Only Willow
- May 19, 2023
- 6 min read
by Gina Thayer
The willow tree stands in the center of the furthest field. Only it is not a willow tree at all. Or, it was once a willow and now is something else.
Instead of leafy tendrils, the tree dangles with human arms, their skins every texture and hue. They bear wrinkles and age spots and hearty blue veins. They sprout coarse dark hair and patches of orange freckles, birthmarks and moles and raised pink scars. Russet, peach, olive, onyx. They fidget and snap their fingers and stretch.
In the distance, a figure shimmers on the horizon, too far to tell if it is moving closer or away.
*
The willow has been there as long as Adelaide remembers. She visits it sometimes (though never too close) when she is playing in the pastures behind her house. She is seven and loves the solitude, the expansiveness, the lightness beneath her feet on uneven terrain. She is a tiger, an elf. She is a bat in the night, hunting by ear. She is anything she wants in the open fields, unencumbered by inquisitive eyes.
At age nine, Adelaide takes a photograph of the willow. Its long arms sway in the tangling wind. She brings the polaroid to school for Show and Tell. There is so much she wants the willow to convey — its beauty, its strangeness, the high thrill of taboo. But the children look at the photo and say, “There’s nothing in that picture but dirt.”
*
Adelaide approaches the willow from across the field. She kicks up dust from the months-long drought. The crops have withered and the river runs low, yet the willow tree is unbothered by lack. Adelaide squints against the sun. She has never stood closer than a dozen feet away.
*
By thirteen, Adelaide is quiet, observant. In school, she trains her eyes on the blue lines in her notebook, the bright pink margin running rule-straight down the page. She keeps her pencil pinched firmly in her fingers. There are so many energies swarming inside her, but she tamps them down, keeps them wrapped up, smothered.
The other students call her weird girl, willow girl. Or they did for a while, but they are older now. Even Adelaide is breaking out of her body. She is of the new skin, new smell, new needs — it has happened to them all.
At her locker, Adelaide hears someone call her name. She turns, frowning, but no one is there. The bell has rung. Her schoolmates are in their classrooms. She is standing alone in the middle of the hall, brimming with an embarrassment she does not know how to tame.
*
The camera hangs from a belt across Adelaide’s torso. She dislikes the weight of it, digging into her chest, banging against her hip as she walks. She has to hold it in her hands if she wishes to run, lest it swing wildly with every step. A ribbon of sweat threads down her back. She’s so close to the willow, she could nearly touch it.
*
“Adelaide,” she hears students whisper in the halls. The word is ripe with potential meaning. Today, it may mean something soft and damp and stinking. Tomorrow, something bone-dry, rasping, too fluttery to touch.
On her way to school one morning, Adelaide sees a robin wrench a worm from the dirt. She pauses by the side of the road to watch. What would it be like to be a bird, she wonders. Or, what to be the worm?
*
Up close, the willow’s hands boast fingernails. Yellow nails, ridged and cracked and brittle. Smooth nails, pearly and opalescent, the insides of seashells. Some are long enough to curl several times over at the tip, long enough even to scratch the ground. Others are trim with perfect half-moon cuticles. Here and there, the nail beds are peeling and raw, as though the tree has bitten itself to the quick.
*
At fifteen, Adelaide takes history from Ms. Sutton, who got married last year but didn’t change her name because (so the kids say) she wants to keep her marriage secret. Ms. Sutton wears stockings and cardigans and flashing silver earrings. She wears a men’s gold-faced wristwatch with a leather strap.
One day Adelaide passes Ms. Sutton in her classroom eating lunch. Someone else is in the room standing just out of sight, their shadow draped over Ms. Sutton’s desk. They say something and Ms. Sutton tips her head back and laughs, exposes her neck, frees her body with delight. Adelaide ducks her head and hurries away, certain she’s seen something she wasn’t supposed to.
*
The wind lifts and Adelaide’s skin rises at the follicles. The willow’s many arms hang docile at their sides.
Adelaide is seventeen and has never been kissed.
“We need a new picture,” her classmates say. They remember the willow. They say, “Make us believe.”
*
The willow strains as Adelaide steps closer. Elbows judder like leaves, wrists roll, fingers splay. The arms reach for Adelaide and pull her in. How startling, to be touched like this — firm hands gripping the meat of her shoulders, calloused palms on her sun-hot skin. They push her forward between their boughs and drape shut like a sigh behind her back.
Inside the willow, the air is cool, the darkness thick. Adelaide stumbles over a root. Only the root is not a root but a knee thrusting from the ground. Or, the roots are a jumble of knees and calves and thighs. Crops of toes, pale and round, dot the ground like button mushrooms.
*
Adelaide has been pinching herself in her sleep. She wakes to crescent ridges pressed into her skin, wonders what, in slumber, was wild enough to make her question if she was dreaming.
*
Slowly, Adelaide’s eyes adjust to the dark and she takes in the miracle rising before her.
The willow’s trunk is a body, awesome and many-formed. Breasts and navels. Genitalia of all manner. This tree is a wonder, an unfathomable gift.
*
The willow expands and contracts from within, matching Adelaide breath for breath. The air is scented with musk and earth. Adelaide suddenly longs to roll in the dirt, to cover herself with mud and clay, to touch and be touched by these many tender limbs. She searches for a visage somewhere in the trunk, but where she expects a face, there is only a mouth. Only the mouth is not a mouth at all. Or, it was once a mouth and now is a hundred mouths becoming one. The mouth is a maw, opening wide, splitting the trunk’s many bodies down the center.
*
Adelaide bends and unlaces her boots. She is barefoot now on the hard-packed earth. Arms rustle around the willow’s exterior, an audience waiting for the lights to dim. Fingers flitter — a sound like birds, like mice, like hands cupping over mouths and ears, ready to murmur their loamy secrets.
From the maw, hot breath rolls over Adelaide in waves, the scent of river rocks and eucalyptus. With one hand, she braces herself against the trunk and dips a toe into the open abyss. No ground beneath. To enter is to fall.
She removes the camera from around her neck. Her heart is a chorus of footsteps, running. She drops the camera into the pit. A flash in the dark. No sound, no echo.
“Adelaide,” the willow whispers.
Adelaide — luminous, vivid, rapt. She is a hundred pulsing, living things. She is mystical, bright, elusive, knowing.
Adelaide climbs into the willow’s throat.
She exhales and lets herself be swallowed.
*
A girl sits on a stool beneath a willow tree. Only she is not a girl at all. Or, she was once a girl and now is something else. Or, Adelaide sits on a stool beside her willow lover. The day is warm, the sun a topaz gleam. Adelaide strokes the flesh of the willow’s arms. Her hair is unbraided and tossed by the breeze.
On the horizon, a new kind of figure. Adelaide stands and feels the tree quiet behind her. Her heart unfurls. Their roots tunnel deep. The seasons are just beginning to change.
Gina Thayer’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lunch Ticket, Bullshit Lit, HAD, and Parhelion Literary Magazine, among others. She holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is currently working on a collection of strange and speculative stories. After several years in the Pacific Northwest, Gina now lives in Minneapolis with her partner and cat.
