.
''When I died, my bereft sister came out here. She'd
gone to Church already, and the Priest had told her to let me
go, let me go to heaven. She didn't like that. She said I never
got the chance to do what I was always so good at--I never got
to be a farmer, I never got to climb my trees with my children
and I always loved trees. So she came out here, and I followed
her, a drifting consciousness, nothing more. She spent a long
time alone in the woods, and came to a sort of piece with
herself. She thought I would make a wonderful willow tree, like
the one I used to help her climb. She didn't know what to do
about her decision though, so she wandered, picking flowers
and not eating for awhile, and I was worried about her.
''The Druids who lurk in these woods found her and
took care of her. And when they heard what she wanted, they
helped her ask the world if it wanted me that way. She found
her place. And helped me find mine. My sister stayed with them,
and me, I'm still here,'' Away said.
But I knew we were not there. We were nowhere, no
when. For that time, we were just two people, or souls, or
trees--out on a limb that was tangental to the world, but still
within the circle.
It never began and it never ended.
------
"Out on A Limb" by jenna Hirschman Copyright (c) 1996
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