Email:
Disclaimer: This story is entirely copyrighted ©2001 Carolyn Ann Snow, and for no reason may be passed off as your own, entirely or in part. If you want to use it for any reason (i.e. webpage), please e-mail me for permission first.
Author's Notes: A story I wrote quite a few months ago, edited a little and re-posted here. Rated PG-13 for fairly mature subject matter. Enjoy.

~~~~****~~~~

The Oak Tree
Written by Carolyn Ann Snow, a.k.a. Asamoya Kirameki

I stepped into the trees and began to walk.

This would be the last walk I would ever take. No, I wasn't crazy, or paranoid, or anything like that. It was only that my lethal injection was next in line in the day's proceedings. I had an hour, and then it would be my turn.

I strolled along the forest path, the tree tops rustling overhead. I could hear a bird's song wafting from somewhere in the bushes. The last bird I would ever hear. It saddened me a little to think of it. How I would miss Earth, and all the things on it, when I was gone!

A bright red flower waved merrily at the edge of the path. I reached down and tugged at it, and it easily came away in my hand. I looked at the beautiful blossom in my hand for a moment. I examined thoroughly each tiny petal, the stem, the yellow sweetness in its center. It would fade within hours, be crumbled in days. Just like me. I clenched my fist on it, savagely crushing the petals in my hand, then opened my hand and let the battered flower fall to the ground.

The scent of pine needles filled the air as I continued into the forest. I was glad that I had been allowed this last walk through the spruce grove in the camp. It relaxed and prepared me for death like nothing else could have done. I felt refreshed, cleansed, peaceful... whole. This forest was my sanctuary.

My mind slowly drifted over the course of events since my arrest. I recalled the dim courtroom, the flashes of light bulbs going in and coming out of my trial, the black-on-white letters that spanned pages of the newspapers. I could still recall one article that screamed my name in a monstrous headline. I shivered in remembrance.

I could still recall the police car I had been taken in immediately after my arrest. The steel mesh between me and the officers in front had been more than a little intimidating, and the locked doors and handcuffs had only made it worse. The officers talked over their radio about me, but spoke no words to me other than the routine speech upon arrest. I had never felt more alone. The memory was one of the most vivid in my mind. I could recall even the tiniest details, like the silver ashtray in the front seats, and the fact that a bit of mesh appeared to have a spot of blood on it. I'd wondered who'd been in the back seat of the police car before me, and what they had done to be put there.

What had I done? I didn't like to think about that if I could help it... the problem was, I never could help it. There was always a counsellor-type person asking me what motivation I might have had for doing such a thing, or my attorney referring to it, or occasional jabs from my fellow "jailbirds," as we would say with a chuckle. Of course, I could always come back at the other prisoners, but what could one say to a psychiatrist with a squeaky clean record, not even one ticket for speeding or parking in the wrong space? My shrink swore to me that she HAD gotten tickets before, but she probably only said it to make me feel like I could relate to her, so I would tell her more about me. Oh, I knew all the shrink's tricks, all right, and no one could get an interesting word out of me. They'd never yet found out my REAL motivation for killing seven people in the span of two weeks, and if I had my way, the secret would die with me. It looked like that would happen, anyway. Somehow I had temporarily forgotten that I was going to be put to death in the next hour. I chuckled at my own stupidity.

I reached out a hand and stroked the leaf of an oak tree that had somehow grown between a wad of spruce trees. I almost admired it for surviving amid a whole crowd of organisms that were completely different from it. Did the spruce trees laugh at the oak when it lost its leaves in winter? Did the oak tree have the last word when in the summertime, its leaves came back, big and luscious and beautiful like they were now? It certainly outshone the duller, plainer spruce trees behind it. I could relate to that oak. A lot of people had hated me because I was different, and had picked apart every tiny weakness I'd ever had. But I'd gotten all those people back... oh, yes, indeed. I'd been friends with them all my life, and I think they'd forgotten all about grade school, and how they used to tease me. But even when I was nice, even when I was the best friend and the sweetest man on earth, that little sting of malice was never quite driven out of my heart.

About a week before I'd begun my "spree," my wife had died. Was killed by one of my friend's daughter's idiot boyfriends, who was drunk at the time. That same guy was supposed to have a trial about two weeks after the incident, but I'd saved him the trouble. A week before the trial, I'd gone to his house in the dead of night, on a weekend when I knew his mother wouldn't be home. Unluckily enough he'd taken my friend's daughter to his house for the night. Fair enough. I murdered them both.

I'd dumped the bodies in the muddy, smelly, dirty pond next to the sewage processing plant. No one would tell the stink of rotting corpses from the other crap that got dumped there every day. Then, when one by one I visited other friends' houses and murdered their children too, I dumped the bodies in that same place. No one had ever discovered them, and though I had been questioned endlessly about the locations of the bodies, I'd refused to answer. If the police and those psychiatrists thought they were so smart, let them figure it out on their own. What did they need with a foul criminal like me?

I'm not saying what I did was right, but in my mind it was NECESSARY. Never mind the fact that my name had become infamous across the United States. Never mind the fact that I caused my own friends more grief than they've probably ever felt in their entire lives. I can, literally, only imagine what it must be like to lose your child to a serial killer. I'd never had children myself, had never been interested in them, but I've always been told that parents are very attached to their kids. Never mind that I must have caused at least a couple of hundred people to become almost sick with grief. Never mind that every one of my living relatives now hated me. I don't give a fig about them anyway, never did. Some of them were extremely pathetic and whiny, and some of them could yell so loudly that you were sure the house would collapse, but they all shared one common trait: the fact that they could bore anyone to tears. I know they did it to me on more than a few occasions. I never could stand family reunions.

