The tree looked cold, its shaky branches writhing like tarnished silver in the day light. Spiders webs formed almost from sheer necessity. Some larger creatures had been captured in the white mess, and they had died, clung to the thick strings of spunk. But there were no spiders, so it was there that they would stay to rot. The tree and its thick brambles extended a hundred feet into the air, yet still it was overshadowed by the dozens of oaks and elms which soaked up all the sun and left the cold tree to starve. It was the misfit tree, and it sat like a gnarled old man, hunched over the stony brook where they'd found a child's body almost every year for the past century. A boy, or sometimes a girl, would go fishing, and they'd find themselves face to face with hell's eye. Then they'd be dead, their flesh left to rot at the base of the thick, forlorn scraggle of wood and moss. Its only friends the frightened corpses of the damned, the tree would scrape the sky and hope to shred apart the endless blue. It hoped that something might fall out from nowhere. At its very lowest, where its prostrated tendrils sunk into the clotted dirt, a groove had formed. From the soot black stump of the tree, there was a shape. If one looked at it from the proper angle, they'd see it. They'd see what it was meant to be and they'd move on. The shape was the shape of a child; one who was curled into a ball. The shape of a child who was needling away at his chest with folded fingers. The shape of a kid whose head hung low even when he stared up at the sky. It was a hole made from chiseled bark, and it was for the loneliest kid in the world.