Trees

In the winter, when the trees for the first time withered and went frail, her eyes turned to a starchy emerald green and she was ill. When the gardener disappeared to sit at sunset with his face buried softly in his wife's golden hair, her heart shattered like it did at the sight of the trees, sharp august pink playing between them. When the garden had gone untended for a year and the twigs she adored broke off at the slightest touch of her fingertips, she decided to go to bed.

Young girl tears trickled softly down the side of her wooden bed as she watched the withering of the trees. Everything good she knew was of branches and solid breathing twigs; her pencils and the notebooks where she wrote stories that came flowing complete from beginning to end into her head when she leaned rosy warm cheeks against a placid branch yellow by sunrise.

Everything she knew that was not good was stuck inside a black box of steel and metal and a glass window showing images of clouds , grey dust and machines, dirt-green clothed men from distant countries. When she turned fourteen she realized she loved trees more than she loved people. She saw deep red blood flowing from chests and sculls and did not flinch. She saw a silent blazing fire shatter giant Magnolias in a foreign gold-green forest and her eyes went to deep emerald. She would leave the silent man and woman she didn't know sitting by the steel box as she went up the white spiral staircase to lie quiet and heartbroken with her fingertips, pale pink, pulsating softly against her wooden bed. 

When she turned twenty and the sight of her small-built frame in a silk strap-dress caused widened pupils and heavy breaths in afternoon streets, her heart had been broken many times by sunset sugar maples, never by boys or men.

All the trees in the garden were dying when on a frail November morning, after long weeks of disease, she decided the trees would no longer cause her body to shatter and grow pale. She took a dust-black train to a city of metal and pavement. She bought shoes with steel-embedded heels that made her look tall; she bought a toaster and a coffee machine that made a loud beeping sound when her morning drink was ready to be poured into a porcelain mug. She slept at night, sometimes with men in dark blue ties who told her they were aiming for something or everything, lying in cold-grey beds with clean clear sheets. When she woke in the A.M. with a soft Good Morning Beautiful whispered in the shell of her ear, she knew that as soon as he went to make her breakfast she would walk with silent strokes of her feet to the door.

After drinking her morning coffee from her ornate porcelain cup, she pulled her hair up with a brass pin and spent the day typing with coral rosy fingertips, letters to people she'd never meet, for a lady in a red suit with frosted hair she would never understand. Every time her calendar showed a large blue 1 under a picture of a larger steel construction, a letter arrived at the hard doorstep she would hit her toes on, saying a certain number of a value was hers, hidden in a brick building without windows.

On Saturdays she went to the largest building she had ever known and bought little bottles of pink liquid in a velvet glass box which she polished on her nails until they shone. She painted her eyelashes black and ran her fingers through her hair. In the nighttime she went to little dark rooms where everyone danced. Men in shiny black shoes bought her drinks and put their hands on her waist. She sat silently in glass apartments with a view of neon lights and yellow cars, pulsing through paved stone streets. Men with dark blue ties and wine they said was many years old caressed her breasts and let out soft moans when she touched two fingers to their collarbones.

She went on a plane to Tokyo with a blue-tie man whose shoes were shiny and black and who stared at her hair while she pretended to sleep, her eyes drifting leniently across the sea beneath.

In Tokyo there was no green. Cars, buses and steel glass buildings surrounded her everywhere she went or raised her eyes to look. The man with the shiny black shoes took her to restaurants they needed to be in elevators to get to. Her blood froze inside her as the escalating mechanisms showed her one hundred buildings, windows, lights and cars in less than seconds through the frosted glass. She was slightly dizzy when the man took her arm and walked proudly or maybe timidly through rows of linen dressed tables with little silver forks and polished knives. She at first didn't understand when he pulled from his left dark blue pocket something oval and of steel with a little stone glimmering almost like the light green lights nauseating her as she gazed out on the city.

She was married in a white dress with little bronze pearls in her hair and moved with the pair of shiny black shoes to a large city apartment with glass windows in metallic frames. She bought a new coffee machine and a wispy pale white orchid that died after four days. Black Shiny Shoes looked at her tenderly and asked her if she wanted to have a child with him. She gazed back at him with dreamy clear green eyes and four years later she had four children. 

