I'm in love with a tree. It's a secret romance that's been growing for eleven years. My husband doesn't know about it. He wouldn't understand. If I told him, he'd dismiss it as one of my metaphors taken too far. But my connection with the tree runs deep. She and I have shared things we've shared with no one: buried dreams, sickness for homeland, our roots pulled out and replanted for the purposes of other people's agendas. I didn't leave my home against my will, exactly, but it did take many years to acclimate to my new soil and find courage to send out new shoots. My love, on the other hand, has a much more dramatic story. She wears 750 rings, a Boab goddess of the East Kimberley, Warmun country, Western Australia. Her wisdom stretches back centuries before the settlers came to carve up the land without a thought to its owners. When a new highway was plotted along her roots, a deal was struck with her custodians: instead of cutting her down, she would be plucked from the earth, tied to a truck, and driven 3200 km for replanting in the botanic gardens. I wasn't fooled by the good-deed story on the plaque next her.

She cried out to me the very first time I saw her. Not everyone could hear her song. But I recognised her melancholy, saw the signs. We were both transplants, failing to thrive in a harsh climate. As the sun burned my unaccustomed skin, her roots struggled to drink the meagre rains, missing the monsoons of her birthplace. I made a vow to her that first day—I would visit her every week, or as often as I could, and promised to listen to her memories, full of rain and red earth, and the dry times when she stored water in her trunk, like a camel crossing a desert. I cried with her when vandals cut her beautiful bark, branding her with human names and dates. And then came the sores that gaped all over her trunk. Those made the horticulturalists nervous—visitors were starting to point and frown. They posted a sign to explain the holes were symptoms of transplantation—but that she was ‘healing'. It was all a ‘natural regeneration process'. That was five years ago now.

The wounds haven't healed. I tell her she still looks beautiful. She stands tall and proud, but she whispers weakly that she's only hanging on some days. She has given up trying to reach for her sisters back home—roots can only go so far. We keep each other going.

 

 

© Laura Keenan. From Twice Not Shy: One hundred short short stories published by Night Parrot Press.

 

 

Laura Keenan is co-publisher and editor at Night Parrot Press. In 2002, Laura met flash fiction in a writers group in Denver, Colorado, and has been head-over-heels for the genre ever since. Her career as an editor spans twenty years, working for publishers including the Perseus Books Group (USA) and UWA Publishing. She runs flash fiction writing workshops in schools, libraries and community centres, encouraging others to obsess over small, intense stories.

 

www.nightparrotpress.com