Editor's note: the power and magic of nature made this story a standout among the many submissions I receive each month.
I was the only one who saw him. Everyone else, even my mother, it seems, only saw the tree. I lay in the long grass playing with my soldiers who were using the lawn as a jungle. Sunlight fell thick and heavy through the strands of grass, darkness falling briefly as my mother passed. I glanced up to see where she was going – saw her reach the tree, climb the trunk and disappear into the leaves. I gazed, amazed. My mother had never climbed a tree in my life, that I knew of. I stared at the old oak, then heard a rustling, a sharp gasp, and my mother fell. By the time she hit the ground, my father was halfway down the lawn, running full tilt. Yet only I saw the man in the branches, his skin the color and texture of bark, eyes like two bright spaces between the leaves where light leached through.
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| "Asleep in the Moonlight," Richard Doyle, artmagick.com |
The next day my mother
gave birth to my brother Edwin, which would have been less alarming if anyone
had known she was pregnant. Edwin was a slight, mostly silent child. If he
cried out at all it was with a thin gust like the wind. His only passion was
for being outside, for lying in the long grass where my soldiers fought. When
the battles had been won or lost, I’d fling myself down beside him, feel the
air rushing over my skin, hearing the leaves shifting above us. He never grew
cold as I did. Whenever my skin prickled with goosebumps, his was smooth, warm.
I watched him spread his nubbly baby fingers above him so the light showed
crimson through his palms. When the soil was damp from an earlier rainfall,
he’d plunge his fingers deep into it, an expression of bliss on his pinched
little face. When it finally grew his pale hair was like the veins of a leaf;
his fingernails as strong and satiny as acorn shells.
My father tried to
love him, bounced him on his knee, talked baby-talk to him, pulled faces in an
attempt to make him smile, but Edwin would just look at him, wide-eyed and
somehow patient, like he was humoring him.
He wore that
expression often, as my mother tried to suckle him, and he kept his lips firmly
closed, as the health visitor weighed and prodded him, marveling at his ever
increasing weight and height despite his apparent abstinence, and as I stared
over his cot, wondering what, exactly, my new little brother was. Not flesh and
blood like me, or at least not only.
His father watched
from the branches, and I watched him watching, eyes hot enough to burn through
the daylight, make it seem dull. He watched my mother as she drifted through
our house, stepped barefoot over the grass to pick up her younger son, hold him
to her bosom, try to lull him into feeding as his lips remained as pursed as a
knot in a tree trunk.
“The acorn tree is
dangerous,” I told my dad. “Please cut it down.”
But he could only see
me as a four-year-old, could not see what I had seen.
“It’s an oak, not an
acorn tree,” he said, ruffling my hair, and going back to his crossword.
The tree-man waited
patiently, watching his offspring grow strong and tall on rainfall and
sunlight, sprouting ever upwards till, at the age of two, he was taller than
me, aged six. He still did not speak, did not smile, did not laugh, though he
would murmur occasionally with a sound like the wind through leaves. And he
could stand, lean and erect as a sapling, arms reaching towards the sun.
“Why don’t we move to
somewhere else?” I asked my dad. “Somewhere with no trees?” I could sense what
was coming while everyone else was oblivious.
Dad chuckled at my
precociousness, but was distracted by my mother swirling past like dandelion
seeds on a breeze, running to retrieve my brother who was attempting to scale
the trunk of his father’s tree. She and my dad brought him inside to the
nursery, stood him in a corner, reprimanded him, while he looked through them
to the windows, to his own father’s waving branches, clear against the sky for
anyone who bothered to look.
I devised a new
defense plan, insisting on the four of us going out on excursions, to museums,
beaches, to parks where metal slides and swings had precedence over nature. My
father approved of my suggestions, but wherever we went, Edwin found something
I had failed to preempt – sculptures carved from petrified wood to rest his
cheek against, driftwood worn smooth by the waves, wood chips at the base of
climbing frames that he ran through his fingers and chattered to with a sound
like birdsong. It seems impossible that they replied, but I recognized the look
on his face – he was learning, gleaning, preparing for his escape.
The night he left us
the very air fought against itself. Lightening shot through the sky and the
earth shook with thunder. Edwin was four years old and as tall as a
12-year-old. We shared a room at that point and neither of us were sleeping, so
when he slipped out of bed and went to the window, I went with him. We watched
the clouds broiling overhead, the screaming of the wind through branches, and I
saw him nod solemnly as though in response to some call.
In morning, the
garden, and all the gardens about, were devastated. Our old oak was fallen,
split asunder by a stray lightening bolt, almost as though it had thrown itself
in front of the blast to prevent it striking the house.
And my brother was
gone, taking his murmurings and silences with him, but leaving behind a grief
my mother wore like a veil.
I did not grieve for
him, though. I recognized that I’d failed in my self-imposed task of keeping
him with us, but realized that had been for the best. My failing had set him
free.
And besides, I saw him
occasionally, still do: in the branches of trees that shadow shelters where I
await for my Omnibus to work, in forest canopies beneath which I stroll with my
own growing family. And in his eyes like two bright spaces where light leaches
through I can see he’s watching over us, guarding us from harm.
Judy Darley is a British fiction writer and journalist who has previously had short stories published by literary magazines and anthologies including Litro Magazine, Fiction 365, Riptide Journal, and The View From Here. She blogs at SkyLightRain.com.
