Listening to Trees
If she could wait anymore she would’ve. But the trees need to be thinned. So it wasn’t exactly the crime it was called. She wasn’t as eager as the papers and the mugshot made her seem. The mugshot hadn’t been her idea. The man behind the camera was a creep with yellow incisors and a white tongue he wagged when an adjustment of the straps of her top made her breasts lift. He told her more than once to smile for the camera like a pretty girl. Which she did to his moan and the judgment of her father’s friends who thought her face in the picture proved that she was just as crazy as they always thought she was.
No one had asked her what the trees had said which meant when she told them, they didn’t care to listen. But the trees had been pathetic for a long time. About seven months or so.
Her father was a retired plastic surgeon who worked at a hospital three towns over known for the steadiest of hands in the county. He got tired of so many stitches and wanted more hours in the day to build the float he and his friends, who play beside him in a Grateful Dead cover band, were planning to ride in this year’s Burning Man. Lizard shaped and dark blue. He especially didn’t care about the trees, who he had been saying couldn’t talk for the entire time she’d heard them.
“But I’m listening to them anyway.” She’d reply at the end of their nightly phone calls.
The officer that came to the scene said to whoever was on the other end of his walkie-talkie that she had knotted hair and gasoline he could tell was cheap. He called the lunge she made towards him after this a symptom of whatever kind of state she was in but really she just didn’t like that he called her broke while she was doing the trees a favor.
“They complained about how crowded they are. How sore. How stiff from bending in ways they can’t to keep from touching each other.” She said while in custody.
“So you killed them?”
“Only the ones so old they didn’t mind.” She answered.
There were things she could’ve said in court when the prosecutor argued for a charge of aggravated arson that sought personal gain. She could have said the trees that she set fire to took a sigh of relief when the flames picked up. She could say she heard the ones left bless her as she climbed in the cop car. She could say nobody cried or asked her to stop. But instead she let her lawyer say she was insane and lacking proper medication.
After the hearing in which his daughter was sentenced to six months in a state psychiatric facility preceding a re-trial, the plastic surgeon said there wasn’t to be any room in the lizard’s mouth for the flames they’d previously agreed it would breathe. None of his friends put up a fight out of pity. They could understand why he’d be weird about fire. What they couldn’t understand was his new found disdain for trees. Trimming the ones in his yard of any leaves and branches until they were nothing but sticks coming out of the ground. He hated trees and everything they had to say.
Playing With Toys
The little boy tells me the dinosaur in the corner of his pile of toys is retarded. He catches himself and tells me what he meant to say was ‘r-worded’. I touch the toy’s neck and ask why the dinosaur is the disabled toy and he says anything can be r-worded even dinosaurs. He says the dinosaur’s name is Speddy and he doesn’t do anything but stare at the other toys.
When Leona came back from the bathroom to find me sitting next to the boy we’d just complained about, she was startled. She hesitated to sit on the ground despite the boy asking her to by patting it. He said his mom was teaching him to share then asked if I know how. I said sometimes.
“You only have to share sometimes?” He asked, his eyes lighting up.
“Adults only have to share every once in a while. Kids have to share more.” I answered.
The boy’s face fell and Leona told him sharing isn’t so bad.
“You’re sharing right now.” She said.
“Yeah, Speddy cause he’s the easiest to share.” The boy said to her.
“Speddy is special needs.” I told Leona.
Leona reached for a cowgirl and boy that she said should be married. I was surprised to hear this from her because she said she’d only marry me if one of us was terminally sick. In a moment of more immaturity than the child in front of us I hated the cowgirl and boy, what made them more worthy of marriage than us? She didn’t even know those toys for shit. The boy said he didn’t mind if they got married but the wedding had to be quick because the girl had a shoot out later that day she couldn’t miss.
“Speddy says he’s lonely.” I said. Wanting more for Speddy than what there was to offer him.
“He doesn’t like girl dinosaurs. They make him nervous.” The kid said. Tripping over the r in nervous so it sounded like nuwvous.
I picked up one of the horse figurines and asked the boy if it was a girl, he said yes and that her name is Marigold. She’s an old girl who the cowboy used to ride before she started having hip problems. I quickly introduced her to Speddy thinking Marigold was the only toy remotely close to his size and maybe what Speddy needs is an older woman with enough maturity to accept an introverted man.
“Maybe Marigold could marry Speddy.” I said.
Leona looked at me like I was doing something strange and reminded me horses and dinosaurs didn’t mix and hadn’t been on earth at the same time. I scoffed and asked the boy if that was really a facor. He nodded.
“Speddy and Marigold aren’t even friends.” He said after a drink of his juice.
Leona prepared for the cowgirl and cowboy wedding by making an aisle out of nearby twigs and the boy said Marigold would officiate the wedding while all the other toys watched. I held Speddy in the back of the group letting him watch and sulk. Always a guest, never a groom.
Katie Haley has honest work in/on Hobart, Farewell Transmission, Bruiser and elsewhere. She writes in her black Honda up and down California with the AC blasting.
High Horse 