Beautiful warm sunlight from above, a gentle and refreshing breeze all around, and cool, damp, and fertile soil down below. The mobile organisms scurry, slope, flit, and slither all around, providing me with delicious carbon dioxide, and sometimes I think there is no better place that I could be. I’ve seen generations of the mobile ones come and go, changing and aging, as I’ve grown larger, taller, wiser. Sometimes they are nice, bringing extra nutrients, or admiring my leaves as the seasons change. It amuses me to watch the young ones try to climb, and I try then not to let them fall to their deaths. Other times they are a nuisance, trying to carve markings into my body. But mostly they are harmless, with short lifespans and shorter attention spans, so the damage they do is usually temporary.
Most of what the bipeds do is building things. There’s one here, near me. They brought stones from far away and stacked them. They brought metals and minerals, melted and stretched thin, and decorated and filled the various holes between the stones. It’s not a natural look, but so little of what the bipeds do looks natural anymore. As far as their structures go, this seems to be one of the nicer ones. I’ve grown accustomed to it over the past seasons, if not fully fond of it. But don’t let the cool stone deceive you. This structure is full of unspeakable horrors.
I didn’t realize it at first. I was (relatively) young and unconcerned with the comings and goings of the bipeds within their artificial stone outcropping. In those days I was smaller and more of the young ones would try and climb me, with their feet tickling my limbs and branches as they scurried about like squirrels. I’ve never really understood why so many of the mobile organisms move so quickly, but it does amuse me, how they bustle about in such a hurry, as though they are filled with a raging wind.
Occasionally, one of the bipeds will stop and rest in my shade either on the way in or out of the stone building, often carrying a small object. Normally small objects don’t concern me much one way or another. But there was something so horrifyingly repulsive about this one. Perhaps the revulsion was in that the item was so small and unassuming, quiet and harmless. I didn’t notice it at first. Certainly a great many of them had escaped my notice before this one showed me the monsters all around me.
In the hands of this calm, quiet biped, carried out from the silent stone outcropping, were the scraps of my brethren, only barely recognizable after having been shredded and and mashed, mutilated and bleached, burned and bound. I looked and saw more: nearly every biped entering and exiting that artificial cave had one of these items, often more. A few had more than they could hold and carried them in bags. I had not paid much mind to what went on in the artificial cave, but it was largely quiet and still, and I had not considered the carnage housed inside, the evidence of such monumental violence, obviously carried out somewhere, if not just beyond my roots’ reach! Suddenly it seemed an abandoned abbatoire, a gruesome mausoleum full of haunts.
I cannot view the tomb the same way again, nor the bipeds coming and going from it. I have become suspicious of them and all their doings. They have gone from harmless follies to unpredictable monsters.
I saw one last spring digging holes in the open land near the monstrous cavern, and placing saplings of my own kind into the holes. At the time it seemed beautiful, a nurturing act that seems to have become relatively rare on the part of the bipeds toward us stationary organisms. Now I find myself wondering if the young are being placed there for convenience, to be grown nearby and slaughtered when they are needed. I wonder if I am in danger, and my brothers nearby. At times I grow angry thinking about it, and when the wind is in my favor, I break off pieces of my limbs and throw them in rage at the bipeds, their motorized machines, at the unspeakable building itself.
The bipeds would have to pay for such treachery. I reached out to my brethren through the root network and asked if they knew of this. Some admitted they did. Some had heard from farther away about whole forests being cleared, but none of us knew exactly the middle steps between our kind being slaughtered and being carried around in pieces by the monsters around us. We decided to fight back. We had been on this planet longer than the bipeds, and we would remain when they were gone. We slowed down our oxygen production, just slightly enough to cause panic, even though carbon dioxide was more than abundant. Those of us with hard fruit and nuts instructed the squirrels and chipmunks how to throw it at the bipeds when they least suspected it. We warned the birds of the treachery and encouraged them to drop their waste on the bipeds when possible, and on their motorized machines when the bipeds themselves were unavailable. We used the wind to throw whatever of ourselves we could manage. Our efforts had little effect, it seemed, but it felt good to direct our rage back at the bipeds. For a while.
One calm spring day, when the wind wasn’t strong enough to do much and we had nothing yet for the squirrels to throw, I watched some of the young bipeds running through my domain. I noticed a small biped clutching a particularly large specimen of my mutilated kin. Several other bipeds, also small, but larger than the first, were chasing her. At first I thought they must be practicing their violent ways, growing their anger and honing their rage. But then I noticed that the smallest one, with her horrible souvenir, was not in a frenzy, but was actually fleeing, afraid of the demons chasing her. I watched, studying the situation as the others caught the small one and took the prize from her arms. She shrieked in defiance, and I inwardly cheered, siding with the beasts that were apparently also enraged by the sacrilege it represented. The small one continued crying out, pleading with the others, who then encircled her, taunting her with what they had taken. But then I changed sides, for as I looked on, the others took the artifact and waved it, open with the thin shreds of my kind flapping perversely. The small one made a lunge and fell, and I noticed her face was wet. The others cheered and laughed at her humiliation and, to my horror, began destroying the item they had wrenched from her hands.
The sheets fluttered about like autumn leaves as the small one scrabbled for them and begged the others to return the carcass. They laughed maliciously, and with a final rip, tossed the now empty shell back at the small one and scattered.
I was dumbfounded. The small one caught each stray piece of the mangled tome and, still sobbing, sat beneath my boughs and put each one back in its place with a gentle caress. She seemed to apologize to each scrap as she lovingly smoothed, tucked, and straightened each one back within the covering. I could no longer be angry with this small biped holding tattered remains of my family. It was painfully clear that this was no monster cherishing a head on a spike. Whatever had been done to transform mighty trees into this small brick had carried great meaning with it. My fallen comrades had become the medium that bore greater meaning than we could have imagined. No biped had ever cried out over a branch we had lost or even one of our great number completely letting go of the earth and falling. We became so much more important to the souls of these creatures when we carried the markings they burned upon our processed flesh. And while I still wished that we were valued more as living things, my anger subsided to see how dearly the bipeds loved what we became.
I still shudder inwardly, from time to time, at all of the carcasses entombed so nearby, but it’s almost worth it when I see how much meaning the bipeds get from the messages we carry. And maybe someday we can find a compromise.
No comments:
Post a Comment