Little Reed, Bending

Zoe Mize

The clouds came on suddenly, cloaking the house in soft grey. I left the lights off and lay down on the family room sofa, watching through the floor-to-ceiling windows the wind whip the leafy branches into a frenetic dance of waving green-fingered hands. Thunder rumbled softly, and I counted the beats between light and sound. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three… And so on. I dozed off when the storm reached ten counts away, mulling over how many miles that might be, the thunder still rolling low beneath the moaning of the wind.

A crash woke me, and at the same time the room filled with a clean and startling light. The clamor carried on even as the light sucked back out of the room and left only grey again, no longer the gentle murmur of thunder but a fractal crackling and clanging unfolding to surround and choke the room. It ended and a steady pelting rain took its place. The air hummed with absence.

I knew several of the trees lining the property were at least decades old and one was hollowed with rot. I sat up, praying that I would not get buried in this house by a fallen oak tree, like the one that killed my sleeping great-aunt in her attic bedroom at only fifteen. She was found pinned beneath the thick trunk and the bed frame, had been pushed through the mattress even, and the firemen told my grandfather that she likely died instantaneously. It was a story he told us often.

I thought I might try to read until the worst of the storm passed, but as I flipped open my book I caught a faint wail, emerging under the fading thunder. Lightning flickered. I turned again to the page and managed a paragraph or two. The unfaltering rain filled my head. The words blurred on the page. I thought I heard the wail again. 

I walked over to the windows and pressed my nose into the warm glass. The lawn had grown calm in the storm’s wake. I worried about the trees. With my galoshes on, I marched toward the tree line near the road, a half-acre from my front door, my boots squelching in the sucking mud. Broken branches and rubbery magnolia leaves lay scattered over the grass. And the wailing—it grew and fell painfully, like an animal’s dying cry. Ahead of me one tree stuck out black against all the green, riven down its center, one arm slack and peeling. I ran towards the figures slumped beneath. 

One was as black as the tree, his head face down in the mud. The other was lying straight on his back with his mouth open—oh, I still hear that wailing. Their blue running shorts were soaked through to navy. I placed a hand on the crying one, only a stranger, and thought he looked nothing like my son, pale and blonde under all the rain. He quieted for a second, and his eyelids flew open, the whites fluorescent in his dim face. I jumped back. But I don’t believe he saw anything at all. 

I called 911. At the advice of the dispatcher, I slipped my forearms into the mud and lifted the other boy over and started chest compressions, but I knew he was dead. His right side was burnt, gently melting in the rain. After several long, aching and futile moments she instructed me to move on. The other boy’s eyes had closed again but I felt his heart beneath his shallow chest. I think I must have cried. The EMTs were there in seven minutes.

For days I did not walk through my front lawn. When I left the house, I exited through the garage and down the driveway and did not look to my left, where I might have seen the Tree—I began to think of it as the Tree, its rotted black limb hanging grotesque from its hollowed body. Still, I knew what was happening at the base of that Tree. My gardener told me. He said there were tokens. Pairs of running shoes, mostly. Some flowers. Crumpled marathon bibs and plastic medals. He said he would leave flowers for me. 

There were the neighbors, too. I pushed my couch underneath the front window and watched them clamber down the small gully where my lawn drops down from the road and stand there in front of the Tree and contemplate. The Pattons, Opal Plinth and her daughter, Mr. Rutger and his dog, taking their pilgrimage to my lawn and my Tree, whose mottled trunk obstructed any view of the soft ground where the boys had lain and where now my neighbors created their memorial. 

I was afraid to tell my gardener not to set out flowers for me. I wanted the Tree gone.

I paced my living room because I could not do anything else. The whole house seemed to vibrate with a continuous energy. When I tried to read I saw the flash again, a ghost of bright light. 

My son called me.

He told me he read about the lightning strike. That it was front page on the local news, which he got for free through his college library. He told me that it was horrible, that he used to play around those trees as a kid.

