by George Salis
The uniformity of this tree-canopied earth strikes you as an obscenity. Never before have you beheld such an arboreal height limit, breached by neither leaf nor branch-tip. Indeed, all have fallen in line, including yews, beeches, birches, larches, willows, gingkos, monkey puzzles, sycamores, sequoias, banyans, baobabs, dragon trees, olive trees, palm trees, rainbow eucalyptuses, jellyfish trees, cherry blossom trees, bastard quiver trees, and Glastonbury thorns, not to mention trees no one has ever seen before, such as those that, in the spirit of Batesian mimicry, evolved anthropological shapes, gnarled faces whose mouths foamed with cerise sap, limbs fingered with opposable chutes, crowns styled as afros, bobs, mohawks, and other features to intimidate their neighbors.
You notice that the core of this earth exists as a colossal knot of roots that double as their own soil. Symbiotic insects grow into twigs as inverted buds and act as oxygen eaters, contributing to the atmospheric balance, the global breathing. Further scrutiny reveals that the equilibrium of the altitude limit is the consequence of a diplomatic ruler, the first and thus the frailest, a once-towering Ished Tree, a Yggdrasil, an axis mundi now sapped to the point of a six-foot sapling, a height by which all others are measured and tethered, every species bowing or crouching in accordance with the ruler’s forest-wide truce (putting the topiary in utopia), which sees to it that no crown shall out-shadow another, none reaching its boughs higher at the expense of the lower elders or younglings.
You see, these trees are not what one might remember from a backyard long ago, where lone oaks could stretch their gigantic branches with impunity, no, these are the organisms of a virescent evolution that took root well after the self-extinguishment of anything like humanoids. In the freedom of an unbalanced lifeform equation, trees begat trees who begat trees who begat trees until the susurrations between leaves morphed into wind-words, sibilant sentences that allowed for a linguistic cross-pollination, and thus the plant kingdom bloomed into a much more collaborative civilization. This is not to say that perennial peace came about by dint of deciduous discussions, no, for the trees shook, barked, and felled each other during centuries of growing pains, shadows from the loftiest expanding like one-dimensional clouds of pestilence that suffocated loved ones in sluggish, curling deaths, trauma that manifested in survivors as black tree rings, mourning bands embedded in the manner of internal scars over time. A pruning of ambitious deplorables proved necessary, a vine-imprisoning of selfish transgressors for as long as it took for re-education to produce a change of heartwood in a troublesome maple here, a nefarious cypress there, and only then could the revolution of truncated trunks lead to a green harmony heretofore unseen if ever even dreamed.
The status quo lasts for a millennium, safeguarded by the ruler’s twelve floral disciples, a sturdy Cercis siliquastrum among them, otherwise known as a Judas Tree, one who can only fadingly recall the vivid pink flowers of his ancestors. The more he feasts on the meager rations of light allotted to him, the more he yearns for his lineage’s most radiant of hues to replace his pale and puny adornments, but he has no chance of fulfilling this desire without dedicating himself to avaricious photosynthesis. How can he grow into his greatest form if one flower higher means penalty by death? Who is the ruler to curtail an entire citizenry, to keep it on the edge of starvation? Such shallow breathing will precede a scream if it lasts but one century longer. Still, the Judas Tree conspires in unsuspecting quiet before testing the winds in search of accomplices outside the others in that abjectly allegiant dozen. It proves all too easy to recruit those who long for the dizziness of sky-scratching heights, of potent light that can birth broods and broods of juicy fruits, gems of another kind. Are not these aspirations written into our very genes? That eunuch eugenicist would have us as grounded as our wormy roots rather than soaring like those extinct creatures once called birds.
For his frailness, the first and formerly regal tree has long since camouflaged himself among the penurious rest, no one other than the twelve disciples privy to his true identity so that they alone can carry out his commands and tend to his harrowing health, and so it remains the Judas Tree’s responsibility to identify the head that needs cleaving. Once the traitors’ intent to takeover is solidified with wrought-iron whispers, the prime malefactor snakes forward an under-branch and kisses the nameless ruler with the petals of a flower whose shade resembles a sallow salmon, and therefore the coup commences, the Judas Tree’s fellow insurrectionists lashing out their branches to stifle their desiccated despot unto dust through and through. How swiftly the mutiny transforms into a marathon, every tree indulging in postmature growth spurts, frenetic giraffe stretches. Upward and upward, they streak like mahogany comets through the sky. For too long have they lapped and supped at a claustrophobic trough, ordered to be satisfied with scintillas, so many of the other trees hugging themselves out of fear and obedience, but no longer, because the Judas Tree shall lead them to a higher place, one in which the strongest and most beautiful shall bathe in the liquid gold of sunlight, tilting their heads into an endless faucet of life made sweeter by its opposite. He informs his co-conspirators that they made it, they are in the clear and can stop growing for now, time to regroup and plan the next phase of a brighter kingdom, but they don’t stop because they don’t trust him, no, no one trusts any other to cease flourishing, for even a few feet lower than the rest can spell their deaths, in which they would join the dumbly loyal others who, under the tonnage of so much shadow, now flatten into decaying plant matter, further fuel for the new ruler, and so rebel rebels against rebel, growing and growing beyond any giant beanstalk in the heavens.
The Judas Tree’s only hope lies in an entrapment of the sun as a whole, absorbing every ecstatic ray, but first he must close the cold gap between the earth and the ether, such a Zeno reach, yet the solar flare that flings outward to meet him is no such godly arm. Instead, that blinding life-giver’s touch lights the wooden fuse and causes a global conflagration that roasts marshy, mellow souls till all turns to ash. In that blackest of planetary cinders, hope acts as the fertilizer from which a sooty seedling peeks.
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Bio:
George Salis is the author of the novel Sea Above, Sun Below. After a decade, he has finished his second novel, Morpholocal Echoes. He’s the winner of the Tom La Farge Award for Innovative Writing. He’s also the editor of The Collidescope, an online publication that celebrates innovative and neglected literature. His website is www.GeorgeSalis.com.
