26 | Psychopomp Magazine
V.
The tree screamed and screamed and screamed.
VI.
Coincidentally: the pencil-maker had once read a poem written by the tree-woman whose arms he was now severing. Someone had left a literary magazine on the table in his dentist’s office, and the pencil-maker had flipped through it.
The poem was about a cardboard box sagging with the weight of rain. It was called, “I liked you better before you literally found the Holy Ghost.” In the dentist’s chair, the pencil-maker had thought about the heaviness of God, and water.
The pencil-maker piled his potential pencils by the roots of the tree and sat. He evaluated as he peeled the bark from each severed limb, stripping through cambium, phloem, bark. The brightness of leaves glowing around his bare ankles.
The light was fading by the time he had finished. A chill wind was beginning to knife its way through the woods, and the pencil-maker huddled closer against the tree. He thought about how when he was a child, he’d leaned against the trunks of trees to listen to them breathing. He pressed his cheek into the maple’s gray trunk, listened for the slow susurration.
VII.
A strange thing was happening to the tree.
The first was: through her shock, she realized that she felt no pain.
There was not even the concept of pain. There was simply memory. Pain was like something that had happened in a dream: an unpleasant thing that she had once had strong feelings about but now couldn’t remember why.
The other thing is that she was suddenly omnipresent.
She was standing and reaching (and with her untouched uppermost limbs chlorophyll xanthophyll anthocyanin) and rooting. But she was also below and to the left, and warm in the pencil-maker’s lap, and in one instance cradled in the