COMPLETED WORKS

TREERIE

by Curtis W. Long

I awoke with a start! I was standing. I couldn't move. My feet seemed to be tied to the ground. My arms were stretched above my head. My hands seemed to dangle from them, my fingers loose appendages with extended fingernails, torpidly waving in the wind.

As my vision began to clear, I could tell I was in a park. There were benches. In a playground, children were raucously swinging and sliding. Just in front of me, there was a pool of some sort. As I peered into it and calculated my position, the alarming reality broke through: I was a tree!

As I attempted to come to terms with this untenable circumstance, I knew that in order to maintain my sanity I would have to think things through carefully. Logically, I knew that this type of transmogrification did not fall within the realm of the science of which I was aware. I determined that either I was experiencing a realistic dream or had, in some way, stumbled upon a parallel existence where varied species of life were transmutable to other forms. At any rate, I decided that, until a clearer explanation of my predicament emerged, I would use the situation to experience at firsthand the life of a tree. So, I relaxed and began to observe.

The first thing I noticed was that I had no sense of gender*. While feeling that I should establish some gender-specific status, the well-known poem Trees came to mind. The author Joyce Kilmer (who, for the record, is a guy), made reference to "…lifting her leafy arms in prayer…" and "…a nest of robins in her hair…" Then, there is another poem or song about a "mighty oak" that has a masculine connotation. Anyhow, none of that worked. I was just a tree. But that bit about the robins did give me pause--where there are robins, there are droppings. How messy might that be?

Now that I was able to leave gender ruminations to those of my former species, I decided to sharpen the focus on my surroundings. All of a sudden, I felt an excruciating pain in my side. I saw a teenage boy and girl standing there. He had a penknife out and was carving something into my bark. I called upon my faculties to remind me that trees cannot sense pain--contrary to the thinking of those idiots who talk to plants. To hell with them. To hell with the tree-huggers, too. If there's no gender, there's no need for affection.

Now, here's a lady coming down the walk with a rather large dog. Ah, the beauty of ambulatory existence! I hadn't realized the freedom that movement affords. Now, they're coming toward me. It's gratifying how the lower forms appreciate the essence of nature. It's sniffing all around me, trying to determine the substance of which I am made. Now it's…HEY, HEY, HEEEEEEEEY!!!! Stupidly, I had forgotten about territorial marking.

O.K., Merlin, you've had your little joke. It's now time for this interesting little session to come to a screeching halt. I call upon the intercession of the Good Witch of the West or whoever it was who got Dorothy back to Kansas and Alice out of that stinking hole. I'm ripe for re-conversion--and that ain't no pun.

I do feel as though I'm drifting back now. And just in time--here come the goddamned robins! Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

*I am aware that gender is a term that previously (and correctly) was restricted to grammatical reference; however, I like many others, have given in to the general appropriation of the term to designate sex.