The Tree

The thing they don’t tell you in the movies is that, when the world ends, much of it stays the same. The dirt under my fingernails after searching out earthworms in the soil is the same dirt I remember as a child. The smell of my socks—worn thin, now, and with a hole I keep meaning to darn in the heel—after a day of walking is the same as it was a decade ago.

But as things stay the same, so, too, do they change. Where I once sought out earthworms as friends, now I seek them out as food. Cooked in salted water, they almost pass for chicken. Almost, not quite. And where I once walked for pleasure, for dates, for exercise, now I walk to remind myself that I’m alive. In death, I’ve heard, you don’t feel pain. You don’t feel anything. At the end of a long day of walking, I tend to my cramped calves and my blistered toes with a sense of satisfaction. I may be hurting, but I’m not dead. Not yet.

The things that change in the apocalypse are the big things. The things you don’t think about possibly going without, because you’ve had them so long.

The sound of traffic—ubiquitous, once upon a time. An endless roar underpinning everything else. Now, gone. The silence is deafening.

Or the burnished bronze of sunset, threading orange beams between buildings and along crowded streets, dancing blissfully atop the merry waves at the wharf. The haze in the sky is too great now to make out much of anything, even the sun. I track its glow overhead to keep time.

(I wear a watch on my wrist—the latest generation smart watch, a gift from my parents for my doctoral graduation—but its blank face is meaningless now. I count my hours in the length of shadows. Shadows, ingeniously, don’t need charging ports.)

But the thing I miss most, the thing that festers at the hole in my chest when I try to sleep at night, is the green. God, how I miss the green.

I grew up in the country, on acres and acres of feverishly green grass. My parents planted pines along the borders of our property (less friendly than the low walls of fences; my parents were isolationists) that reached up, up, up. When I was young, they appeared like great, evergreen mountains.

Funny, that the word “evergreen” was a misnomer, after all.

As I grew into adulthood, I pushed myself further and further into jungles of concrete and asphalt. My mountains were skyscrapers, my fences were apartment balcony banisters. I left behind the sprawling fields of green grass and told myself that it was progress. I pitied the pathetic, sad trees caged into the sidewalks, or the foolhardy weeds peeking up through cracks in the pavement.

Now, I would give every scrap of fabric on my body, every scavenged salt packet, every weathered page of every browbeaten book in my pack, for a glimpse at a dandelion.

Or rather, that’s how I felt before I found the Tree.

It’s a Tuesday when I find the Tree. I have no way of knowing that it’s a Tuesday, but that hardly matters. I used to like Tuesdays, and I like the day I find the Tree. Therefore, it’s a Tuesday.

The first thing I notice is the green. The bright, vivid, joyous green on each leaf, repeated thousands of times across the many branches and twigs. More than ever, I wish the pollution would clear, just so I could see the light filter through the foliage the way it used to on the crabapple trees back home.

The tears come before I realize what I’m seeing. I process the Tree like I processed my breakup with Amy Hellmann my freshman year of high school: In great, fat, helpless tears that scorch my cheeks and collect frigidly under my chin. My legs give out, and I collapse.

I am witnessing the miracle of life. I feel sainted.

When my eyes have finished devouring the merciful green of the leaves, I turn to the branches. They are a predictable grey, jagged and organic, unremarkable, yet perfect nonetheless. I weep for them, too. My eyes track inward, and I meet the trunk.

The trunk itself is largely ordinary. The same grey as the branches, but heavily textured in thick, coarsely cragged bark. Yet at the heart of the branches, at roughly eye level, the Tree folds in on itself, like a roll of fat hanging over a tight belt. I stumble to my feet and approach the Tree, familiar enough with trees to know that they do not typically bear much resemblance to Aunt Cheryl.

As I draw near, picking my way over an uncommonly large assortment of bones to do so, a gleam of silver in the cleavage of the fold catches my eye. There’s metal on the Tree. I get close enough to touch the trunk—and do, with wondering fingers and thankful lips, thrilling in the once-familiar drag of bark on my skin—and find that the glint of metal isn’t steel or iron, as I thought it might be. It’s silver.

There is a pendant necklace wrapped around the trunk of the Tree, cinching it in like a tiny, chain link corset.

I laugh out loud. A mighty tree, weighing several thousand pounds, held prisoner by a delicate necklace. If there is a greater allegory to life, I do not know it.

