Shadows And Tall Trees

A short story about the wilderness of youth and rebellion. For more of my writing, go to andrewhenleywriting.wordpress.com

Paige Anderson stood in the spiky shadow of the tree that had loomed over her all her life. Its coarse skin was tattooed with lover’s initials and its branches reached up to the summer sky, grasping it tightly, pulling it over Paige like a child’s security blanket. Paige’s 64 year old skin was as contoured as the tree itself, deep creases in her loose, white skin emanating outwards from the corners of her lips, her nose, her eye sockets.

 

It was 50 years ago today. Paige’s body was young and pure and curvy. Highwaisted dark denim shorts were wrapped around her hips, below that her legs were bare. Her hair was coiffed and black like a mudflap pinup. Jason’s car was rusty and humid, the interior tinged with the smell of escapism doused in smoke and alcohol. Jason wound his window up. He leant across Paige, brushing his ear to her breasts and her heartbeat as he wound up hers. He removed a tightly wrapped joint from his pocket and held it between his teeth as he drove. He took his hands off the wheel, using one to hold the old brass lighter to thumb the flame into existence, while the other rose out of habit to shield the fresh flame from an imagined wind. He took a deep drag then opened his mouth and the thick, hallucinogenic fog poured out of his mouth like hot soup.

He handed it to Paige, “It’s called hotboxing,” was all he said for the rest of the drive, until they arrived at the wild forest, tall trees behind young, sprouting bushes.

 

Paige pushed the joint into her pink painted preacher’s daughter lips and took an intoxicating inhale. She tensed her barely teenaged body with all her will to not splutter. Looking through her dark sunglasses, Paige saw melting world speeding by. She blew on the clear glass and wrote her name in the mist of condensation. Her fingernails were each painted in different colours. She could feel Jason’s rough, calloused hand swimming in the unexplored lake of her thigh.

 

They arrived at the forest’s edge, and Jason stopped on the loosely packed clay of the dirttrack. Paige climbed out of the car and slid her hands into the back pockets of her shorts, her sleeveless white polka dot vest wispy to the rhythm of the wind. Her loveheart tattoo was new and crimson, 50 years later time has stolen her deep red rebellion.

 

Jason’s car was once a proud navy colour, before rust had gnawed through the chassis, transforming it to flimsy, eroding patches of brown and grey. It rattled as he climbed out and locked the door with a heavy clunk. He put his arm around Paige, his hand pulling her close towards him like a strong legged spider. Jason was 25, a day labourer who had twice served time for assault. His skin was firm, his body a cornet shape, with muscles sculpted by prison sentences and shovels. Paige wanted to see Jason naked. She had no idea what was between his legs. In her mind he was a plastic Ken doll with a flat, smooth crotch. But that was not what she was interested in. She wanted to lace her fingers through his chest hair, grabbing his firm buttocks and scratching his strong legs. He had a tear drop tattoo that he told Paige represented a murder he had gotten away with. Paige had chosen him to anger her father; it was Jason or a Jew.

 

As they walked through the forest, thin blades of long grass grazed Paige’s leg, tickling her into giggles. Their path was not clearly marked, and they often had to wade through soft, swampy earth, muddying their soles. There was a dense canopy that blackened their world, at times the only light was thin, piercing swords that fought its way through narrow holes in the leaves.

                       

“It’ll be worth it when we get there,” Jason told Paige as he dragged her by the hand through the weeds.

Paige’s mouth felt dry after her first smoke, and her mind reeled in the uncharted territory of losing her drug virginity. Creatures and eyes seemed to emerge from the dense foliage, laughing at her, grinning with huge teeth and watching her every move.

 

Eventually they came to a small, secluded hill with a single tree at its peak. The tree had no marks then. It was smoother; perhaps it was happier. Jason pulled a switchblade knife out of his front pocket and slammed it deep into the untouched bark. Paige pulled it out and fondled the cool handle as if she were an expert.

“You know what we should do?” Paige said, flicking the switchblade in and out of its stowaway compartment, “We should carve our initials into the tree.”

“Whatever,” Jason said, taking a drag on a new joint and admiring the sprayed out sunlight on the horizon.

Paige carved ‘P.A. + J.’ into the tree, and asked “What’s your surname?”

“Lebowitz.”

Paige added the ‘L’ to the tree and thought, ‘Cool. He’s a Jew as well.’

 

Drawing the horizontal line of the ‘L’, Paige felt Jason push his body up against her back. The joint was still in his mouth; the burnt, peppery tip was blister close to Paige’s nostril.

Through gritted teeth acting as a vice on his joint, Jason said, “Now we’ll have something to remember this by,”

His hands slithered under her vest, his palms scratching lightly as they cupped her small, blossoming breasts.

“No, Jason,” Paige said.

She tried to push him away but he was an immovable pillar. There was no escape to the front either; caught between a tree and a hard place.

“Don’t be like that,” Jason said.

His joint dropped the grass below them, smouldering until Jason’s foot ground the embers.

“No,” Paige tried to sound stern but it came out quivering and desperate.

Jason’s hands reached around to her front and forced open the zip of her shorts with a metallic pop.

 

Paige spun quickly, tearing Jason’s hand open on the jagged edge of her zip. Instinctively, Paige stabbed Jason in the heart with his own switchblade. There was a crack of cartilage and a narrow jetstream of red as the knife pierced Jason between two ribs. Paige let go and it remained imbedded, the glossy wooden handle reaching out like a small, ineffective limb. He fell back against the soft earth and gasped for air wordlessly. The dense muscles in his neck strained and bulged as he fought against the contractions of his narrowing throat. Paige put her hands on his chest, compressing the wound, feeling his heart beat and life leak out of him with every slowing thump of his threading pulse. Flecks of blood spat up and disappeared in the polka dots of her top.

 

Her hands were stained in a deep, oxygenated red syrup. Her fresh, smooth skin looked like it was acne cursed, and sticky clots of flesh and bone her tangled in her blonde hair like bubblegum. She took Jason’s keys and ran back through the forest, past the watching, laughing eyes. She opened up the boot of his car, grabbed his shovel and returned to the dead man on the hill.

 

The wood of the shovel handle drank up the wet blood from her palms. Paige dug a deep hole and buried Jason in it, then covered it over and packed the dirt tight. The crushed remnants of his joint marked his headstone.

 

Paige stood on the same spot 50 years later. The tree was taller, and stained with the presence of other lovers. It had been living off Jason’s decaying nutrients for the last half a century. No one had come looking for Jason. He was a drifter, day labourer, no family.

 

On her way to the tree, Paige passed by Jason’s car. Rain and rust had stolen chunks from the front and rear bumpers; they looked like sharp jaws, taking bites out of stray cars that passed by on the solitary dirt track. A predator, a haunting phantom for lonely drivers.

 

Paige ran her wrinkled fingers across the tree’s bark. Her fingertips felt the knifed imprints of letters left by lovers.

“50 years is long enough,” Paige said.

 

She swung her axe into the spine of the tree, wheezing under the effort. The handle of the axe was smooth and porous, removing the sweat from her old hands almost as quickly as it caused it. The paper embers of the joint that had blown away decades ago were not Jason’s headstone, Paige realised. The tree was. And it had been desecrated repeatedly by other peoples’ happiness. With every chop, Paige cut half an inch deeper into the tree’s core. She let the heavy, dull blade rest against the earth as she regained the strength for another tired chop. Eventually, the tree collapsed, its branches still outstretched towards the sky.