Anti-Story Story

TREE
by Nate Kamiya

It was a dark and stormy night. The tangled branches of an ancient oak scratched against the window, as if trying to break the pane, reach through the glass, and crush the rumpled writer busy destroying the English language. The oak sighed, its extremities creaking. The cold made it stiffer, and the rain was making its trunk warp. Maybe it would become the pages for the author’s book. The grass hadn’t been trimmed in years, and it made its roots itch. If the rain kept up like it had been the grass would all be drowned, and then there would be no point in trimming it. The tree fixed two knotted eyes on the gothic pile sitting next to it. That damned writer and his dilapidated Victorian monstrosity. Didn’t he have any idea? The Oak Tree had known the shingles and framing for the east side of the building. The whole thing was a cemetery, a perverted cathedral of bones and innards, a hollow mockery of the thing growing in its yard—and the Oak Tree had to stare at it every day. Fucking humans. Next time one of them was close enough it would drop an acorn on their head.