For the Trees

      I was first intrigued in the morning, but horrified in the afternoon. Both reactions were directly caused by the same reason. I knew it would happen, my mother had been talking about it for months, but on this date, June 29 of 2009, five loses came to me.

      From the time I was brought home for the very first time, these five giants brought me shade and mystery for my almost fifteen years here. I never marbled at them as I did to the apple or plum, because those gave me delicious flavor to fill my mouth every spring and summer. These were pine trees, whose only uses were to the squirrels in my backyard and the shadows they cast in the hot July air.

      Once I heard of their final day being set, I began realizing how much these trees have been apart of my outdoor adventures growing up. Although, I had never touched one, their stumps were hidden behind a fence that I dared not to journey past in my girlish fear of snakes and spiders. The bases not to be seen, but the rest of the trees were hard to miss when glancing at the quarter-acre grounds. They towered all our other trees, standing at least fifty or so feet tall. They were the unmoving monsters of our landscape and they were dying.

      One was angled particularly close to the house, which gave my mother and I a fright during rough windstorms. My mom did not want to risk another winter of blustery weather to threaten us with those mighty pines. So, she scheduled for them to be taken down on that summer day.

      If the trees could talk, they would humor with stories of wiffle-ball games, the planting of flowers, the cleaning of a mature playhouse every spring, and projects to build a wall for the ivy to not sneak up on us and the create a nice extra patio space. The trees witnessed barbeques and my elder sister’s high school parties. They had even seen me mentally break down a few occasions in my personal wilderness guarded by three sides of fences and the back of the house. Of course, trees cannot speak our human language, but they saw everything in our backyard.

      I woke up later that morning then originally intending to due to my struggle for sleep that took me a couple hours to win. In my blue junior high P.E. uniform that I had recycled to be my new pajamas, I crossed my legs in the Indian fashion and looked up to see that one tree was all bare and half the size it was in the night and the other had the majority of its branches off. There was a man on that tree, taking care of the rest of the obstructing limbs. My eyes were glued to the tree as heavy wood was brought to the ground using a pulley system and rope as they fell. Some would dangle for a bit until another branch that shared the same piece of rope was cut and they fell from the sky.

      After the men went to lunch and our dogs had the opportunity to go back into their territory for a short while, when they came back I dressed and got my black purse with a red peace sign on it that my sister had given me from England. I put in my pockets enough bus fare to get the Pinole Shopping Center and back home. The bus stopped was perched at the top of my block, only a few houses away. I indulged my taste buds with curly fries and a smoothie until I caught the bus that goes to my locality.

      I had a half an hour until the planned everyday time of three-thirty came and I left to walk my neighbor’s dog, Rocky. When I returned home about twenty minutes later, I finally looked out our backdoor with a window on it and was shocked. There were only three naked trees standing, two were gone completely. The atmosphere above our other vegetation seemed empty in a vast blue only with three wood poles to fill the space and those would be gone soon, too.

      The men were working on taking one of only three left down, piece by piece, as I assume they did with the others. Large chunks of lumber would hit the ground following a call of “Timber!” and two or three of the men below would pick up the dead trunk and put it on our browning grass. Another would lift a chainsaw to slice it as if it were cake and a couple of the others put it on the serving dish to roll it to the front yard where there was a hungry guest waiting to devour them: the wood chipper.

      By the time that former sentence was put onto the paper, I stared to see only two trees and a few of the men raking up the debris that littered our lawn from their hard day’s work. Leaving the two to have another day standing nude on our property, those would wait until tomorrow.

      I vaguely wondered if the squirrels and birds that I found in our backyard frequently eating our fruit would ever come back at the death of their friends and homes, our five pine trees.

Freedom

No matter how she looks upon those days, they replay the same scenario, no matter how she tries to see it from a different perspective.

 

A voice tells her it was wrong, and her heart tells her it was right. She doesn’t know when the voice came in but she was sure it had come along the same time the bottle was set down for the last time. The same time the needle penetrated the skin of her best friend.

 

Or at least she thought they were best friends,

 

She and him never set down what their relationship truly was.

 

And every time she tries to figure it out, her head spins with grief so horrible she must concentrate on something else.

 

An addiction.

 

She needed an addiction. Or two or three… but she craved at least one, at least one thing to live for.

 

From ages sixteen to thirty-three, a consuming seventeen years, he was her addiction.

 

Although it might have been multiple addictions, from the sound of his words caressing her ear with no touch, to the rush of skin with nothing but touch.

