Tree Woman

A five day a week runner, Lenore usually did her five miles past slick shingled houses on manicured lawns. Barely aware of these precision cut acres lined with spidery plants, she entered a meditative state, alone with her thoughts. Still, the uniformity of the Cape Cod style houses with square tulip gardens bored her. On the edge of the neighborhood was a mile of woods which local conservationists had saved from a land hungry developer. A public service lawyer, Lenore had led the campaign against this man, who for months haunted the town in his big white electric SUV, whizzing through the unlined streets like giant insect.

A mile long, the forest had elms, oaks, and firs with massive curved branches that seemed to embrace those who entered. Lenore had avoided the woods despite its beauty. Fearing its seclusion, she imagined these big open boughs could enclose her in a trap filled with rabid foxes, or crazed people who found their way into the forest. Still, she had defended those woods against the man who would turn it to dust and trade its feral grandeur for squat steel boxes.

A force within compelled Lenore to run into that green world. She longed to converse with talking trees, like those in a Monty Python film. An elm with a smooth baritone would warn her to stay away from the northern pond where wolves were known to drink. A smooth voiced female oak would say run, run to the southern edge, dear, where the wildflowers grow. There the bloodroot and wild columbine blossom. Pick them if you dare. Lenore wondered if she could become a nymph or a dryad, a creature of untamed nature who could morph into a tree. Yet she knew that most of these creatures of myth were escaping rapists – gods with brutish libidos. She ran and ran, forgetting to check the stats on her fitness tracker, enjoying the silence occasionally broken by a barn owl’s drawling call.

As she ran further into the woods, she saw a man in loose faded jeans and an old leather jacket, swigging from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. A red baseball cap pulled over his eyes shielded his gaze as he stood, arms dangling, legs wobbling. Lenore’s impulse was to sprint out of the forest, yet something compelled her to stare at this man, who was both familiar and strange. She could have sworn that she saw him before, driving in her neighborhood in a slick white SUV, or walking his Siberian Husky on winter days, using that dog’s glowing stare to scare passersby. It was the developer, who usually wore fitted Armani suits or designer jeans with armless down vests. “Are you afraid of me?” he growled. “Shit,” he said, laughing like a fool. “I’m more afraid of you than you’re afraid of me!”

Lenore for a moment felt paralyzed, unable to run. Yet as she had the urge to bolt, her human limbs dissolved as she entered and became one with a blue hued fir tree. Medium sized with lush, rotund limbs it stood beside the taller elm, a tree queen who chastised the man with her deep alto. “Now that she’s with us, you can fear her even more. Since she came to our defense when you threatened to rape us and replace us with your ugly houses, she will decide what to do with you.” The tree queen gestured toward him with her biggest branch as the wind blew.

Lenore eased into her fir tree body, reveling in her frankincense odor, feeling her limbs as multiple boughs with infinite prickly needles. She found her tree voice, also alto but not as deep as the tree queen’s. “Why are you afraid of me?” she asked the man. “What have I done to you?”

“What have you done to me? Get out of my mind! You’re a fucking hallucination! You . . . you two-bit low brow legal aid lawyer from LaLa Land.” Staggering, the man fell into a pile of leaves. “Bitch! This forest should be mine. I’m not a taker – a rapist. I would’ve paid for every inch of every tree in these damned woods. People like you – people who like to run through woods when you belong at the track in the gym --- you bourgie baloney heads without balls – you kill my business. You deserve to stay as a tree till a chain saw chops you up and you rot in the ground!”

“Silence!” the tree queen intoned. “She is free to take her human form at any time. You – not she – will be banished and punished.” At this, Lenore felt relief. While she reveled in her newfound power as fifty- foot fir, she didn’t want to remain a tree forever.

As the man fell into a briar patch, the tree queen continued, “You’ve destroyed enough of us to build your tacky overpriced buildings that no one with any sense wants to buy. She did nothing but run in the forest to enjoy our company. We’ve given her the pleasure of experiencing what it means to be a sentient tree – a botanical entity with consciousness that could rival that of any stupid human like yourself. She will decide what to do with you.” Beckoning towards Lenore, the tree queen said, “I am the feminine embodiment of the forest from all myths – from Mother Nature to Diana, Mielliki, and Aranyani. Call me by any of these names, dear, and use the power that I’ve given you.”

“What should I do to him?”

“Whatever you please. You won the legal case against him, but now he must be banished . . . cast out forever to live at least 100 miles from this forest.”

“Banished?” the man sounded as if he was trying to suppress vomiting. “Banished? You can’t evict me from my apartment.”

“Get the hell out!” the tree woman yelled. “You own no property in town. Your lease will expire in two weeks. Leave. Move back to your real house in the city 100 miles away.”

“And if I don’t leave? What will you do? Fall on me?”

The tree queen laughed. “That is for her to decide.”

“Should I turn him into a tree?” Lenore whispered, fearing her new power.

“Never!” the tree queen said. “He should never be one of us. Turn him into the animal of your choice. He will take that form until his lease expires in two weeks.”

As Lenore tried to imagine the perfect animal that suited this man’s character, a fisher cat ran around the trees, yawping its creepy screech. She imagined the man as this thirty-pound creature, rambling through suburban streets until the animal control officer lured it into a metal cage. In two weeks, he’d squirm in agony as his human form broke through that crate.

“Dear, you must be quick,” the tree queen said. “I haven’t got an eternity. Turn him into an animal – the animal of your choice now!”

Remembering the bug like whir of his white electric SUV, she willed him into becoming a one-inch beetle who flew in circles until he disappeared from view.

“Well done!” the tree queen said.

“I hope he doesn’t carry any disease,” Lenore said as she transformed back to her human form.

“Nonsense. I’ve made sure he’s free of dengue, chikungunya, and any other pestilence. Enjoy your run, and return any time to inhabit the fir,” the tree queen said, as Lenore tied her running shoes.

After Lenore ran home, the flying beetle followed her everywhere. He hovered over the cat’s litterbox. He peeked into her shower. When she drove to her office, he perched on the car’s front window. When she went to bed at night, he buzzed over her head, threatening her with chronic insomnia. Unlike Gregor Samsa, whose insect life wasted away, he gained so much pesty force by the end of two weeks that Lenore wanted to spray him with Raid. But she knew this would kill him, and she feared conviction of murder, for snuffing out a man who had temporarily assumed the form of a beetle. She knew he would soon regain his human form. As he buzzed around her head when she headed out for a workday, she caught him with a net and put him in a shoe box. Driving to work, she stopped and dumped the box by his apartment where his electric white SUV was parked by the side of the road. As she drove away, she saw him in her rearview mirror, emerging in human form, crouching and cursing his nakedness.