You Can't Hide From The Monsters

For a long moment there were no words to describe the tree’s feelings. But then they came, swift and colourful like the breeze blowing up the autumn leaves. Hopeless, disarming, limiting, sad, sorrowful, regretful, harrowing, broken. Once the words came they couldn’t stop and the tree bowed his withered head and swayed to the rhythm of them. Again and again he rocked left and right to each syllable, each sound. His empty soul held a singing bird that chirped out a similar tune. Godforsaken, useless, angry, hateful, ignorant, unheeding, sinful. They had no reason, only colour, but it didn’t matter because the colours said enough. Black, blue, red, grey, purple. He kept waiting for one word, one colour that said something different but it didn’t come.

Around him lay the skins of his forefathers and not a single light word could grace his mind.

His leaves hung heavy, his branches drooped, his bark peeled back to expose his vulnerable interior. Help me, he thought desperately, wishing he had fingers to reach out and claw at the ground instead of roots struggling underneath it. Help me, they’re coming. He heard them now, loud and insolent and deadly. He heard the roar of a monster made of steel and chain and clomps of heavy feet on the packed dirt. Terror gripped him tight and he wished it could pull him from the ground and lift him up and away, away from them, away from the dead.

Alas, he remained there, glued to the ground, with the monsters closing in. The worst part was their faces. Their smooth, soft faces that so easily twisted and melded into something new every second. Only something unnatural could change so quickly. A chatter of shallow tones escaped the holes on the pale expanse of their faces and the tree watched, horrified, as they idly pulled on the leashes of the monsters, closer and closer. He wished for their two twiggy legs that strode solidly and for their elastic arms that moved swiftly, but stuck in his shell as he was he could not go anywhere. The only thing he didn’t wish for was their faces. No, their faces were where they lied.

He watched them cut into him with their metallic monsters and dig deeper through his core. Pain spurted from the wound and years passed through him as his leaves slid through season after season, his trunk growing smaller, smoother, his branches curling in on themselves, shrinking in along with his roots until there was nothing left.