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In the morning, they put trees along the drive to the burn clinic at the hospital down the block. Last week, they put trees around the cancer research pavilion, along the circular drive of the emergency ward. Something had killed the old ones off -- fungus, bugs, I don't know the details. All I know is that one day all the trees were dead, and another day all the trees were taken down, though I didn't see the process, what machines they used. Then new trees -- all of the exact same height, uniform trunk width, scrubbed looking, tidy -- started appearing, evenly spaced, in beds framed with concrete. I didn't see it happening until that morning. There was a flatbed truck loaded with little trees, slanted back like porcupine spines, roots wrapped in burlap, all covered over in a gauzy fabric tarp that was tied down in dozens of places. Men walked along the truck, untying the ropes as I walked past. There was a digging machine, too, small and yellow, but I didn't really look at that. I was reinterpreting recent history, realizing that things made sense that didn't make sense before, feeling sort of numbed by the workings of logic, memory, specific scenes, dates, names. There had been a miscommunication some time back, though she insisted that nothing was changed by it, that she felt the same way -- toward me, about me -- that she had always felt the same way, that she never felt anything for any of them, the others, that it was just something that she did -- a sort of entertainment, an answer to a specific and transient need -- meaningless, she said, just her body and theirs. There was no explicit agreement. This she kept returning to, a legal point. No explicit agreement, no terms, and so she had assumed it worked that way for both of us, a constant sea of others. But it didn't, never did, and I don't know if it can, if that's possible, though saying it that way sounds prudish, old fashioned. The whole thing sort of baffles me -- the emotions or their lack, the bodies, what the bodies mean, or any of her words, her hands on me, any of the specifics of desire, rendered pretty much interchangeable. One day the trees were gone, for instance, and I remember noticing, some point before, that they had turned a dry brown, their leaves, and looked diseased. It's all like that. You learn something, like the way the new trees come in on a flatbed truck, roped down, slanted, in burlap bags, a tarp tied over the top, and more mystery is created than solved, a new wonder rising out from a gap that didn't seem like a gap. There is ignorance, and then there is revelation, which is everything else. ___________ |
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Spencer Dew lives in Chicago, studying rabbinic conceptions of language and completing a novel. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Word Riot, 3am Magazine, Facsimilation, Sexy Stranger, and The Diagram.
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