The Tree

The seed lay low, far beneath the sun and rain and clopping horse hooves.

The silver rays of morning scattered and broke apart the fresh earth, giving taste and fertility to its loamy home, covered in wet, scentful leaves. Drops from the night before, hanging fat, clinging to the last second, dipping, bending, falling noisily, heavily.

The seed moved.

Their feet came by, day after day. Pressing the earth. Sometimes stopping, sometimes not. Their voices floated down, gently to the ground. And became liquid. Into the earth they drained.

The seed opened. Green blindly searched, instictively grasping up, knowing only light.

The feet came by, day after day. Sometimes they stopped, and pressed the ground much wider. Bodies lay in the grass, on the leaves. Bees buzzed and sparrows chirped. Far away, in the farmhouse, a woman heard a cry, but she ignored it because the cry, full of lust and of love and heavy with salt and dirt smeared on clean, smooth skin, fell quickly. Below the bodies, down in the earth.
The cry stayed secret.

Except to the seed. It reached, strained. Quivered. Stretched, and at last broke the surface.

The seed grew taller, sturdier. Bark, like fledgling feathers appeared, with branches and seed reached ever higher so when the snow the arrived, it was ready.

In the cold and dark the seed waited, stunted and bare and withered. The bodies would come but never stop, the rain was frozen and the sunlight reflected back into the the cloudy sky off the white snow.

But finally the melt came, the water, and it's warmth once again worked its way down through the earth, and the sunlight wrapped itself around the seed.

And it grew stronger.

And when the bodies came, and pressed into the grass, with voices that were breath and liquid, the seed reached, and grew.

And so it went, until the sunlight, the rain, the hooves, the snow, the bodies, and the lusty, salty, liquid cry turned the seed into a tree.