I found an old log covered in moss, brushed it off as best I could, then sat down. Funny that I should want to keep a prison uniform clean, especially when I would be dead within the hour and they'd probably throw the uniform out anyway. Or maybe they'd give it to a new inmate and make him wear it, never telling him that it rested on the back of a dead man. I'd read somewhere that that was what Hitler did with his Jewish victims, made them strip before entering the gas chambers so he could pass their suits to new prisoners. Hitler might have been the most horrible man that ever lived, but no one said he wasn't economical. I rubbed the rough, grey-blue material between my fingers, wondering if my uniform had been some other man's before he died. Interesting thought, really. I thought of what that man might have looked like. He would have been tall, like me, and skinny, also like me. Other than that, how could you know? He might have been black, or Chinese, or had a brown beard, or red hair, or yellow eyes for all I'd have known. Not that I was too fussy about any of that. Color was color, and would always be no more and no less than color. Who cared?

I rested my elbows on my legs, then rested my chin in my hands and looked around again. The forest glade made me feel cut off from the rest of the world, and I liked that. I'd had too much of the rest of the world for the past two years. My trial, then my death sentence, then waiting for today... it had all been extremely stressful. I would have liked to write out my feelings in a journal, but we weren't allowed to have paper or pens or pencils. It had something to do with the fact that once upon a time they had allowed such things, and an inmate had tried to slice himself open with the point of a newly sharpened pencil, then, failing that, had stabbed himself in the eyes. Poor fellow must have been pretty desperate to want to blind himself. I'd heard that the fellow died later on of the infection in his eyes from the stab wounds, but that part was just a well-circulated rumor, never confirmed by any security guards or workers. It sounded as if it could be true, but who knew? Rumors are almost never proven one way or the other.

I glanced at the watch that the security guard so nicely provided for my walk in the woods. I had about twenty minutes left, out of the hour I'd been alotted to stay out here. I had to be back at precisely fourteen thirty, military time. 2:30. I checked the watch again, and it read 14:11. Nineteen minutes left to live.

I leaned down and picked up a pebble, then held it between my thumb and index finger while I examined it. Its grey surface was dull and weather-worn, and there were many uneven, though smooth, cuts etched into it. I looked away, then suddenly did a double take of sorts and looked back at the stone. Yes... it was initials. I squinted and made out the letters A.L. WZ HR. Someone with the initials A.L. had left their mark on a stone, and as chance would have it, I had found it and remembered them. I wondered whether A.L. was a man or woman, and what they had done to be sent here. For some reason I was always interested in why people were sent to death row. It was the first question I asked of any new inmate, and surprisingly enough, most of them had no hesitations about telling me what they'd done. I was always on the lookout for interesting criminals and was never disappointed. There was a score of them in my prison.

I searched around on the ground, picking through the stones carefully, then found a relatively sharp rock along with a fairly large one. I set the large rock down on my lap, then took the sharp rock in my left hand and etched the words, "E.P. WAS HERE." I traced over the words again, making the grooves in the rock deeper, then I turned the stone over and laid it words-down on the path. I figured it wouldn't erode as fast that way.

I checked the watch. 14:26. If I wanted to get back on time, I'd have to get up from my place on the log now. I hoisted myself off my makeshift chair, brushed the moss off my backside and began to slowly walk down the forest path. I again stopped at the oak tree, to pat its trunk and whisper a soft good-bye to the one that dared to be different. I walked further down the path and spotted the little flower I'd crushed. I bent over and picked it up, trying to smooth the petals a bit, then I walked back to the oak tree and gave it my bright flower as a sort of offering. The wind blew through the oak tree's branches as soon as I laid the flower at its base, and it seemed to smile at me. I smiled too, sure it approved of my sacrifice.

I stepped lightly through the short distance to the forest entrance, then checked my watch. 14:29. I looked at the numbers until they flipped to 14:30. The guard, who was heavily built and dark-skinned, walked over and took my arm, removing the watch first. It was, after all, his.

"Time to go," he said, then began walking towards the side doors of the building. And as I passed through those double doors for the last time, I turned and whispered one last good-bye to my forest, the only thing that appreciated me right now, but especially my oak tree. As I walked through the white hallways, I thought an apology to that little red flower. I hadn't meant to crush it, but sometimes my anger got the better of me.

I was seated in an adjustable chair and my sleeve rolled up. I felt the slight sting of a needle in my upper arm, then I felt a warm, almost burning sensation spread through my arm and slowly make its way through my body. They moved the chair so that I was lying down instead of sitting up. Likely they did it because it would be much less awkward to move a flat corpse than one that was sitting up, and also because there would be less of a chance that my body would fall off the chair when I died.

"Any last words?" the doctor asked. A standard question that they have to ask before someone dies from the poison. I could already feel myself becoming a little more relaxed.

"My will is in the third drawer of my desk, the key for which is hidden in my closet, on the top shelf, in a shoe box with MONORO written across it in white letters." I was getting a little more drowsy now. Sleep would be good.

"Is that all?" the doctor said.

"Yes," I said groggily. So what they'd said was true... lethal injections WERE a lot like falling asleep, except that I could almost feel my organs freezing up inside me. Creepy, but interesting. My heart rate was slowing down considerably, and I felt a little chilly.

Suddenly my heart jolted, then stopped. I felt a wave of panic wash over me, but I took my last breath and used it to steady myself. Everything was hazy, everything was going black...

Then, suddenly, I saw a brilliant, beautiful light in front of me. I breezed through what seemed almost like a tunnel, then arrived at the source of the light. It came from what almost looked like a door frame.

"Come in," a pleasant voice called. I stepped inside, and a smile instantly filled my face. There, in that little room, was the spruce grove I had just left. I darted inside, rushing past dozens of trees, then stopped in delight.

There, nestled between two tall spruce trees, was my oak tree, with my little red flower resting at its base.