 

It was addicting, he was. And he took advantage of that.

 

He barely graduated high school, while she graduated with honors. He reeled her into his lifestyle like a fisherman and his catch. She got accepted into many colleges.

 

She never went to one.

 

They ran away from the town they knew, the family they knew, and the people they used to care for. No letters. No contact. Not even a goodbye. Up and left with no words. His idea.

 

The small apartment they shared required bars on the windows and at least three locks on the door. She had to be careful when stepping, as she not surprise herself with a sickening crunch of a cockroach or the backbone of a rat.

 

At nights, she would read the proposals and thoughts of women like Mary Wollstonecraft, Olympe de Gouges, Susan B. Anthony and many other people to be aspired by other people.

 

Not her.

 

The words went to her head, but barely touched her heart.

 

There was no more room in there.

 

Its occupant was dominant, and it was he.

The Nurse

A young girl named Etta sat in the hospital bed; she did not know why she was here, but she did know that it must be bad to cause all her symptoms. Etta had the feeling the doctors were hiding something; she got that horrible vibe whenever they looked at her. She did not remember anything. All she recalled was finishing her homework then… nothing. Waking up in the hospital with so many tubes down her throat she could not talk for a few days was next and now she only had confusion.

      She had no clue why there was more than one nurse administering her medicine and why one of those nurses never wore scrubs. There was a pale brunette nurse who was always dressed in a traditional nurses uniform, she didn’t even know there was an option for people to wear those nowadays. Etta wanted to ask the reason as to why, but she couldn’t talk until just yesterday and she was too busy asking still unanswered questions as to what is wrong with her.

      “Why do you wear those?” Etta managed to choke out to the brunette nurse while the other one, the blonde one, was loading a needle with some sort of liquid from a plastic bottle, something probably for the shot-dreading patient Etta shared a room with, as the blonde’s attention was trying to calm what’s-her-name.

      “Excuse me?” the blonde nurse’s gaze shifted from the shivering patient to the confused one.

      “Her,” Etta pointed to the brunette. The more modern nurse scowled and looked to the white wall across from the girl.

      “Are you feeling alright?” the blonde asked cautiously.

      “Great, just…” Etta’s gaze turned to the blonde trying to comprehend why this nurse would not acknowledge her colleague. “C-can’t you see her?”

      “Who, dear?”

      “The nurse!” Etta exclaimed hysterically. What was the matter with this lady? Could she not see her? She has to! “Right there,” she fingered exactly where the brunette nurse, who was still had the same tranquil expression on her face, was.

      “There is no one but you, your roommate and me in the room,” the nurse confirmed slowly, staring at her as if she was in the wrong ward, the one with all the mental patients. “I’ll be right back,” the blonde set down the needle (to the other girl’s delight and Etta’s bewilderment) and fled the plain hospital room.

      “It is all right,” the brunette nurse spoke to her for the first time. “You will be okay.”

      “What?” Etta said. “Why can’t they see you?”

      “Whom are you talking to?” Etta’s roommate said, but both the nurse and Etta ignored her.

      “You will be with Marcy, and Rachel and Amelia,” the nurse listed.

      “Who?” Etta tried to scoot as far away as possible on the bed, even if it wasn’t miles, it would still be enough to get an inch or two away from this invisible woman.

      “And Frankie, and Maria and Jasper,” the nurse kept revealing name after name.

      “Stop it!” Etta screamed. “Who are all those people?”

      “They were unfortunate, but they will be great friends,” the brunette’s strangely peaceful voice said. “Come with me,” the nurse stretched out her hand. If the girl could walk like the nurse suggested, she would have ran out of that room as fast and as soon as possible, but she could not. Etta could not even feel her legs, let alone move them.

      “I-I can’t walk,” she stuttered, horrified. “What are you doing?”

      “It is all right,” the nurse repeated from earlier in the conversation with the same eerie calm, but Etta knew different from the evil glint in the woman’s eye.

      “Please,” Etta begged. “Help, please! Someone-!” but she was interrupted by the nurse’s hand over her mouth and Etta found her vocal chords produced no noise any more, even when the hand was taken off. The final thing Etta remembered the nurse hovered her hand over her forehead before she passed out.

      Etta gasped when she awoke, but the outside of her eyelids gave her the unchanged image as if they were shut tight. The smell of molded wood caused Etta to plug her nose momentarily before realizing she would need both her hands to help her move and grope in the darkness to attempt to identify where she was. That was a chore, seeing as her legs were not moving any time soon.

