The Tree

A stunted, scraggly tree sat amongst a few crumpled beer cans and soggy fast food wrappers in a small patch of greying and equally scraggly grass by the side of a highway somewhere in New England. A few dewdrops fell from its branches, forming a small, murky puddle at its base. The dreary November morning allowed little sun through its grey, cloud-laden sky, and what did get through, the tree greedily soaked up with the few leaves still hanging on to its thin, gnarled branches. The tree’s roots wormed their way through the dusty and far-from-nutritious soil, lapping up the minerals they found with vigor bordering on obsession. The tree paid little attention to these things. It was busy making a plan. You see, the tree had been there since it was a seed, and had worked hard to earn itself a place among the ill-kempt grass and Bud Lite cans, only to be ignored by just about everyone. As you might expect, it was rather fed up with it all. It had long resolved to leave, but hadn’t ever quite gotten around to figuring out how to do so. The problem, it thought, was that it was a tree, which, as you might know, is strictly forbidden from moving of its own accord. But it had no intent of letting this stop it. 

As the tree thought these things, something happened. This something was not the sort of something you might expect to be especially relevant to a tree, but in this case, you would be wrong. The something was a fight. More specifically, it was a fight between a man and his wife. The wife was tired of him drinking all of their money away, and decided to tell him so, in a manner that involved more screaming and raging than actual telling. The man, quite tired of being called worthless about a thousand times, decided that he needed to visit a nearby bar, to cool off a little, and to waste all of his money, which just so happened to be one of his favorite pastimes. In fact, he passed the tree just as it was beginning to give up pondering how it, as a tree, would move. 

A few hours later, the tree had given up entirely, and the man felt drunk enough to go home. He stumbled out of the bar, hopped into his truck, and trundled off. Just as he was passing by the tree, as he had done hundreds of times on his way to and from the bar, a gust of wind wafted by, carrying a few fast food containers with it. These blew in front of the man, who, as it happens, was drunk enough that he couldn’t tell the difference between a piece of trash and a small animal, but just barely not drunk enough that it didn’t occur to him to swerve out of the way. He skidded across the width of the highway, right over its edge, and straight into the tree, easily uprooting it from its place in the rocky soil. The tree, seeing its chance, promptly got up and walked away, earning itself a few dark looks from its grassy neighbors, who took abiding by the laws of nature more seriously. The man was vaguely aware of the fact that something unusual had happened, but decided it best to simply drive home and hope no one had noticed. Luckily for both of them, few noticed the tree was missing, and those who did mostly assumed it had been removed by a road crew, or some equally unoriginal story. The road crew also noticed it was gone, but had other matters to attend to, albeit ones that were no less mundane than a missing tree.