The Tree

This place wasn’t for children. How many times had Linda been told that? Even so, her sandals pressed into this forbidden ground, soft as the freshly tilled fields around her village. It held no evidence of this afternoon’s shower, damp and a little musky but lacking any scent of petrichor. Instead, a lighter perfume saturated the air, sweet but shier than citrus and sharper than apple.

The flowers far above her head glittered in the starlight, the palest of pinks and purples against wending, deep gray branches. She set her eyes upon the massive trunk in the center of it all—a clear shot, nothing to keep her from the answer she sought. The Tree wouldn’t judge her. It wouldn’t tell her she would only understand when she was older.

Linda broke into a run but fell back as a hand tangled in the reverse side of her vest.

“Girl, you know them rules is there for a reason. So’s the fence you must have climbed and the guard you snuck behind.”

Vision blurred by tears, she looked up at Peg-leg Paul, loudest mouth in the village but the slowest runner for obvious reasons.

His face softened. “I understand you’s desperate. You want the Tree to tell you how to get your sister to come back.”

No, Celia had deserted for good reason. Linda wouldn’t drag her back here, and she wouldn’t waste a wish trying.

Paul towed her toward the gate. “The Tree does more than answer questions, Linda. It unlocks an area of truth in the mind of one who sleeps in them branches. Even adults can handle that only so many times before they go insane.”

She was insane already, though. This whole village was. Celia said so.

Twisting out of her vest, Linda tore across the soft soil. As Paul’s shouts played a melody over the rhythm of her heart, she scaled the gnarled trunk and kept going as high as she dared. She didn’t have much time, but at least the answer should be simple.

Once the sky’s speckled velvet black outweighed the pastel of the flowers, she wedged herself in a V and filled her lungs with the Tree’s fragrance, one thought held at the forefront of her mind: Should I go with her?