      All she could distinguish in the tiny room was that it was full of splintered wood with either a low table or a high bench. The rest above her she did not know, as she was lying on the cold floor, her legs useless.

      Etta needed to break out, but she had no idea how to do that. She could not stand, so she used her elbows to crawl to what she thought was the nearest wall and began to bang on the hard wood with her fists.

      Her attempt to yell for help was futile, as her voice was still gone, though she did not give up. She could not afford to give up.

      “Hoping to get out?” a voice came from the bench-table after what felt like an eternity to Etta.

      Etta did not recognize the voice as the nurse’s, this one was much younger, a child’s voice, but she did not know how or why she was in there, so Etta banged on the wall harder and harder still, tears of stress, pain and the puzzlement of the unknown coming to her eyes.

      “You don’t have to do that,” the girlish sound said. “I won’t hurt you.”

      That nurse said that, too, Etta thought.

      “I’ll help you get out.” Even through the possibility that Etta might escape, she also had the sense to think if this stranger was lying. Though, she did not hear a hint of deceit in the voice, it would be better if she could see the speaker.

      “The nurse is a psycho,” the voice explained. “She used to work here when the hospital was started, over eighty years ago. She kills the dying people, hoping to end their misery, even if there is a cure for whatever disease they have, if they are in a state right now that means they are dying, she doesn’t take the chances that the person will die in pain…. I was her first victim, about seventy-six years ago.”

      By this time, Etta had ceased to knock on the stiff wall, her knuckles hurting badly, and she was sure they must have been bleeding by now.

      “Keep knocking, I’ll be back,” the ghost said. “My name is Marcy, by the way.”

      Etta did as she was told, though her hands protested fiercely.

      Minutes passed, then a wanted sound graced Etta’s ears… faint footsteps could be heard outside the small rot-filled room. Then a male voice asked. “Is anyone in there?” Etta knocked even harder and faster as if to reply with a secret “yes! Help me!”

      She heard a pounding of metal on metal, and then the crunching of one of said metals. An unseen door then swung open and light rushed inside.

      Etta forgot she did not have the ability to speak and tried to talk, but could not, again.

      “What are you doing down here?” a man dressed as a regular doctor asked as he checked to see if she was all right. “Can you hear me?” he said louder and clearer, worry even more noticeable. She nodded her head slightly; still shocked that Marcy had actually kept her word.

      As the doctor helped Etta up she realized she was in the basement of the hospital, but the moldy wooden room was some forgotten closet most likely locked (which she inferred from the broken metal lock lying on the floor beside the metal fire extinguisher) because of mold and other health problems that could be caused in that room. She then saw a shocking sight: the nurse was staring at her with all the hatred such a delicate looking face could muster. Etta would have screamed if she could, and suddenly… she could.

      “What’s the matter?” the doctor stressed. “Where does it hurt?”

      Etta did not reply to the doctor at all for a moment, she gawked wide-eyed at her kidnapper until the ghost nurse vanished right before her eyes.

      “The ghost!” Etta yelled. “There’s a nurse! A ghost! She put me there!”

      The following day Etta was transferred to the psychiatric ward. All while she was trying to convince them she was not crazy. The doctors were still baffled at the fact they found a paralyzed girl down two levels from where she was supposed to be seemingly without any assistance to get down the flight of stairs and to the basement then lock herself inside an old closet. They suspected she crawled on her hands from the way they looked after banging on the wooden wall for about an hour or two. The closet thing was a continued mystery.

      Etta’s roommate could not identify the source as to how she got down there, due to the odd coincidence that she fainted right after Etta did.

      Etta could only hope that Marcy’s ghost would aid the nurse’s other victims like her. Etta was only sure that she was not getting out of the locked hospital room any time soon.

      The fact of the matter was, something evil was still in the halls of the hospital, and no one was going to catch on to a psychiatric patient’s screams, true or not.

Shows and Characters

Warnings: Sensitive topics, Substance use, Mentions of sex

Rating: 16+

      A woman sat in at a bar in the middle of the city, pondering:

    Who am I kidding myself? I’d be lucky if a guy gave me one glance, let alone actually talk to me. I simply cannot keep up with these easy twenty year olds. Men are pigs and they have been pigs and will continue on this attitude until the sun finally eats up this damned world in a fiery explosion.

