Northern_Lights_2019

40 The Mean Tree By Kelson Brewer Last night, on Saturday, January 3rd, Sicily’s pet cat Pebbles died. He had lived a long time, especially for a cat. Sicily’s parents had bought him before she was even born, and even then, he had been old. Sicily had known him all her life, and out of her three pets (two black labs and the cat), she had liked Pebbles the most. Pebbles was one of those distant, angry cats, that really only pays attention to one person in any given family. Of course, Sicily didn’t give him a choice of who to love. She would snatch him up from beside his food bowl and bury him in blankets and coats. Some nights she would trap him under the sheets and close her bedroom door just so he would sleep with her, ignoring all the growls and meows until they gave away to reluctant purrs and drowsy eyes. Sicily wasn’t really sad though, especially today. All that mattered to Sicily this day was the huge forest at the back of her parents’ property. This was no ordinary forest though. It was a forest with those tall trees that loom into the sky. The wind would whip in and out of the tree line as it swam through the densely packed trunks and brush. Blackberry bushes were dotted along the ground, and in some places, farther into the forest, they grew so large and so thick that no human, not even a little girl, could pass without being stuck by a thousand thorns. Where there weren’t any blackberries, there was long grass which swayed back and forth with the invading wind. Some of the grass was tall and thick, and it cut you if you put your hand on the wrong side. Sicily’s father called it “saw grass” and warned her not to grab or pull it without her gloves on. After a fight with the old rusty stable gate, she walked slowly over the soft wet ground towards the forest entrance. Well, she called it an entrance. It was more of a hole in the brush that had slowly gotten larger as both Sicily and her dogs had walked through it. Her father called it a deer trail and had at one point taken an electric hedger that he had borrowed from their neighbors and attempted to clear it out a little. He had succeeded in cutting some brambles directly in the center, but the ferns and nettles that lay on the sides proved too thick to adequately trim. Sicily didn’t mind though; the entrance was just big enough for her and the deer, and she liked it that way. Carefully, she crawled through the opening, making sure not to get her wool sweater caught on the low hanging brambles. She crawled a couple feet and the forest opened up a little. The surrounding trees shaded the ground from the sun, which stopped the growth of invasive vegetation enough to easily walk through. Eventually the tree canopy would become so dense that walking was fairly easy. Sicily dodged past trunks and over roots, slowly progressing down the small footpath into the forest that ended at a small clearing with a large evergreen tree in the center. Sicily looked up at the thick branches and walked left around the trunk looking for the lowest hanging one. She had named this tree “Pointer,” because the lowest branch on the left side pointed in the direction of the next path. She liked naming the trees; it made her feel like she knew the forest and that the forest could know her too. She liked to imagine that the trees were waving at her as she carefully stepped over their roots and brushed her hands against their trunks. She had even named the dead ones that had fallen over. After all, they still had stumps which were stuck in the ground, so there must be some life left in them. Jumping down into a small dry creekbed, she continued past the stumps and into a small grove in between two walls of brambles. This was the grove she was looking for. The fern-covered ground was slanted upward into a steep slope which made the tree trunks bend upwards. This had the double effect of both making them look funny and making them exceptionally easy to climb. Most of them were skinny and full of pitch, but one near the center was much bigger and thicker. Its bark at the bottom had been mostly kicked off by Sicily’s rubber boots, but farther up the trunk the bark was almost entirely intact. Though it was thick, the tree was old, and the branches hung low over the gnarled roots. Its pines and twigs glistened with a slight dew, but the branches, sheltered by the above foliage, were mostly dry.