Apopemtic

The line stretches out across a bleak breaking dawn. It should embody beginnings and life, but instead, to me, it has become a herald of preternatural death. When I lived, I imagined death to ride in on a dark horse or a black storm cloud. Yet, lavender and golden light signals a march to the shade beneath my canopy.

The line on the horizon begins to form into distinct shapes of maybe 10 individuals. Their clothes and breath both hung raggedly from their bodies.

Over the years I had seen almost all types of persons. Some people would beg, some hid behind a veil of brash and boldness, and a small few were serene and accepting. The desperation creates an energetic murkiness, a haze that settles all around my trunk and seeps into my branches. My leaves are dulled with its residue; they no longer shine with a waxy sheen even when the sun hits. How can the sun fight its way through? The fog of it all is too thick to permeate and the screams startle the rays away.

A day like any other is barely a dent in my decade-long routine. The dawn brings the sad souls one by one and aligning with my gnarled trunk. Individually they step forward and place their head into the roughly woven rope’s loop, last words are said, a sudden moment of freefall, a quick jerk and the same rope digs further into my thickest branch. Which was worse, I’m not sure. Hosting the noose, a portal to the next life. The physical ache of my bark being sawed day to day, body to body. Is it how they leave me as lone sentinel, watching over the bodies through the hours or the night as they dig graves? If I were being entirely honest, I think it may be that they have unwittingly made me a ledger of final words. I have not been turned to paper and yet somehow, I am engraved with the last traces of the sentiment that is an amalgamation of a person’s entire lifespan. How can you summarize an existence in a sentence or two? Yet I could fill volumes of stories unremembered.

Three thousand six hundred and eighty-two sunrises ago I was just another cowering man, shaking in my shackles. A bright morning, I was at the front of a short line of myself and three other people. Two women and a man stood behind me, faces downcast. I had heard whispers of their stories- stolen food, public drunkenness and disorderliness, witchcraft. Who was I to know if any of it was true, my main all-consuming thoughts were crowded with my impending death. Our cohort of the damned stood in front of a modest but tidy wood house on the edge of town whose view overlooked incredible rolling hills blooming with wildflowers dappling its green, likely complimenting the skies color at any time of day. A hanging with a view seemed a strange thing.

The tree loomed over us in the front of the home. It was tall and overrun with fruit all but dripping from the branches. Apples. How ironic that a tree once forbidden to the first people would be the unmaking of me, when the forbidden fruit of love had been the undoing of me.

She hadn’t been an apple; she was a pomegranate. The fruit that had bound me to hades the second it’s dark and indulgent taste hit my lips; its seeds taking root within me. I think deep down I knew the road led to the gallows, but her hand was in mine through the sprawling flora-laden fragment of the journey. I wanted to feel the silken touch of her fingertips threading through my hair and see the sparkle in her verdant eyes rimmed in gold. She smelled like lily of the valley, muse rising from her.

I could put paper to pen again and again to write of her bouncing curls and fury-driven heart. She lived like all things unjust could be yanked up from its roots and tossed into compost. As if its corpse held the capacity to feed, nurture and support genesis. She said our children would grow up by the sea where the sand would polish us all clean from the sins of this town. So, I wrote for her, to her, of her, page and page. Sonnet and story tumbled from my messy lover’s mind.

In the hour of my death, I stood there, knowing she could very well be watching from the windows. I think the only event that could have been a cause for greater irony would be if I had fallen in love with the hang man’s daughter instead of the magistrate’s- but then I would not be in a different kind of irony of being hung in the front yard of my love, the very one I had spent evenings awaiting her emergence from the front door in the dark of night. Now, in the bright of day, I was still waiting in the front yard- but not for love and new beginnings. I awaited the end.

A petty crime that I do not even remember and that is not of importance now, was all the magistrate needed to charge me. Declaring the tree outside his own home the town’s new hanging tree was a cruelty inflicted on myself, his daughter or perhaps both of us. His cruelty had always been one of a personal nature.

The freshly built platform was to be christened with my boots at exactly eight in the morning. I stood before the noose as it swayed gently. My thoughts were blank. I had believed I would be filled with a final statement about my love, as the hang man cinched the rope tight around my neck. In case she could hear me, I wanted to say something. I wanted to say anything. I wanted her to have something final to remember me.

I stood on the very edge of the platform. The words didn’t come. Only an emptiness settled on my mind, as wide and vast as the landscape before me. Quiet tears fell from my eyes. I was terrified to die and terrified to be without her. They slipped from my face, landing on the roots below.

