The Tree

The Tree

Mark Coleman

  The tree leaks into the river as the soldier bleeds out on the battlefield. He can’t hold in his intestines. He can’t read or write. He payed the only person that he thought of as his friend to pen love letters to his girl back home. This friend deserted him. No one is at his side. He remembers being at his mother’s death bed. Holding her hand.

  The general’s harsh assessment of the casualties reduced to nothing but meaningless numbers. He is, of course, among these. Buried in indifference. A population of vampires thirsty for blood drank him away to 137. The hatched lines of fives running towards an uncertain release date.

  The prisoner marks off these repetitive days with the shank he will later leave in an innocent man’s heart. A heart in which a young wife resides.

  Her sky blue eyes pondering something after their bouts of lovemaking. Something far away and detached from him. But still there with him at the same time. Tethered out of an unspoken need. 
  He certainly needed her. Constantly sought her approval in everything he did. He feared rejection when he got down on his knees to propose. Their wedding was out of an unpublished fairytale. Uncollected in a supposedly comprehensive collection. 
  She always seemed to be questioning him. As to what, he could never quite tell. Just one of the many things she would do that twisted him into strange, foreign knots. Like the way that she would stand over him in his study as though posing for an invisible photographer. 

  The tree grows on. Trying to play the harp of the heavens. Beyond the fence built from its own fallen a game is being played. The children are cherubs who lost their wings. Lost their balance on the clouds and fell down to earth. Onto a sandlot of disappointment and future regret.

  At first, they think of God. Their cruel master. Constantly amusing himself by creating his marionettes. Pulling the strings tied to their arms and legs. Then they just throw around the balls. Laughing at their first attempts at pitching. Their uncertain, timid bunts.

  The balls lose their stitching. It gradually unravels. Like unlacing a boot. Grow into one another. Become a centipede of massive proportions. A creature that feeds off the bark of babes. Especially, those still relatively new to the world.

  Men using their severed legs as crutches trod upon the broken branches. They try to judge the distance through empty sockets. They didn’t lose their eyes they were just forced farther up and into their minds. What they see there bleeds. Screams and writhes. Convulsing the past comes crawling into the infancy of petite mal. Soon it will learn to walk. The closer it comes, the steadier the gait.

  And so the orgy begins. The fish take in with their blank, soulless eyes what takes place upon their riverbed. It’s hard to sleep with twenty thoughts spouting the tributaries of Styx. But everything must multiply.

  Fucking in its crudest, most primal form. A division takes place. The unborn, barely conceived child becomes the parent. Watching the mechanical coital movements of his subjects the emperor becomes hard. His egotistical cock throbs within the hole they’ve drilled in your head.

  This is the way of a godless liquid world. Flowing on whether we want it to or not. It will crush us or pin us down and keep us in its collection. Bloat floats past the portholes we stare out of. Men with death and hate in their eyes bear down upon you. Waiting patiently in their distortion through the peephole.

  You lock and bolt the door but the ants still get in. Dying in pools of semen. There is a continual ejaculation here. The nectar too sweet to resist. Everything ripples.

  She doesn’t recognize you. You don’t recognize her. You don’t recognize you. The gap between all involved seems to expand infinitely. You were once inseparable. Love was a word passed back and forth freely but with conviction. 

  You invested a world of adulation in her. Worshipped at her feet. Necking in your car at the lookout. It could have been a funny and it wouldn’t have mattered to either of you. Spooning in the movie theater. Feeding one another popcorn. Everything saccharine. Everything so pure. 

  The children on the sandlot become vicious. They take turns braining each other with the bat. The wood splinters as do the flocculent bones. Kneecaps and elbows are smashed. Obliterated. 

  The balls have all gone off in search of their centipede seams so the wingless blemish their conscience by playing their game with the weakest angel’s head. All innocence is lost under the surface of the sky. 

  Its hair is flaxen. Its cheeks are rosy. The eyes carrying that ever present tenderness between its long lashes. The lips untainted. Slightly parted as was usually the case. Always seeming inquisitive. 

  It is you. Constantly heading farther away from me. Spinning moonshot. The stars such a great distance. We tumble upwards. Wishing to reside on their soft, wished upon points. 

  In fall, the leaves suffocate us. In winter, the freeze over takes us. In spring, ardor begins to set in. In summer, we sit here and dream. 

  We patiently waited and believed we were rewarded. Wanted to believe. Even if it was just for a little while. 

  So, we planned for a future that did not exist. It was a blameless sort of ignorance that led us astray. For all we knew, we’d be together forever in some forgotten bower or cave. A place known only to us. But so it goes. The tree grows on and on with or without us.