Stories No One Hopes Are about Them by A. J. Bermudez
Author:A. J. Bermudez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00
Ori Dreams of a Tree
FROM THIS FANTASTICAL HEIGHT, the world appears to carve itself into dissenting planes: a slick, thrumming quilt of asphalt rivulets and right-angled topography. Highways slither and pulse like veins, as alive as anything, curled around patches of green with the matter-of-fact hunger of snakes around mice.
Ori clambers onto the flower-patterned loveseat beside the window and presses her nose to the glass. From here, she can see everything. She cracks the window, ever so slightly, and tips out a droplet of water from the mouth of her lidded cup. Somewhere, a dizzying distance below, the droplet lands. She surges with the divine thrill of a god, having made rain.
She ventures below, of course, hand tucked in her motherâs hand. Her backpack, bumblebees dancing over grass, bounces against her small frame. As they pass the flat, construction-paper green of the local park, she looks up, as she always does, toward her home, from here just a rectangular fleck of glass among a million just like it, anonymous as a star amid its galaxy, reflecting the sky back to itself.
Today at school, the teacher announces with feigned glee, we are learning about trees. Children yawn and writhe. Sysheâthe snottiest of the children (everyone agrees)âthrows herself back in her chair with PixeÌreÌcourtian drama. Time-withered extracts from National Geographic and dubiously colored inkjet printoutsâthe Amazon as seen from the Içana, Schwarzwald in Baden-WuÌrttemberg, Arashiyama in Japanâfreckle the wall between windows overlooking the concrete play court. The outside wall has likewise been painted with a mural of trees, and Ori feels, with the pang of watching a clown totter atop a tightrope, what it is to be both amused and distressed. Later, when the fidgeting students are asked to draw their hands, Ori instead draws a tree, with her fingers for the branches. By now, the teacher has moved on to multiplication tables, but Ori is not listening. She is transfixed by a faded image, harvested from a coffee table book, of the towering sequoias of Redwood National Park.
Ori is in love.
That night, having been tucked in, she dreams of birthday parties for trees, of gently pulling back her skin to find six concentric rings. She wiggles her toes, metatarsals wriggling like roots.
The following afternoon, she tells her mother that she is going to her piano lesson. She tells her piano teacher that she is going home.
It is the perfect crime.
She locates the Shop of Natural Wonders at Avery and 6th, right where the internet said it would be. In the front window, a sprawling watercolor display connotes the phyla and genera of various trees in illegible cursive. Ori studies it for a moment, uncannily reminded of diagrams of algorithms sheâs seen. She is too young to register the âstemâ pun but is nonetheless eagerly impressed by this confluence of dendrology and abstract mathematics.
Inside is a wonderland of buckets and boxes, devotedly lit and brimming with impossible greens. Amid a riot of ponytail palms and fiddle-leaf figs, beneath a sign that reads WELCOME TO THE POST-ANTHROPOCENE, a shopkeeper looks up from their ancient-looking desk.
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