The Sycamore
Trees remember everything
Grandma always said that trees remember everything that ever happened to them. And a lot can happen over a hundred years, a thousand years. Grandma said some trees live to be almost ten thousand years old. That’s why I went out to the forest today, even when everyone told me not to. I had to find a tree to tell me what happened to Jack.
No one just disappears. No one. I knew the spot because in the hospital Maisy was screaming about the bowl. The bowl tried to eat them, she said. Ate Jack. The doctor said she was just in shock, she didn’t know what she was saying. Dad and the police and some people from the neighborhood went out to search the bowl but they didn’t find a trace of him. But they aren’t calling it a kidnapping. They aren’t calling it anything. Just, Jack’s gone now. So you tell me what that means. Means they know Maisy wasn’t really confused. All the parents around here have told us kids to stay out of the woods, don’t even think about the bowl. Well, that’s maybe what they told us, but some of us have to come to know a thing first hand, and not just be told.
Maisy had her head on straight. She was just scared out of her mind. Dad said she was still in the hospital this morning because there were complications with her leg. It’s broken, that’s not complicated. They just don’t want her blabbing.
I heard her screaming as they carried her into the hospital.
“The bowl, the bowl, ate Jack! It swallowed him whole!”
The bowl is nothing, really, just a spot almost straight into the forest from Jack’s house where the ground sinks in a circular depression. Like some giant pressed his giant bowl into the soft dirt a long, long time ago. The dirt never got filled in, it’s still a bowl.
When I got there I could tell something was wrong right away. There’s a feeling in the air, you know, when something sinister is around. Like teeth on your skin, pressing in a bit, not biting you, but gonna.
There’s a big sycamore near the center of the bowl. It sees everything. I can tell by the ways it stands, like if it could run, it would. On one side, is a scar that looks like a face. The eye is closed, the face all scrunched up like it’s dreaming of something sad and anxious. The day before yesterday we were playing in the bowl and I asked it what was wrong. It wanted to answer, I could tell, but Jack broke a branch off of it to sword fight Maisy. She had stabbed her pocket knife into the trunk, which she did all the time because she thought it looked cool, and grabbed a branch of her own. I think the tree hurt too much to talk.
She’d left the knife there when we went home and yesterday’s when she and Jack went to go get it back. When the bowl ate Jack.
Grandma said that there used to be Klan lynchings in the bowl, that they used the sycamore as a hanging tree. And she also said that in the eighties a bunch of homeless people were sleeping in the bowl when the cops came through and busted the camp. Arrested nine and killed four. It was all over the news, she said. She said those trees must have some sad, sad stories to tell.
I knew the trees were upset. The whole place was quiet, even the birds and cicadas. Like when your parents fight and you’re afraid to make even a peep afterwords. That’s what standing in the bowl felt like, like standing in the kitchen alone after both of your parents had stormed off angry.
I scanned the ground. Maisy said the bowl ate Jack, so it must have a mouth. I bet grownups were too “smart” to look for a mouth. Even if there turned out not to be one, at least you looked. And dang it, there wasn’t one, not even a snake burrow. And what was weirder was that the ground looked undisturbed, like there hadn’t just been fifty men tromping through it looking for a boy they knew they wouldn’t find. Maybe they had never even come.
I decided it was time to talk to the tree. When I got up to its face I noticed it was reddish and looked angry. Bark peeled away from it in flat chips. I knew it was smooth underneath and I wanted to touch it, but I didn’t. I stood in front of it for at least a minute, staring stupidly and trying to figure out what to say.
“Um… hey, so my friends were here yesterday and one of them didn’t come back. I was wondering if you could tell me what happened?” I swallowed hard. Waited. Around me the forest started to creak and pop. I whirled around to see the trees were turning toward me, leaning in to where I stood. Something brushed my shoulder and I turned back around to see my shirt snagged on a branch. I tugged away but the branch tugged back, sticking farther through my shirt and making it impossible to run without ripping my shirt off me. The sycamore groaned and the eye above its mouth slid open. It was yellow and fuzzy, like a sycamore seed, with a lid that opened sideways. Its mouth was small and puckered.
I tried to step back but more tree branches stuck in my shirt and others formed a cage around me. The sycamore’s mouth opened and a line of ants marched out, twisting their army down and around the trunk.
“Up,” it moaned. I looked up, sycamore trees are tall, this one was taller than most and its leaves made it hard to see anything. I squinted and realized the leaves were shaking, rippling as the branches waved back and forth. As I watched, the commotion became a swirling of leaves, like a twister. Something was coming toward me, falling down the center, or being handed down from branch to branch, I thought. It was a bundle of something, I kept seeing purple, then orange, then green. It was coming fast and was coming right for me. I tried to duck sideways, but branches jabbed me whenever I moved. I looked back up and the bundle was closer, close enough to see. I screamed and tried to move again. It was fucked up. I never did anything to the tree. Jack’s dead purple face stopped inches from mine. His blood trickled down my chin. He was still wearing his orange and green windbreaker.
“Break,” the sycamore said, its voice was like something hard going over a cheese grater.
“But- but” I sputtered. “Jack didn’t mean to hurt you, he just didn’t think. What about all the others that hurt you on purpose? They made you be a hanging tree. Maisy stabbed you! Why Jack? Why?” I shrieked.
“Now you will think. The girl will think. Make other people think.”
“Think what? Think what?” I was shaking. Jack’s body began to swing back up into the tree. His horrible bloated face bobbed through the dappled light.
“The trees are dangerous. Stay away.” Its eye began to slowly close.
“Where are you taking him?” I could barely hear my own voice.
“I keep Jack.” The tree said. Its eye snapped shut. The trees cleared a path. I left the forest and I will never go back.
That was great.