I examine the necklace more closely. The pendant of it is a heart-shaped locket, beset with sapphires. My fingers trace the necklace with reverence, wiping away the dust and grime to let the jewels shine. I attempt to open the locket, curious to see what keepsake might be hidden inside, and the sharp setting snags the edge of my cuticle. I curse and wipe the blood away, embarrassed to have made a mess. It seems shameful to leave something as pedestrian as my blood on the Tree.

I spend hours under the canopy of the Tree, eyes closed, entirely absorbed in the gentle susurrus of rustling leaves, somehow both achingly familiar and entirely novel to me. As the sun sets, though, I know my time with the Tree is coming to an end. The land around us is barren and arid, and my pack rations are running too low for comfort.

Walking away requires emotional effort, the likes of which I have not felt in years. Each step seems heavier as the green fades into the simmering fog of pollution behind me, yet I plod on. There is no emotion I cannot outpace, a lesson I have learned a dozen times over since the world ended.

(I wish I had a good term for it. The world ending, I mean. The movies always had a snappy title for the apocalypse, like “the Cataclysm” or “the Blip.” In the last two years, all I’ve come up with is the Great Sneeze, so-named because the color of the sky now is a fetid, mucousy beige.)

By nightfall I have come upon a small strip mall, halfway demolished by post-Sneeze looters. I haven’t seen another person in well over a year now—most people divided into factions and waged a useless war, grief giving way to rage giving way to more grief—but I like to imagine they still exist somewhere. Just never here.

The strip mall has a convenience store, which is my first stop. The sodas are long since expired, but there are a few water bottles left. The first empties itself between my lips like a magic trick. The second, I savor, trying to pretend it fills the ache in my chest left by the Tree.

I meander through the other stores, finding nothing, and make camp in the convenience store. I dream of the Tree that night. In my dreams, it is massive and shadowed, looming, demanding. A god of the Old Testament disposition. My cuticle aches.

I awake to the rustling of leaves. I know where I am before my eyes have opened. The Tree stands before me, proud and beautiful, and my confusion gives way to gratitude. I do not know how I got here, but I am thankful for it.

Over the course of the day, I stay by the Tree. I stretch out my cramped calves and blistered toes and read from my books aloud, after I rediscover how to speak, taking sips from the bottle of water I saved in my pack. At sunset, I reluctantly pack up and head off, in a different direction than last time. I can feel the Tree behind me like a pair of eyes tracking my steps.

I fall asleep in a parking lot. I awake under the Tree.

The cycle repeats again and again. Days pass, maybe weeks. I should be concerned, I suppose, but under the gentle green tide of the leaves I cannot bring myself to mind. If home is where the heart is, I am home under this Tree. It is everything that matters.

One morning, I awake with the knife from my pack in my hand, and I understand: I am not quite home. Not yet.

The blood winds its way unerringly toward the Tree, fleeing as if ready to leave me for a more glorious host. In this moment, I wish I were that blood, so that I could be one with the Tree. I yearn to mingle in its gnarled roots, to travel up the rough crevices of bark, to explore the infinite wisdom contained within the rings of its trunk. Alas, I cannot. But my sacrifice can.

My hearing is, oddly, the first to go. Soon, all I hear is my heartbeat, and as I listen, that fades, too.

I fall to my knees. Then to my side. The roots dig into my ribs, the bones of my hip, but I pay it no mind. I stare up at the Tree, blinking back tears. I am so grateful, so blessed, to have this moment. Here, it is just the two of us, finding peace together in a wasteland of terror. Here, we are free.

My vision starts to go not long after. This, I regret. I doubt I could ever tire of looking at the Tree. I grieve this loss more than I grieve myself.

I blink once, heavy, and can tell that the next time I blink, it will be my last.

I search out the locket at the heart of the Tree. I pray that someday, someone else will find its beauty as transfixing as I did. That someone else will behold its majesty.

I prepare for my next blink.

As my eyelids grow heavy, I see the locket glow. The world is ashen grey, but it glows vibrant, heated red.

My labored breath catches in my throat. The locket is sapphire blue, not red. There’s been a mistake, a miscommunication. Something is wrong with that locket. I need to open my eyes, I need to see—

My eyes slip shut. The last thing I see is a branch unfurling from the trunk, a winding and knobby arm reaching up, up, up toward the godless sky. The twigs sprout. The leaves unfurl. They are green.

~fin~