      If there is a “Big Guy” up there, I wonder if this is how he gets his kicks. Laughing, while us little people down here cry ourselves into our alcohol and ashtrays and eventually get so drunk that we go to our homes with some pig and wake up the next morning alone with a splitting headache, because he skipped out so he wouldn’t have to take the liberty of giving you a fake name and a false phone number. If so, this “God” must tune into my life like eight year olds watch cartoons.

      Am I meant to be alone forever? Is this some sort of fate pushing me past all the decent men (if there are any) around and right to the arms of the jerks? That’s all my love life is, one-night stands with jerks. I don’t even think that is a love life; it’s a lust life. Most certainly not love.

      I try to think of reasons my love life is nonexistent. The one thing I can think of is my career. It can be demanding, but that’s the only way to get to the top. In this competitive business you need to be dedicated. Except for the only time I get off, Saturday nights, when I go to the local bar.

      No man would ever love any woman who doesn’t get their attention by curves and features. I guess that God guy forgot to rest men’s brains to a setting at which they could think more about if she’s going to be there tomorrow then if she’s going to be there tonight. How pathetic. And I’m an expert at pathetic.

      I don’t need a man. In the olden days, they only used them for reproducing and hunting down dinner, of which the woman had to cook. Now with the grocery store down the street, I surely don’t need one to retrieve food, and I don’t have the life that could handle a kid. Though, I love kids, especially those smiling ones at the park I pass to go to the store, playing on the swings, laughing with their mothers….

      When I’m old and senile, I’ll just go to one of those homes where random strangers take care of me and I don’t have to worry about… well…. Either way, I’m happy. I am great being single; I am so close to being on top of my business I can smell it clearly. This is the life beginners dream about.

      Life has blessed me with the brain that took me to one of the best jobs here in the city. It also saved me from the heartbreak when a husband divorces me for a younger, much prettier woman. Maybe this was the better path. Safer. I shouldn’t complain.

      Of course, I always took the safe way. The only times when I get a little wild are usually courtesy of the strong drinks the bartender sells me. I can’t complain: this is my part.

      We all must play our parts in this world. The brains run the world while the beauties rule it. I run it, but I shall never rule it; that would be out of character. You are born with your part and you are forced to stick with it, because there are no other costumes that will fit you. Either write the play, direct it, sell the tickets and market it, or you say the words that are written for you and take all the credit for the success. Yeah, life’s fair.

      Painting sets, making costumes, writing scenes and handing your work over so someone else can say your lines. That would be my life in theater version. We all have are parts, all important, but the credit is split differently.

      And every person who pulls a curtain, or puts make-up on one of the actress’s faces wishes, for just a single scene, to be on stage. And center stage, at that. Not a passerby, not a minor character, a star. But those parts are reserved for the beauties, rarely the brains.

      My roll is the lonely woman, who writes the script, but can never take part in it. Even if you wrote yourself in, some glorious totally not you woman would steal your spot.

      “Hello there,” a sly male voice came from the seat beside me. A handsome man was smiling at me. He must have sneaked up there while I was lost in my mind’s rambling.

      “Hello,” I said, sharp and cold, wanting this man to leave me alone to my thoughts.

      “So… how are you?” he obviously wanted to start an unwanted conversation.

      “Fine.”

      The man let out a small chuckle, “I’m fine, too. We have that in common. How long have you been coming here?”

      “Look,” I was getting tired of all these so-called charmers. “If you’re searching for another slut, you might as well go over to tootsie over there.” I pointed to the sickening sight to the end of the bar of a blonde twenty-something year old surrounded by four different men competing for her affections for one night, then to the next prettier woman tomorrow.

      “I don’t want to talk to her,” he persisted. “She has enough company, and you seemed lonely.”

      “Okay, first of all, you expect me to buy that crap? And second, I’m not drunk enough to sleep with a stranger, yet. But I am leaving before that time, so you can just save those overused lines on some other girl.”

      “They’re not just line,” his annoying smirk seemed, as though it was permanent.

      I rolled my eyes, who was this guy trying to kid? Easy answer: me.

      “Not all guys are after just one thing,” he attempted his reasoning. Gosh, why couldn’t this fellow get a grip and comprehend it’s a lost cause? I decided I don’t need, nor want, a man in my life. “There are few like me who just want to talk to another human who looks just as lonely as I am.”

      “Sure,” I rolled my eyes again.

      “Really!”

      I didn’t say anything else as I paid the bartender, took a last sip of my drink and left the bar. I do not need a love life. That’s not something my character would have. I am perfectly capable of happiness by myself.

      Her character was independent, but, no matter how many ladders she climbed, coming home to an empty apartment always got to her.

