Among the Trees
by Stephanie Zvan
It should be easier, this letting go and tumbling to rot in peaceful obscurity. She can't remember how many trees she's seen topple. If she could only, finally, make up her mind.
It's simpler for the other trees. She knows; she watched them grow. From tiny seeds to straight towering beauties, they've known nothing but the simple majesty of reaching for the sun.
Daphne is different. She remembers.
Never seed nor sapling, she was a laughing young girl. As it is for the trees, life was simple for her then. Before.
Then came the man, a boy really--a young god who wouldn't know "No." He pursued her, confident, arrogant, never bothering to hurry. He left the scrambling to her, the terror and fever of the chase. He merely followed.
How she ran. She ran until her breath came short, her feet bled. She stumbled and rose to run again with bruised knees and raw hands. She ran until her eyes and cheeks hollowed and her breasts hung like empty sacks. She ran until her brain knew nothing more and she became the running.
Then she could run no longer. Still he followed.
Worn and wild-eyed, she looked around. Panting on the high banks of a sunny stream she had always imagined was a river, she was home. Had she never left, or had her flight brought her back to this place that had once seemed safe? No time to ask.
Her father answered her panicked call. "We will make you something he cannot want," he promised. She huddled and waited.
As the bark wrapped around her scabbed legs, as her matted hair disappeared behind shining leaves, she understood. But it was too late. She had no breath left to protest.
Then he came. He smiled at what she had become--for him. He reached out, snapped two brittle, fragile branches. Then he turned and strode away, wearing her on his brow to tell the world what he could do.
She stood, cramped and crouched, as she stands today. She clutches at the ground and hides under her leaves, now as then.
Her world has changed in these uncounted years. The stream has silently, guiltily drifted away to flow somewhere less haunted. Trees grow over the meadow that was its banks.
She learns from these trees, of falling and rest and oblivion. She learns choice. Each day, Daphne chooses.
She looks far above her. She sees the trees she knew as saplings, as scrawny twigs, and knows there is another lesson, somewhere among their reaching branches, for her.
Daphne tells the setting sun, "No." Today is not the day she falls.
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