The Flowering Tree

There once was a young woman who lived in the woods and had lived there all her life. From her budding as a tiny girl, she had opened and blossomed into maturity, living all alone except for her aged grandmother. It was now the early spring of her twenty-first year. She was walking in the woods at sunset when she heard something. A voice. She often walked in the woods at all hours, having no fear of this familiar land, and occasionally she thought she could hear half-words in the voices of birds, slanting along shafts of mellow light. Rhymes and riddles woven from nonsense sound. But this time it was different.

"Come to me," said the soft, sexless voice. "Come closer. Here. I'm over here."

"Come where?" she replied, vibrato in her throat.

"Here. Follow the scent and find me."

Tilting her face to the breeze, she tasted more than smelt it: a thick fur of sweetness on her tongue. It was the scent of flowers, heavier than lilac, richer than honeysuckle. This was odd since only the purest, most delicate of flowers, the snowdrops and crocuses, were blooming at this time of year, and they had little odour. Curious, she traced the scent through angled bars of blue shadow and golden sun. Over dry leaves and moss, under canted logs and around low brush-branches that seemed to tug at her skirt-hem and lift it up. Unheeding, she was drawn and she sought it out. The voice, the source.

There in a glade stood the flowering tree. One half of it crooked to the sky, and the other to the earth like a vast arm reaching down to embrace an empty space. Its downward-curving branch seemed for all the world like a hand yearning to be touched, a hand with a thousand fingers, each covered in soft pink blossom. She moved towards it without a moment's hesitation. The flowers were little cups of round petals with peaked white edges deepening to pink, their blushing centres crowned by fringes of thick gold pollen. She brushed first one, then another, circling until she was within the tree's curving grasp.

And then, as she sensed it would, the tree reached out to touch her back. Silently, with an animal grace contrary to its wooden nature, it snaked around her waist and painted her face with its pollen. She marveled at its artistry, natural and uncomplicated.

The branch curled around her. Her feet left the ground. One moment she was standing, the next swept up. It was wondrous and yet, and yet, the flowering tree had so many little twigs. Each spray of flowers was on a twig, and the twigs at their ends were sharp. She was not supported by any solid branch but by innumerable slim, pointed branchlets, swaying things that dug into her flesh. To shift was to risk falling; but to stay still grew uncomfortable, then painful.

"Ow," she said. "Ow! You're hurting me. Do you understand? You're –aah!"

She was suddenly lifted fast and dropped, as a child shakes a squirming kitten. The force of gravity pressed the twigs against her harder, driving them through her thin dress into her thighs and the delicate undersides of her bare arms. Gasping, she tried to tip herself off of them, but they flexed and reconformed to her weight. The tiny bud-ends of the branches nosed eagerly through cloth into the flesh of her legs, her back. Truly panicking, she gave a short scream.

"No, let me go! No!"

"Shhhh," whispered the wind through leaves. And with that, the sensations she felt began to change. The pain didn't dull so much as heighten to a point at which it became exquisite, intensely vivid, alive and alluring. She became aware of each point at which one of a thousand twigs pierced into her, aware of each point and all of them at once, of her entire body as a surface riven with points of contact. A thousand mouths, a thousand holes, and each suddenly warmly conjoined. She opened her eyes, relaxed her body, and let her head fall to the side. Through the screen of her tangled copper hair limned in crepuscular light, she could see the blossoms nearest her flushing pink and deeper than pink: flushing red with the blood that trickled from each branching entry point.

It was her blood, yes, but it did not horrify her. It looked beautiful to her, if only because its coursing felt so good. Each trickle pulsed like the pale fluids that flowed from her when she touched herself alone at night, as if her entire body were made fluid and her veins externalized as branches spreading, suffusing the burnished glow of the sky with the colour of her raw, beating life. The blossoms spread wide, the tree trunk ran with pinkish sap, and at that moment she knew she would die, but a death of such ecstatic exaltation that she could barely wait for it. It was hardly death at all, since she knew that she would become engrained in the tree so that each spring she would open, sap coursing in pleasure, to spread her tender blossoms in the sun. She spurred her heart to beat faster, her life's blood to flow so that she could enter the tree and it could have her, fully, together, a thousand entwinings—

A sickening thud ran through the tree's trunk, directly into her heart. And then another. A chop. An axe. The woodsman! There's always a woodsman to save the maiden from nature in the end of a fairy-story. But no, no! Her mouth full of flowers, she tried to scream out her protest:

'Don't save me! I know it looks like this tree is hurting me. It is hurting me. But I want it. Can't you see what we're becoming? Go away, and take the steel wedge that's sundering our flows with you. Don't divide us into two again!'

Did she say it aloud? Even if she did, it had no effect. He chopped and chopped, until with a moaning creak the branch gave way. Twigs brutally ripped from her, she fell into his arms. The strong masculine musk of hero was on him, banishing the fading sweetness of blossoms. His powerful reassurances filled her ears. The world was restored to order.

In his arms, wishing she were not in his arms, she cried. In fact, she cried and fought him so much that eventually he put her down. He left her under the embers of the sky to find her own way home, a single red blossom tucked deep in her curling hair. Later that night in bed, she stroked the unfading flower, vowing to remember, and to wait.

There is always another spring.