Tree Food

For a brief period, I considered it. The Giving Tree in permanent ink. The book’s final pages, an old man seated on the remains of a hacked-down oak, curved in on himself as he waits for the end. A cue to suggest the extent of my depth. Tattoo as shorthand: Here’s a guy who thinks about magnitude. The passage of time, the headlong march toward decay and death. Yes, I thought, That’s it. People would see the delicate stump peeking from my sleeve and ask, What’s that? And then they would consider the possibility of loving me. Thankfully, enough time passed for me to reconsider. In other words, I began therapy and medication, learned to tell the difference between depth and the black fog of depression. But I also began to think about myself lying there in the darkest box, bugs and fungi making a meal of my skin and bones. I was ashamed of what they would make of the stretched and shriveled body art: Here lies another taker. How do I tell the earth and the trees that all I want to be is a blank canvas, the raw material for a different kind of permanence? Sometimes I dream about it: fresh roots spidering what’s left of my body, piercing my trashed and desiccated heart. A sapling cracks the earth, pushes toward an infinite sky, flourishing as I decompose, pulling life from whatever it is I have left to give.

Brendan Gillen is a writer in Brooklyn, NY. His stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions and appear in the Florida Review, Wigleaf, X-R-A-Y, Necessary Fiction, New Delta Review, Taco Bell Quarterly, HAD, and elsewhere. His first novel, STATIC, is forthcoming from Vine Leaves Press (July '24). You can find him online at bgillen.com and on Twitter/IG @beegillen.

Published July 15 2024