She was thirty-two and sat quiet in her steel glass apartment, staring at her coffee maker; her face pale blanch, still beautiful. She pushed, suddenly, her chair away from the cold table. She pulled with pallid wrists at the thin synthetic shirt and fabric underwear, away from her skin, and crept silently onto the floor. Holding her arms softly around her waist, she leaned a cold pink cheek against the wood, her nose breathing in the most familiar scent. Her youngest daughter came home from school and stared for little minutes at the only woman she had ever known. The child began weeping and the woman stood up and made her a bowl of cereal. Her husband got home from work and she asked him if they could re-do the floors. The year she turned thirty-three the floors were carpeted and smelled of woolen fabric. 

She turned forty and her husband threw her a party in a large uptown apartment in the building of his company. A tree from New Zealand stood in the corner of the city view window. Loquacious voices growing faint, she went slowly to it, idly caressing the lenient leaves and the steadiness of wood. She let her frail fingertips run across the wispy green, taking in the scent of young girl feet and soft warm cheeks leaning against a giant maple and knowing it was life. Her chest began to hurt as though something inside her was shattered, her waist sweeping the mellowness. Her thoughts turned bland and velvety and when she opened her eyes she noticed the ceiling was blue and ten or fifteen unfamiliar faces were staring at her, worried. 

She went to work. Red Suit Lady touched her collar bone and asked her what she was going to do with little fragments of time she told her she had saved. She looked out to the pale white outside the windows and a week later, her husband smiled watching her slip bathing towels into a brown-handle bag, carrying it softly on her wrist as they boarded a plane. She let her fingers rest carelessly on the skin of her thighs, breathing in soft sleight-of-sleep rhythms, gazing with pale eyes to the still blue. She watched her daughters, light wavy locks sweeping their necks, soft transparent-skinned creatures she’d never known. They smiled at her, waving, swirls of sand embracing their ankles. They ran laughing, sunbeams swimming smoothly through their hair. She rested her head against a beautiful coconut tree and while passing out, she remembered that Red Suit Lady probably wanted her to sit by the black desk again, and that she should go back. 

She went to work, went home, went to dinner, went to sleep, went to work. She worked longer, went home faster, cancelled dinner, didn't sleep. Red Suit Lady led her to a square grey metal room with sharp edges and told her that the amount on the piece of paper in her dark green mailbox would be bigger when the wooden forest house on her calendar flipped and turned to hillside landscapes. She didn't sleep and her daughters looked at her with worry in frost-blue eyes. She fixed her gaze on the cool steel alarm clock, her skin growing pale. Black Shiny Shoes put his arm around her, asked her what she needed. She shivered and closed her eyes. On a cold February morning, little snowflakes frosting pieces of her skin, she went silently to her balcony, frail wrists pushing the glass-door open. She remembered, suddenly what she needed, smiled and let go, drifting. 

Her eyes went to clear wide emerald and she felt the air brush softly around the skin on her shoulders. The sun setting, cast yellow reflections of daylight on lenient leaves of honey crisp trees. There were hundreds of them, silver green oval droplets resting on a supple curve. She let her feet slip silently from her shoes and felt for the first time in too long little green strands teasing the creases between her toes. Her wrists were weak and light and the thin linen dress caressed softly her waist as she walked into the field of trees. Lucid fingertips went smoothly to the rough, the touch sending little vibrations along her neck. The sun descending coral-glazed behind the hillside, she pressed her cheek firmly against the sturdy frame, a throbbing filling her chest as the most basic of scents filled her nostrils. Breathing in the wooden air, she placed her wrist beneath an arched droplet curve, sensing with eyes closed thin sunlit softness sweeping through her skin. She pressed her lips together, letting them lift apart as she brushed her waist against the wood, the last sunset beams on resting mellow eyes. Little strings of every feeling bonded at the touch of a tiny curved crease in the wood, a surging in her heart as a coral finger filled it, and with the softest movement she rested a rosy cheek against the green.