The Taking Tree

A little girl in a little black dress stood with her mother in a slow-moving line. She eyed the room from her place tucked into her mother’s side, one hand clutching at the frills on her dress, searching anxiously for the reason the room held its breath. With every step the line took without breathing, the oppressive gloom of the space seemed to shrink in on itself. Around them the muffled sounds of crying faded into the background, and the girl clutched at her dress a little bit harder – as though the cheap polyester fabric might protect her from the room and its people.

The shuffling footsteps as the line swung forwards, pulled reluctantly and desperately towards the front all at once, seemed far too loud to the little girl in the not-breathing room. Quickly, though, the sound sunk into the dusty, faded carpet of the floor as the line settled once again.

After a pause and a heartbeat, the little girl and her mother climbed the four carpeted steps to the odd-looking box tugging the desperate-reluctant line forwards.

There was a woman in that box. Dressed in fancy clothing, the barest edges of her lips tilted up into a peaceful smile at odds with the heaviness of everyone else.

The little girl, too young to hold her breath with the rest of the room, blinked at the woman lying in the box, head tilted in silent confusion.

It didn’t feel right to her. Staring at this woman while she was sleeping, putting her in that box. The little girl tried to whisper to her mother that they couldn’t put a person in there, that they had to wake her up. Couldn’t they see she was just sleeping? She’s gonna be real scared when she wakes up, and there’s so many people just staring. Couldn’t they see that?

 A small, pale hand, uncoiling itself from the frills of a little black dress, glinted a shade paler than it really was as it was touched by the tired light of the muted old lamp lighting the room. The tiny hand reached towards the much-too-still woman to wake her up, to prove she’s still breathing, to do something. But a larger hand of the same shade pulled the smaller one back and told the little girl ‘you can’t touch them, it’s disrespectful’.

Wide, hazel eyes asked her mother why as she was led from the room, lingering on the box that held the sleeping woman.

She never got an answer.

Eventually, the little girl and her mother, hand in hand, left the too-still room and the woman inside it behind, the thick, wooden double doors of the building resting open as the occupants spilled out. It was sunny and warm, and the grass was green and thick. A butterfly darted past her small form, chased by bodies just as small as her own. They jumped and tripped along after the darting butterfly, across the sun-warmed pavement and over the time-chipped curb. The little girl hesitated only once before joining them, becoming one child amongst many.

Playful, gasping breaths tasted the air as they ran. It was heavy with the weight of an oncoming storm and sweet from the scent of freshly bloomed honeysuckle. It was a beautiful day, if a little hot, but the image of an unmoving woman in a shiny wood box stubbornly lingered in the mind of a then-innocent little girl.

Maybe the memory would fade in the oncoming years. But maybe the girl would remember. Remember, and wonder why the room didn’t feel real. Wonder why the black clothing of the room and the people felt like the shadows you feel when you’re suffocating in the dark of a lonely room, too scared to turn on the light and too scared to sleep without it. Maybe she’d ask herself why the shiny wood box made her want to cry, because the woman in it was only sleeping, and she’d wake up eventually. Maybe she’d sit and stare at a blank sheet of paper, wondering if there were any words that could capture what she barely remembered.

Many years later and the image of a sleeping woman in too-still room, lips tilted up in the barest of smiles, clung to edges of a memory, begging a long-dead little girl to prove to the world that she’s still breathing.

Before there were little girls and too-still rooms – before butterflies and warm afternoons – there was silence. Not the comforting kind, but the kind of silence where every noise is too loud and every sound could be a monster lurking in the dark, waiting for your moment of weakness, waiting for your attention to slip just a little.

That kind of silence.

Even though silence like that seems to last forever, most people know that that kind of silence can’t truly last for long. Maybe it’s the rustle of a plastic bag under a slow-turning fan that breaks it. Maybe it’s a pet running around in the dark. Maybe it’s the tap tap tap of a tree hitting your window, knocking politely to alert you to its presence.

But maybe it’s not.

Maybe it’s the muted, ear-splitting roars of a planet being formed from nothing. Maybe it’s the sound of people walking and living and evolving. Maybe it’s the sound of screaming as this new-born race discovers despair for the very first time.

Though we may never know how this original silence was broken, in the end it doesn’t matter. Here, in this may-be-truth, and always-never-happened, it’s what could have broken and been broken that makes all the difference. Because that’s where this all starts – with that first tiny wail of disbelief and despair as life discovers the cruelty of the gift they were given. The scream that was both literally and figuratively the seed of what shouldn’t have been. A seed created by desolation, planted by denial and given roots in the grounds of despair.

As is the purpose of seeds, it grew. It grew and grew into a great, looming tree that gripped the edges of not-quite-real, conquering a dimension all of its own. But the Taking Tree – as it would come to be known, as it would come to be forgotten – was hungry. Always hungry. Eventually, it could longer content itself with eating away at the leftover darkness of the people that created it. The Tree wanted more.

