Father Tree

Father Tree

            Sitting placid and sweating on a bench, I wonder, “What am I going to do with my life?” That very moment, I see my father walking down the park road. Tall and sturdy, he walks down the path, wearing his black wool overcoat, the complete picture of cool and collected thought, even on a scorching summer morning like this. With a hot black coffee in one hand, and pitching out dried pieces of bread to the birds with his other, he looks to me the ideal image of a man’s man.

            I stand myself up, walk over to the hazel tree that shades my bench, and look for a branch that’s just at the full length of my reach. I break a twig off from that branch; quickly rush up to my father, and plunge the jagged broken edge into my father’s eye. I dig and grind the twig all the way to the back of his skull, feeling the splintering edges mesh and grind till it my hand is doused in cold blood. My father stands there for a moment, staring out of his one good eye, but then makes a plummeted fall backwards, as I yell, “Timber!”

            I kneel down next to my father, and reach into my pocket to produce a small vial. I open it, and I let slip onto my father’s still warm corpse a few of my mother’s death bed tears. I stand up, bush off the gravel and dust from my knees, and let him lay there in peace.

            I walk that bumpy road everyday now to my new job, feeling the small pebbles press up against the soles of my shoe. I tip the top of my hat to my father’s corpse, walk towards the right of the path, always making sure not to step on my father. People do look at him from time to time, but never long enough to stop and break the pace they are walking.

            By next summer, all traces of my father’s body are gone. By the time next spring came, the twig I planted in his eye slowly pulled my father into itself, and became a fully grown hazel tree. Right in the middle of the road stands my father’s tomb, right there for everyone to see and mumble complaints about, right where I can look up to him every day, nod the tip of my hat, and tell him how much I love him.