Soliloquy Of The Last Tree
By Daniel Muenzer
I remember humanity. I’ve lived a long time. I measure my life in rings, in seasons of growth. Individual buds I reckon not, but whole seasons of fruitage: the long arc of the sun; the reiterated progression that deposits itself, in sediment, in the hidden rings about the heart. I remember humanity en masse: like a blanket of grass returned with the spring; like the flowers that nod, succumb to snow, and return; like a fungus.
They would pass from the white forest of stone on long summer evenings, and beneath my boughs, as their smoky mounts from nearby rock-rivers rolled and cried, they’d recline, absorbing nutrients from the sun. Their secret life gestated beyond the metal fence on the other side of the hill: in the rectangular forest, laid out, unlike the organic profusion I feel in my branches, according to a colder scheme, regularity trimmed and fitted to a function I couldn’t understand. It wasn’t here, on the grass, and between the protuberances of my roots, that humanity had its real being. They would arrive as transients, unpack their baskets, lounge in rows between me and my brethren, always with the air of being here only for a time, flightier even than the pigeons.
I was not surprised when they disappeared entirely.
The last tore through my lawn on a smoky mount and screamed over my branches like a nightmare bird. They took their stone forest with them. They took their secret meaning with them. Now unstinting smoke sifts from beyond the hill, and the crater has swallowed their meaning, and the long-burning flame eaten it up, and my branches, even though dying, feel it coating its twigs: an ash I haven’t felt before, tasting of man, and glass, and alien compounds.
Humanity was downtrodden feet dragged past the fence and didn’t stay because it couldn’t, impelled like the bee from nectar to nectar. Humanity was a dark, ragged wave billowing around me as though its force, elsewhere, had already been spent. Humanity grew whiter as the fences grew taller, and as their wooden shells turned to stone, they obfuscated the day, and only my lucky leaves were left in the sun: the unlucky, rather than accede to the shade, stretched toward the light, and would have supplanted the well-sited, if they could. Thus, humanity: white bands and dark bands rippling through sun and shade, living partly in light, another section in dark, ever and continually at war with itself.
What comes up through my roots isn’t water as I’ve known it. What insinuates through my bark and clogs, sharp and sludgy, in my hollows contaminates my rings and weakens my memory, such that to tell them over, plunging toward my own heart in an attempt to recapture my youth, yields strange distortions. It is odd to admit it, strange to feel the truth of it: I do not recognize the sun anymore. I do not recognize the earth. This grey greasiness will run all the years together until, without a cry, I collapse under their weight.
Ants, in organized defiles, once climbed up my trunk and bore away my nectar, and in exchange would attract the aphids, who would in turn attract the birds, who would feast on the leafcutters who predated on my boughs. In this harmonic interchange, each played its part; and, as in myself, from pith to bark, I feel nothing extraneous – nothing but what, though through conduits most secret, contributes to the whole – so, too, did humanity serve its mysterious function, one its own voice could never proclaim. As well ask the bird why it sings or the worm why it tunnels the fruit. They were a worldwide instigator of exothermic decay, devourer whose manure nourishes an empty remainder: the terminal, perfect, and universal parasite.
Each past year found me more deeply rooted, spreading branches more expansively. In contrast to my stability, humanity seemed, if possible, even lighter than air: like a season’s vanguard of wildflowers, to sprout in noisy color then be trampled by the sun. They frothed. They clashed. They beat against each other like two contrary breezes, and where their tussle subsided, they left a wrack of broken forms. They crawled like blind beetles, set the grasses on fire, hewed club-like branches to wield against each other’s maddened motion. Towards the end I thought I heard their voice. I thought I heard humanity’s collective heart commencing a keynote such as the sun, at dawn, sings through all the earth’s waking harmonies. It was one voice in many mouths, just as each leaf, though distinct, pronounces my self. Come one grey dawn all color was shed, and one bare branch – one clear articulation of force – rose in stone, the giant figure of a man, dead slag that didn’t move in sunshine or storm. Man weighing on earth, heavier than life. The shell of a man, blindingly white.
They scared off the sunshine with heaven-splitting sirens. With their marches and nocturnal flares they drove the evening away. In the cool morning, they chased the pink from the dawn with their violent metal birds. They strung the perimeter with lightning wire to keep the unwanted at bay. My roots, where they tunneled below the fence, felt the reverberation of thousands of desperate feet. Then even that life retreated, and all that was left, as after a feast of birds, were the dark, broken shells that piled at my roots, and the stone man, and his face on their chests, and his face on their flags, and his face on the sides of their exploded machines.
I try to ask the elm, but the elm is silent. I ask the oak and the cherry blossom to reckon the snow that doesn’t melt, but all that comes to me is wind through a thorn. A massive flame ignited the heart of mankind, and all its regularity – those careful stone grids – fell pellmell into a common conflagration.
I’d question the stone man, but he never moves. As the earth belches, and birds drop from the sky, he remains with an open palm. A squirrel has crawled across its fingers and melted into flame. Its skeleton is now white as the stone, white as the snow that won’t end, and white as the sun.
I look to my heart, then. I sort through my memories. The world becomes a rumor beyond my blackening surface. Though I have nothing to speak them, words form themselves within. Nothing in this alien clay will respond, but they leach out, anyway, like a poison: “I do not forgive you.”
A little, half-carbonized monstrosity crawls up to my trunk. Its blood-bleared eye’s suffering is obscenely exposed. Its nails break against my bark, and it howls like an infant.
I drop my last clutch of leaves upon its naked back.
Daniel Muenzer’s writing is usually in an absurdist or surrealist vein. He is at the very beginning of his publishing journey, though he has a long history of teaching students how to write, as well as an enduring writing practice of his own. He always encourages students to be courageous in the pursuit of their own voices, and in the above story has tried to model that.