The Tree, born from a race that was changing, changed itself to satisfy its hunger. Instead of eating the passive shadows and hate and despair of a thriving life, it started to eat the people themselves. Not the flesh of the people – for the Tree had no use for their mortal bodies – but their Souls. Everything they were, everything they are, and everything they may have been.

It ate their reality, the idea of their existence, erasing them from where and when they were. Their past, present, and future, everything they were, are, and will be, disappeared into the gaping maw of the Taking Tree and its all-consuming hunger.

But still, the Tree starved. The people it was born from had changed faster than the Tree could adapt to. They changed so much in the thousands of years they reigned, that the Taking Tree’s ties to this almost-new race had faded and shrunk. It could no longer eat them quickly enough to feel fed.

And so, the Tree stole people from their lives and homes, from streets and deathbeds, to help it feed on other’s Souls. The Tree shed skin to make paper and bled black blood-sap for ink, lovingly crafting a book through which it could sate its hunger. The stolen people, intimately tied to the Souls of those they loved, would be used as connections to an ever-changing world. As temporary, disposable bridges to power.

The names of the beloved Souls of these captives would appear on the paper, etched in the ink of the Taking Tree’s blood. It fed on those Souls, draining the one it had stolen of all the life it held with every name it inscribed and every person it erased to satisfy its hunger. The Taking Tree fueled its selfish existence with their long forgotten could-have-beens, and the withered husks of dying Souls.

Eventually, the Taking Tree’s branches spanned Eternity, and its roots tore life form entire universes. Lives and families faded from existence under the shade of its twisted, hollow leaves.

And so, it fed and fed and fed.

One day, from a world that had come to know butterflies and warm afternoons, the Taking Tree stole a child. She was 17 years old and almost a woman, with memories touched by Death and burned by hatred. Asleep in her bed, blissfully unaware of the scissors inching closer to the thread of her life, her dreams of weightless wings and open skies turned to dark forests and the never-ending Tree as her Soul was stolen in the dead of her world’s night.

Her mind played a lullaby and a half-forgotten prayer.

By the time the sun swept its golden fingers across her home, she was gone. Caged and carried away by branches spanning Eternity, the girl who would never be a woman was pulled into the Never that the Taking Tree had conquered.

The life the Taking Tree had stolen her from had been a cold one, and she carried all the strength it had taught her, but still she shivered at the twisted touch of the Taking Tree. Still she cried as she was bound by gnarled, greedy roots. And though she had only just been stolen, she knew.

Knew what every name meant, what every page told, and what every drain on her own Soul brought her to.

Like many before her, she fought and struggled. Railed against the power the bound her – but the Tree was used to struggles and desperation and did not loosen its hold. In the silence of Never and the sorrow of Eternity, the stolen Soul screamed into the dark that surrounded her and the evil that held her. With every name written and every dearly-loved Soul erased, the girl withered as her life was leached by the Tree that only Took.

She was almost completely consumed when she remembered a smile.

A barely-there smile on the face of a sleeping woman, a dead woman. A peaceful smile.

And the girl, she – breathed. Breathed into the memory of that too-still room and smiled back.

The Taking Tree shivered.

The Tree – so cruelly bound by its own terrible, selfish nature – could never comprehend the idea of peace. Of sacrifice. That a dark, angry, hurting Soul would so willingly and joyfully be at total peace with their own death, with the destruction of their own Soul, their own existence, to ensure the survival of another. This stolen Soul, so cut by a loveless worth, carried nothing but an idea the

Taking Tree could never understand.

This girl looked at what was left of her Soul and, a dead woman’s smile tugging at her lips like a slow-moving line, she burned it.

And the Tree, its cycle of greed and hunger, shattered.

Screams and laughter, tears and memories whirled by in the bright-dark cold-hot the Never became with her sacrifice, names disappearing from the ink-blood book as they were restored to their lives. And the burning Soul smiled through it all, even as she took gasping breaths and cried tears of pain and joy as she tore herself apart.

Her Soul stretched across lives and homes, streets and deathbeds. A final, soft touch to a life she would never have – and she was gone.

Far away, just for a moment, a world stood still. Into the silence of sacrifice, a boy continued to sketch as though nothing was missing. After all, to him, nothing was. His phone would never store pictures of a bittersweet first kiss on opening night. His birthday gift, a painting which had taken hours to perfect, was never – would never – be painted.

A mother hummed as she righted a picture frame, smiling at the photo of her two children. She would never have memories of a third child proudly singing a nonsense song – her very first original work.

A young girl stood in the rains of New Orleans, nameless and homeless, having just run away from both – having never held the hand of a friend who begged her to stay.

A frail old woman was lowered into the ground, a peaceful smile tugging at her lips.

Quietly, the memories faded away.