And I said, yes, it’s terrible. 

He said that it just goes to show, you never know. “A storm could come up any moment, and that’s it. You’re out running, and that’s it.” 

Maybe he wanted me to say something more, about how he would always be safe, about how his home was always safe for him. But he didn’t live here anymore. And it wasn’t those boys’ home, either. They could have been anywhere, under any tree belonging to any person. 

He was angry that I wanted to take down the Tree. I told him that’s why I didn’t tell him about it, and I said goodbye and went back to my pacing. 

I did the legwork for my gardener and contacted the city to approve removal of the Tree. It was easy, in fact, because it was so damaged. The form was straightforward and did not leave room for sentimentality. It was concerned only with the hazard posed by the tree, its potential for destruction of life and property. Even my gardener had to agree that the Tree must go. 

I pushed the sofa up against the great tall windows and watched the procession of mourners. The pile of offerings grew so that even I could see it, spilling out from behind the Tree. My gardener billed me for a sympathy bouquet of dusty blue delphinium and white roses. It rained, and the pile shrunk into the ground, collapsing under its own water-logged weight. 

My friends called me. 

What a horrible thing to happen, they said. And in your own front lawn! They all said that. I explained to them it was not in my front lawn, it was in the gully. It was just off the street there. 

One came to visit me, even. From my perch I watched Maren inch around a couple huddled over the Tree to lay her own bouquet before striding down the stone walkway, clutching firmly a bottle of red. 

I let her in. Her face was contorted by the efforts of her sympathy. 

“Oh, Claire. What a horrible thing to happen.”

Maren was beside herself to let me know her grief about those boys. I let her follow me through the kitchen, where I uncorked the wine and tipped out two glasses. In her soft voice she pattered on how the boys grew up together, ran together in high school, kept it up in college, and then bam—she clapped her hands behind me. 

“And to think it could happen like that.” Like my son said. 

“Why were they even under a tree?” I wondered, turning to face my friend. I asked her did they never learn not to hide under a tree during a storm? Maren stared at me, and her brows furrowed, folding a soft cleft over her nose. I was a stranger to her. She opened her mouth, closed it. My jaw set rigid, waiting for her to leave me.

But she didn’t say anything then. She led me to the sofa, the same one I had hardly left that day, and I was conscious as I sat of the shallow divot impressed in the cushion there.

We talked for a bit about my son, about my ex-husband’s house near his college—the lake house, my son was always calling from the lake house. I pictured him during those calls sitting out on the bank in his swim trunks and a t-shirt dripping onto perfectly flat and round pebbles while he tried to make the visit seem ordinary. Just a trip home to his dad. But I told Maren that the house was lovely and it was so great that he could take his friends there on the long weekends. 

I don’t think he had ever done that, yet. But it would be nice.

She asked me if he planned to come home for the summer, which I didn’t know. He could go anywhere. I told her that, that he could go anywhere. He might even want to travel. She found that a nice prospect, too. 

“How lucky he is that you support him,” she said. “It’s so important to travel when you’re young.”

Just then a group of young people arrived at the Tree, a blurred mass through the window. Maren said something then but I stopped caring and watched the group slide into the gully. A few of them carried shoe boxes, which one young girl with great ceremony opened, one-by-one, to lift out pairs of running shoes in electric shades of pink and blue and offer them to the Tree. 

“Will you look at that,” said Maren. “How thoughtful. Probably teammates from college.” She turned to me. 

“But do you keep the blinds open that way all the time?” 

“Of course,” I said. 

“Oh, that must be torture.” She lifted her hand, covered in delicate age spots, and placed it on her heart. 

Maren! I wanted her to stay. I had not seen anyone in so long. But she did not understand me anymore. I thought she needed to know then who I was.

“I’m going to have it removed,” I told her. “The city will send an assessor this week.” 

