Splinter

It is an unusually cold day in June, and the trees are whispering to him. Their voices are faint on the wind, only tickling past his ear from where he is nestled beneath the boughs.

Please, they beg him. Please, there are berries clustered in our leaves. Young who have not yet had the chance to bloom.

Ewan is trying not to listen, his head tucked in his knees and hands over his ears as he tells himself he is hallucinating. He does not feel right about what he must do. The trees are innocent, sacred for the life they breathe into this place destitute of un-poisoned air. But he is so hungry, and he has his own children at home, their frail bodies starving for sustenance. They have already depleted their livestock, and have even gone through what few crops there were. But a tree might be able to sustain them for days, weeks. 

If he doesn’t do this, his children won’t grow either. He will be burying them alongside the fallen berries.

With the image of a too-small rib cage protruding from the earth like fingers reaching for the sky, he finally pulls himself to his feet. He blinks in the bright sunshine and convinces himself that the water pooling along his lashes is a result of his eyes adjusting to the sudden light.

He leaves his axe where it is lying in a bed of pine needles, the rusted blade and stained handle nearly blending in with the umber colors. He scans his selection. Ewan tries to pick an older tree. His axe isn’t sharp enough to cut down any of the wide trunks—bases thick with ringed years still standing strong—so he looks closely at those that are beginning to lean. He checks roots for rot, prods bark for water-logged pulp. Eventually, he finds one. 

The tree is beginning to lean, the earth around the trunk lifting with it, as though grappling for it to stay planted. Already, he could see the detritivores infecting it, the wriggling maggots spilling from the knots in the wood.

Ewan picks up his axe and tells himself it is merciful.

The wind is a howl now. The trees are screaming, but their voices are carried away too quickly for him to hear.

As his axe’s first blow strikes true, embedding past the skin of bark and wedging itself in the flesh beneath, a spurt of red sap sprays from the wound and colors his neck and clothes. This is not as devastating to him as he would have expected. It is just, he thinks, for this sin to stain me. 

Up in the tree, a crow cries. The jerking shudders of the axe’s impact should have rocked it from the branches, spooking it to take flight and nest elsewhere. Instead, Ewan can just barely make out its talons curling tighter around the twigs.

Again, the crow’s call comes as he tugs his weapon free and swings once more. His arms are trembling with effort and anticipation and terror, yet the blow is still harder than all the rest, the desperation for this tragedy to be finished lending a strength to his weary limbs. 

The trunk is beginning to splinter, some vital chunk now missing from the last strike. He can hear the cracking as the tree starts to bend inwards. It looks as though it’s trying to fold up and protect itself, but his axe is still buried deep. The wood whines around the blade as Ewan begins to tug it free.

The crow caws a third time, echoing through the quiet forest, and this time he understands it for what it is. A warning to the others. A death knell.

Ewan hangs his head as he delivers the killing blow.

~

Hours later, he still cannot bring himself to move from the spot. He is light-headed from the fumes and the guilt. Distantly, he can recall his purpose, his children hungrily awaiting dinner and the rumbling of his own empty stomach. But those thoughts are drowned out by the wailing. He hears it echoing in a mourning dove’s song, feels it reverberating through a toad’s croak.

He stares blankly at the felled tree before him. His lips are moving in a stream of endless apologies, but there is no will left within him to give them voice. An awareness that he will have to hack the carcass into pieces to deliver it home is hovering over him, but he is not strong enough to face that yet. He is still raw from the shock of what he has done, still haunted by the thud of the mighty crashing to the ground.

It is this that breaks him, and suddenly he is reaching for the trunk, overcome with the need to taste what has been sacrificed. To prove to the witnesses of his crime that it was a necessary evil. His hands are coated in red as he tears off a piece from the jagged wound his axe wrought.

Ewan lifts it to his teeth and bites. His hunger overtakes him at the first touch on his tongue, and he shoves the rest into his mouth. But despite the water and rot softening the fibers, the wood is still too sharp. Splinters embed themselves in his cheeks and wedge between his molars. If there is a flavor to the flesh, he wouldn’t know, as the blooming blood washes everything in the taste of iron. Yet even as the red sap begins to coagulate it all into a suffocating, prickly paste, he knows he cannot waste it.

Ewan forces himself to swallow and feels the tree take root.