The Maple tree grows next to the aging red-bricked school. It stretches its branches as far and wide as it can, frustrated by the bricks blocking its natural path. The bricks grate the bark off of the tree’s branches mercilessly, peeling it prematurely like skin after a sunburn. It would be one thing to have another tree to compete with, another canopy that complemented its own when hit with the glimmering gold sunlight, but no – this tree must compete with unnaturally stacked rocks that have no life and no feeling. Red leaves must battle red stone; it’s a lonely existence during their dying days.
When the sun is at its peak, and the birds call in search for shade and company, the tree is never visited. The birds prefer clouds over the crippled, broken-branched tree because at least the clouds have an aesthetic appearance.
The children in the schoolyard play away from the tree, away from what is full of splinters sticking out. Once, a young boy decided to climb the tree to impress his friends, but his hands were met with agony with a single touch of the bark.
He and the tree were laughed at after that.
The boy was taken swiftly away to the nurse in shame, and the tree was left alone with the laughing kids. The tree was sickened by the devastating situation it was in. It was ashamed of being laughed at.
It was ashamed of being nourished by the laughter of bullies and the tears of a child.
As the tree grew, it twisted its branches into claws and pitchforks that stabbed its own trunk and roots, allowing water and syrup to bleed out of it. The tree began to laugh at the world around it. When somebody walked past, it would trip them with its broken roots. Each time it rained, it would make an inescapable slide from its bark and contain the water in a muddy puddle on the ground so that the people walking by would not only trip, but fall into a camouflaged goopy brown liquid filled with worms and turds. The tree fed on their screams and cries.
A storm ravaged the tree’s nearest neighbors. It devastated the area and the winds snapped the trunks and stems of the other trees and sent the plants’ remnants as missiles towards the twisted tree. The sharp spear-like missles penetrated the tree and added to its collection of splinters, gouging the wounds that the tree had already created thanks to the brick wall beside it. The wounds would layer each other and never heal. It can’t scar if it can’t heal. The tree fed on that day’s stormy wind.
The low maintenance of the school is to blame. The people, the environment – it is all toxic. All of the litter, all of the pollution, seems to accumulate over and on the twisted tree. It is very unhealthy, yet the tree never seems to die. It has suffered for so long that it is capable of coping. The problem with that, however, is that coping requires outside distractions, which means the tree has to retake some sort of interest in the toxic outside world.
The tree fed on the pollution’s carbon dioxide emissions.
It finds that there are some creatures that have found happiness amidst all the toxic energy. The tree feels temporary bliss each time it gazes from afar at the murder of crows, the dogs pissing on fire hydrants, and the babies crying at their mad mothers until they fall into a deep sleep. But these moments of free happiness make the tree realise just how trapped it is. Its state worsens and worsens, yet it never dies. Its insides hollow out, but it somehow lives.
There is a drought.
School is cancelled.
Nothing can feed the tree, so it dies.