Her lips drew tight into a thin line. “Yes, that is probably for the best,” she said, slowly. I watched her gaze slip sideways towards the window, towards the Tree. 

“They won’t like it, though,” she said. 

Maren sprung up off the sofa and looked down so tenderly at me. “Maybe I’ll just go now,” she whispered. “Let you be.” And she let herself out.

After a few days, I saw the second runner. The one who I supposed had survived.  

I saw him come up to the Tree, so skinny, like he might fade away or maybe crumble into dust, and I thought that it must be him. He came up with a woman and a cameraman. He supported himself on a pair of crutches and struggled to make it off the road and to the Tree. He really was so skinny. Prickly warmth pulsed through my body, and I felt my stomach contract and tighten. 

They stayed over by the Tree for a long time. The light slipped yellow across the living room and shrank into shadows and still they talked. The boy hung his head, sunk deeper onto his crutches to let them take his whole weight. I thought he might be crying, though from my window all faces were a smudge of skin. The reporter took notes and their conversation was punctuated by the searing flash of the camera. 

Finally, they came to my door. Three decisive knocks. Then two rings of the doorbell when I did not answer. I let my head rest on the back of the sofa and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, they were gone.

The article described me as a woman from a nearby home who likely kept the boy alive before the EMTs arrived. But I was disturbed to read the description of the Tree: “an easy spot for shelter during a sudden storm on the side of the road where the two friends ran…” And a sentence at the end noted that a license to remove the Tree had been granted by the city. No mention of the Tree as a once-living piece of my front lawn, situated at the edge of my property where I could watch it cracking under its own broken weight from my front windows. Where my son had played, ducking in and out of the small copse, rolling down into the gully, before running back to the house, back to me, his hair dusted with dirt and twigs. 

I clicked away from the link and read again the short email from my son, which said only:

mom I can’t believe you didn’t talk to the reporter

I pushed my laptop down the coffee table and away from me. The sofa felt too big today, and I had the sensation of sitting on the floor of a boat spinning in a great body of water. All light drew from the room as a blue dusk descended. I watched shadows lengthen and stretch across the back wall like a great procession of mourners to my Tree towering over my body before shrinking down into nothingness. I cowered in the cushions. A dull ache plagued my joints. 

Finally, I pulled myself to bed to sweat out the fever. I dreamt of falling from the roof and landing on a fence post, which drove through my chest as easily as a toothpick through a spongecake, and I had to swat away at the hands that would try to pull it out, telling them that it was fine, it was fine, but pulling it out would be what killed me. The bed when I woke smelled of stale sweat, pungent and sweet, and I found that whatever had seized me was gone. It was already after nine. The sun shone strong through the bedroom windows. I hadn’t even closed the blinds before falling asleep. 

Downstairs, I heard the faint whirr of a gas engine. Without hesitation, I stepped out through the front door, clasping my robe to my body and sliding my bare feet across the stone patio and onto the lawn, feeling the wet grass beneath my feet. I clenched my toes and watched the men working on my Tree. From their cherry-picker, they sawed down its mangled branches, severing the blackened limb from the Tree’s body. Soon it stood bare and erect, a deep gash marking the lightning’s path. 

Methodically they hacked it down to a stump only eight inches or so in height. A chill ran through the damp air and I pulled my robe tighter.  My gardener jogged across the lawn to meet me, grabbing me gently by the arm to lead me to it, talking about how he gathered up all the things, all the flowers and the animals and the shoes, so many pairs of shoes, and for now I shouldn’t worry because they are all in my garage while the guys from the city finish up. I felt I was gliding across the grass with the morning mist. He left me in front of the stump. 

The Tree was a great hollow mess inside. I stared down into that emptiness. 

Zoe Mize is a writer from Nashville. Her work has appeared in Etched Onyx Magazine, Barely South Review, and the journal Survival. She lives in Washington, DC, where she is currently working on her first novel. When not writing, she can be found running in the city’s green havens or knitting socks.