Abelard

Ms. Dailey looked up her dangerously tall sugar maple tree Abelard had climbed. The red leaves rolled in the wind. Ms. Dailey wished the leaves would produce romantic passions within her old, leathery fibers so that she may conjure inspiring imagery of playing cards and soft hands and timelessness like the Japanese haikus of her youth, but all she could see were leaves. Abelard meowed with each gust of unsympathetic wind.

“We’ll have him down in no time.”

Ms. Dailey nodded. “That’s fine, Joe,” she told the fireman.

Joe extended his rickety ladder and leaned it on the tree. He pushed the ladder deep into Ms. Dailey’s soil.

“Don’t you firemen have trucks with ladders for this sort of thing?”

“Repairs.”

And with that, Joe began his ascent. Why he needed his full fireman garb was beyond Ms. Dailey, but she was an old woman out of touch with modern dangers, she reckoned. The fireman’s boots clanged loudly with each step. He grunted with each pull of his spongy arms to impress upon Ms. Dailey, the circle of firemen, and every neighbor watching the difficulty of his task but succeeded only in making himself look effeminate.

In the circle of onlookers, Ms. Dailey turned to the nearest burly, mustachioed fireman. “Do you get many cats in trees?”

“No,” said Mustache. “Mostly fires.”

“In trees?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you have a Dalmatian at your station?”

“No, but we have a few dogs.”

“Any big ones lately?”

“Dogs?”

“Fires.”

“Not big ones.”

“Dogs?”

“Yes.”

“Have they killed anyone?”

“No.”

“That’s quite a good record.”

“They’re good dogs.”

“I meant the fires.”

“Oh. Then yes.”

“Must have been a big fire.”

"Not really."

"That's good, then."

“Not really. It still killed people.”

"Good that is wasn't worse."

"Yes, in that sense."

“So sad.”

“I suppose.”

“It doesn’t make you sad?”

Mustache shrugged. “They would have died whether or not we got there.”

“How do you reckon?”

“We got there and they still died.”

Ms. Dailey looked back up at Joe. “What kind of dogs are at the station?”

“Why?”

“I want to see if I could make a pun from the breed name.”

“A golden and a rottie.”

Ms. Dailey is silent for a while. “I can’t think of any,” said Ms. Dailey.

“Me neither,” admitted Mustache.

“Whoa, whoa,” went Joe. He misplaced his foot and slipped. Latching desperately to the ladder, his legs hung lamely in the wind. “I’m okay,” called out Joe, “I got a good grip on the ladder!” He lifted his dangling leg to recapture his foothold, but the change of weight tilted the ladder off balance. The ladder slowly slid off the tree and Joe, firmly latched to it, hit the ground with a snap. The crowd of onlookers bustled with frenzied horror as the firemen, colliding into the squeamish wanting distance and the curious wanting disclosure, shouldered their way to their fallen, lifeless comrade.

“Someone get the medic!” Mustache called over the chaotic mass of bodies.

“She’s at the station,” answered a younger fireman.

“Well, somebody retrieve her!”

Mustache froze, realizing what he said. Through the crowd’s bobbing head, through the sweaty flesh fleeing and grinding, he saw Ms. Dailey looking right back. Their gaze, piercing through the gnashing of teeth and nails of desperate, fleeing, fleeting souls, anchored themselves to one another. One an old, forgotten widow, the other a spirited albeit rough-around-the-edges laborer, transfixed and, for the first time, open to the possibility that some cosmic order permeates our world answering every question and quelling any uncertainty, bolstering all our pitfalls, if only we would wait.

After the crowd had dispersed, after Mustache, embarrassed by the metaphysical connection he brushed aside as shock, had gone to retrieve the medic, Ms. Dailey looked up her dangerously tall sugar maple tree Joe had climbed. At her feet lay the departed. The fallen red leaves from her sugar maple tree rolling over him like loose flesh, decayed and rotting, pulled from his corpse by the unsympathetic wind.