Kendra Fortmeyer | 25
winter into the pleasurable shock of spring. Once, the tree-woman would have been proud of her adaptability. But now she was mostly just tree.
On this day, she was drawing her energy down into herself, carefully draining back the chlorophyll from the utmost dendritic tips. Which is why she did not hear the pencil-maker until he was almost upon her.
He was just on the edge of young. There was something Prince Charming about him: a ripeness in his lips that promised, at any moment, a bursting into song.
The tree stopped goldening her westernmost leaves.
The tree thought, Oh.
IV.
It was perfect.
The maple’s limbs were pliant and slender, its foliage crisp with fall. He circled it once, eyeing, testing. He reached out, touched a branch, and was rewarded with a windy shimmer of leaf.
Traditionally, juniper was the common choice, or cedar: those soft, fragrant woods that split cleanly down the middle. Maple was harder. It had a tendency toward stickiness. But the pencil-maker was certain: yes, this was the thing exactly. Difficult and complicated and sticky, like love, but you could make it work.
His mind expanded into dream: the (certainly not ex)wife would be well again. They would write each other love notes with this pencil, tuck them into shirt pockets and unexpected places. The wife(!) standing over grocery lists, chewing absently on its eraser: a slow, sensuous ripeness of mouth.
A lifetime of crossword puzzles done together in bed!
The pencil sent with children to college!
And himself saying, as he passed it over (eraser-chewed and shorter, but still there, its graphite luminous and rich with promise of words unwritten), This is the pencil that made your mother fall in love with me all over again.
In the cool autumn air, he reached into his pocket for his penknife.