Paisley Rekdal

CREATION STORY

Before the boy was born, he dreamed

• of a child asleep beside a tree, fireflies 
• flecking the watery dark. 
• He remembers this now, standing
• with his four-year-old before the ancient
• oak outside their house, the tree
• so root-brittle that when the windstorm scoured 
• the block’s shaggy lanes of pine and maple, 
• its copper trunk split as the tree heaved up, 
• taking with it stones and flowerbeds, half 
• their tiny yard. Up and down the block, 
• trees beached themselves onto cars 
• and blacktop, the great roots 
• yawed up in knots, trunks like longboats 
• run aground. The man has taken his son 
• to see them: the giants, his son 
• calls them, snapped like matchsticks 
• in the wind. Though it wasn’t only wind 
• that did this. The fact was humans 
• caused a drought, which worsened heat, 
• which brought sand storms up the coast, changed 
• the very current of the ocean, which means
• hurricanes and even floods now 
• at the doorsteps of strangers, like dogs 
• flushing a wounded grouse to ground.
• They had done this: it was astonishing 
• to the man how passively they’d worked 
• such violence, that what they loved, 
• desire destroyed. But of course, 
• this was beyond the boy, and to tell him now 
• would diminish his sense of security.
• For a moment the man considers telling the boy 
• about his dream to distract him, the image
• of a child sleeping so sweetly that a tree 
• might fall in love with him. But even thinking
• of this image, it starts its change. The tree,
• having fallen in love with the boy, wraps him
• in its roots, the little boy fetal in its embrace, curled
• there in the semblance of sleep, hoping that the tree 
• might tire of him and let him go. But the tree
• will not let the boy go. It holds him tight
• and tighter till he cries, until the boy begins 
• to beg for his release. But the tree 
• only thickens around him, grows 
• off its feeding until his hair turns white and fine 
• as orchid root, and bog moss fills 
• the sockets of his cheeks. The man knows 
• he cannot tell his son this story, 
• yet he can’t help but imagine it, a boy 
• cauled by bark and leaf until one day 
• a woodcutter comes into the forest
• to harvest it. And saws 
• and hacks at the rotten base, toppling it
• as all the oaks now in their neighborhood 
• have toppled—lost, the man tells his son 
• who asks, because the neighbors
• forgot to water them—sheared off in a wall 
• of mud and root that looms over them: 
• the great roots heaved up in a fist with a boy’s 
• knotted remnants inside (the man seeing this 
• clearly, even as he tries not to see it) like a stone 
• entwined in rope perhaps, or the head of an enemy 
• raised after battle. 

PAISLEY REKDAL is the author, most recently, of Imaginary Vessels (Copper Canyon Press).