I was forced from the solid surface beneath me and the fall felt fast, time did not slow- it just seemed to end.

Then, of a sudden nature, it was night. A breeze ruffled my hair but it did not feel right. The cold touched my skin, but it did not feel right. I stood naked before the same empty field and before the house. I could see, but I could not see. I could hear, but I could not hear. There were sensations all of a brand-new nature that I could not name. My heart should pound and my breath should be fast, but no heart pounded and no quick breath escaped me. With these new senses I looked down. A large dark mass, maybe a pile of lumber, were at my feet. Then, I could see a small bit of orange- barely visible in the dark. It was my own hair, atop my own head, on my own body, buried under a pile of other bodies, at my own feet. I wished to scream but there were no lungs and no mouth to scream with. The scream was trapped painfully within me.

Looking at my own feet again, there were no feet but roots. I could sense them even under the ground. Not hair, but leaves. Not body, but trunk. Not arms nor legs, but branches. I was the hanging tree. The hanging tree was me.

The night was filled with horror, the likes of which I’m not sure I previously could have ever imagined. Had I become the tree? Was I still myself but within the tree? Had I fused with the tree? And yet the worst of it was seeing my lover sneak from her house and pull me from the pile, cradling my head all of the evening before the undertaker arrived. She hastily clipped a lock of the fire of my hair and tucked it away. The undertaker dragged my body from her hands as she clutched at me and screamed. He tossed it upon a cart with all the others. I do not know where they buried my body, as I was no longer of it.

The hangings were frequent each week. I was fed names and final words many mornings and each day I would see her leave and return to her home. I ached to have her close but she gave me a wide berth, as if I myself were the most wretched thing.

One day, after a few months she didn’t return. Yet I stood vigil; for her, for our love, for these poor souls, for their final syllables uttered.

The years seemed to drag on; I don’t remember my name. I don’t remember hers. I only have the names of each person who has hung from my branch. I felt myself blur into the landscape until I lost all that was human within. I forgot sensations, emotion. At first, I longed for my human form, but now I have embraced my leaves- though dull and my fruit- though rotten.

Today the line is formed and no magistrate appears, instead a young man dressed in finery as black as night from head to toe calls the names. After the usual morning event, as the last person is dropped and carted away, an automobile pulled into the long dusty drive. I had only seen one other. I can sense very little about it- except, when it came to a halt, I could hear a dainty crunch and the swaying swish of fabric.

Long brown hair tumble down her shoulders- though the style now is hair pinned up and tucked partially under fashionable hats. I noticed one or two at an “event” this year; ones with veils attached that hid the face of soon to be weeping widows. Her dress is jet black and flows out from her, wrapping her in an endless night.

Her face is older, but refined and just as beautiful- I would know her as if no years passed. She strides beyond me, far off and directly into the now weathered house. Soon thereafter I feel cars, horses, carriages- they all fill the driveway and a coffin is carried in. Hours after the entourage arrived, many leave.

I watch another dawn creep in- a line formed but not the usual kind. The wooden coffin is carried out and placed in a carriage. The remaining people follow the carriage as it pulled out and away. The magistrate is dead. I think I wish I could emote about this, I think I wish I could rejoice. My roots stay firm in the ground and my branches creak in the wind- that is all.

As the sun reached its high peak, I can fell her car pulling into the drive again. She is trudging slowly; one foot in front of the other. Its as though her body cannot carry her and she is moving through molasses. Abruptly, she stops and glances in my direction. Turning towards me, she stares. Its as if she could chip or even break like glass at any moment. I want to emote about this too. I almost beg my bark to move, to feel.

She suddenly breaks into a run, so sudden that if I were human I likely would have been startled. Lightly slamming her body into my bark, she let out a sob. I will my limbs to wrap around her. She has collapsed onto my roots and pulls a something on a chain from around her neck. It pops up as she presses her thumb against it gently. A flash of dull orange and red is barely visible. Her tears fall from her cheeks and onto my roots.

Priscilla.

A flash of grief runs through every fiber, every ring within me. I feel. A flash of joy- I know her. And because I know her, I know me.

Priscilla and Louis.

She is weeping at the last place my body drew breath and we both stay like that for a while. She puts her head against the rough bark of my trunk. I can feel her tenderness. I can feel her breathing. I wish she knew that now that she has freed my soul or being or emotions, just something, that I was composing sonnets for her within me even in death. I wish I could read them to her. I wish I could say final words, instead of collect them.

“No more death will be had here. No more,” She said between small gasps and tears.