A Bridge, A Choice

Warning: Sensitive issue

Rating: PG-13

         The man walked out of the hospital. He needed some air; he’s been inside that place since last Thursday and needed to get away for a while.

         It was now Saturday, one week and two days past since she was rushed to the emergency room. The love of his life was now balancing between the thin line of life and death. If she left, would there still be any life in him to live?

         Usually on Saturdays, they would go for walks, go to the city, whatever they could do if she felt up to it. What if there were no more Saturdays? No more with her, to be more specific.

         Two years, two years she had been fighting off this disease… this curse. Now it finally gets the best of her. Even if she does survive, it may well just happen again in a rotating circle until it eats her up to the point where it’s not worth trying.

         He was getting desperate; he could not take this anymore. If she… if she… he couldn’t bring himself to think it. He couldn’t keep sitting at her bedside, praying that she would wake up and everything would be all right and it would all be like before this curse. Although, nothing will ever be the same again.

         The man wished he had the ability to go back when they were first married, merely five years ago. The best years of his life, after fifteen years in the foster care system and three years just wondering all alone, he finally found someone who actually loved him, not the artificial love he’s been given almost all his life before he met her, and now she could be gone and leave him at any second. Without her, he’d be nothing.

         He was pondering all this in his mind, he didn’t realize that his feet auto-piloted himself to the smaller-than-a-traffic-bridge-bigger-than-a-walking-bridge where him and his wife had met about eight years prior. He was going for a walk and she was just sitting beside the water under the bridge. He noticed her and thought it was worth a shot to ask her out on a date, he had had many rejections in his life one more wouldn’t hurt. But to his surprise, and happiness, she accepted.

         They were married a few years after that day. They made plans a few years after that day. Their plans were ruthlessly slaughtered a year after that day.

         He recalled when they first bought their home, and the old owners had painted the living room a hideously bright color orange. They spent a couple hours and more than a couple coats of white paint to override the original color of the walls, all while she flicked drops of paint at him from her paintbrush. That was until he commenced retaliating by getting his brush soaked with paint and then flicked it in her direction with all the force he could do. That day ended in clothes drenched in white paint and many paint bubbles, but they didn’t mind them. The man smiled at the memory, but soon considered that that will be just a memory, and if things turned for the worse, there might be no more memories to share with her.

         He frowned and put his head in his hands, his elbows resting on the railing of the bridge. Why did this have to happen to her? To him? The wind began to pick up sending his already numb body shaking with goose bumps. The skin of his elbows that was touching the bridge was frozen, but he couldn’t see the point in moving them. His eyes felt heavy and watery, but he didn’t want to cry; he didn’t want to show weakness, because once he started revealing the weakness on the outside, it might affect the numbness he built up inside him. And he believed he needed to be strong for both her and himself.

         A chance. A 10% chance. The doctors told him she only had a 10% chance of waking up from the coma that consumed her and condemned her to the hospital. That was better than a 0 percent chance, but still, the odds were not in her or his favor.

         He gazed down on the rushing water below. There were no ducks, no fish, just rapids raging to get to wherever their destination is. The water looked so tempting, and this sent a chill up his spine. It was about thirty feet to the rushing flow of water. If… if something did happen to her, he couldn’t live. He would go crazy.

         He contemplated this decision, the biggest decision anyone can make. He would be able to see his mother again, and his old best friend from sixth grade. He wouldn’t be alone anymore.

         The clouds swished as the wind adjusted to a velocity to match the rapids. If he jumped, he wouldn’t be cold anymore. His wife wouldn’t be sick anymore if she died, too. Death. He didn’t like to think about death at all, but when times like this come, you kind of have to. That’s usually normal, isn’t it?

         The wind was willing him, he could swear he could here a faint “jump, jump.” He only came outside for air, and now he was thinking about stopping his need for air forever.

         “Jump. Jump,” the wind grew louder, whistling these words in his ear. The man couldn’t take it… he couldn’t take the voices, the whistling, he needed to put a cease to them.

         “Stop it! Stop it! I won’t do it!” he yelled to the wind, gaining several unwanted glances from passersby-s. “What are you all looking at!” anger boiled up in him now. The wind, his mind, had no right to tell him to commit suicide!

         He sprinted the distance back to the hospital, through the doors, and burst into the room his wife shared with an elderly lady and another woman who just got out of surgery from an accidental overdose on painkillers.

         He made it just in time to see his wife’s beautiful hazel eyes open.