UNSPOKEN

MELISSA

One more fatal blow. That is all it would take to unseat the mighty giant from his throne. One more thrust of the axe into his cracked, scarred skin. Instead of blood, sap spurted from his wounds. Nothing would hinder the attackers’ progress now. He was left defenseless against their power. He couldn’t run. He didn’t know how. He had never needed to.

Hundreds of years ago, wedged snuggly into the folds of a modest pinecone, unbeknownst to the rest of the world, lay a seed. Its mother tree had abandoned it, as is typical in that culture, to find its own way through life. The cone sheltered the seed from outside cruelties, and the seed put its trust in the cone’s seemingly invincible strength for it knew of nothing else except warmness and comfort. But one day it found itself sitting in the cold, damp earth, the crushed pine cone in fragments. It was to be the first of many trials to come.

Mature and respected, the tree towered high above the land like nature’s own version of a skyscraper. From his high perch, he could see the patterns of life play out beneath him. He had endured many hardships when others beside him had failed, and the rings of his skin showed his colorful history. He had felt the scorching heat of the uncontrollable forest fires, stood his ground against the threatening thunder storms, bore the wintry burden of snow upon his arms, provided shelter for the neighboring woodland creatures, and witnessed the ever repeating patterns of the foreign mankind. Once he had sheltered an entire platoon beneath his limbs as a bloody battle was fought before him. Lovers had tattooed doodles into his skin to show their affection, and his robust back furnished a place for weary travelers to rest. He had seen much more than he would have ever imagined.

It seemed he was always involved in man’s world, yet he could not speak to this being. He could not warn man of the future, nor entertain him with stories of the past. He tried to give what hints he could, but they were too subtle to be noticed. Man would not listen.

Then one day a young forest-dweller boy stumbled upon him. The awe-struck child admired the sturdiness of his branches, ignoring the blemishes that adorned them. Soon discovering how inviting the limbs were, the boy climbed up them like a ladder, taking advantage of what view they could offer. The child’s imagination took the boy captive and crowned him the ruthless captain of a fearsome pirate ship. The trunk became the mast, the gnarly limbs were the rigging, and the rolling sea of hills moved together in fluid motion.

The tree was enheartened when the boy returned week after week, leading an assemblage of children. They chased each other around his base in a frivolous game of tag, nibbled on finger sandwiches while seated niched around his roots, and even erected what he supposed to be a miniature cottage in his lower branches. The vivacity that radiated off the children intrigued him. Season blended into season, and the children never ceased to return to their favorite playing grounds. After a while, their visits became brief and irregular. He so longed to hear their footsteps or their youthful laughter. It was not until many seasons later that an adult man came to gaze once more upon the tree’s timeworn beauty. Instead of inciting a game of hide-and-seek, a tear glistened at the corner of the man’s mournful eyes, and he walked away slowly, never to return. It was then that the tree added yet another lesson to the collection he had painstakingly compiled over the preceding centuries: nothing earthly is everlasting.

The crash splintered the air into a thousand pieces like the firing of a cannon. A slow death was to be expected. Destroyed by the ones who could have benefited by it, unspoken wisdom would be absorbed back into the earth, a place of beginnings and endings - to be lost forevermore.