Two Stories

It was our first day of couples therapy & I had no idea what he meant

“Being married to Victoria,” he said, “is like letting her drive on a back road at night going seventy miles an hour. But you know this road, so you know there’s a cliff coming up. You have to make a decision. You can either tell her to slow down and spend the last two minutes of your life fighting, or say nothing and let her drive off the cliff.” Our therapist asked me if this was true. I said yes.

Trees Don’t Talk

Dad’s in jail. Mom was always a good, industrious wife. She took care of the house while he worked at the shop. She made either chili or chicken soup every night. But no matter what she did, he was not satisfied. He knocked her about and beat her. When the neighbors finally did something about it, the police showed up and took him away. He’s supposed to be making himself a better man in there. When I visit him he tells me he’s learning chess.

“You ever play chess?” he asks.

“No,” I say, holding the phone to my head and twisting the cord around my finger. “I haven’t.”

“Get her a chess set,” he says to my mother, yelling across the glass and pointing at me. “This girl needs to learn how to play. She needs to learn, I tell you.”

My brother takes the phone out of my hands. “My turn to talk to Dad,” he says.

*

            At home, I spend my days in the backyard, climbing around our Ficus in circles and circles. It’s a tree known for its shallow root system and multi-pronged trunk. It makes for good climbing. I sit with my back to the trunk, my legs dangling on either side of a branch, and press my hands into the bark.

            “Dad’s in jail,” I tell the tree. “But maybe he’ll get out soon. If he betters himself.”

            The leaves wave in the wind, and one falls on my forehead.

            “Thank you, tree,” I say.

*

            My mom comes outside to get me. She tells me to come in for dinner. She helps me down from the tree, a hand on either side of my waist, and puts me on the ground.

“When Dad gets out,” I ask her, “will he still beat you?”

She gets down on her knees.

“One day, when he’s let out, it will be otherwise: I will beat him while he rails at me.”

            I lift my finger to her face and trace the deep lines under her eyes. I know nothing else but to believe her.

*

            The day Mom cuts the tree down, I cry and cry. She carries a large chain saw into the backyard and works her way through it before I wake up. The roots were getting under the house, she says. They would wreck the whole foundation. She makes me go to school that day. I show up outside the classroom, my face puffy, waiting for the door to open. I stand there with my friends. One of them is crying. 

            “My dog died today,” she tells me. One of my friends holds her hand. The other hangs onto her in a half-hug. All their lower lips quiver. All of them are blonde.

            “My mom cut down my favorite tree this morning,” I say.

            No one cares. They hang onto each other, and I stand there and shuffle my feet on the ground.

*

At dinner I push my beans around the plate.

“I didn’t know you’d be so upset,” my mother says. “You hardly go in the tree.”

I slam my fork on the table. “That tree was my best friend,” I tell her, my voice hoarse from crying.

“Trees don’t talk,” my brother says, shoveling rice in his mouth.

“They do so,” I say, and, as if in a nightmare, despite my fury, I cannot raise my voice above a whisper. “This one did.”

*

            That night, I go into the backyard with my blanket. I curl up on the stump and whimper, “Good night, tree.”

*

            Dad is let out early for good behavior, and on the condition that he promises not to beat my mother anymore. He makes me play chess with him. He says we can play for candy: if I win, I get a piece. If he wins, he eats it in front of me. 

            “Where’s a good table?” He asks, picking up the salad bowl and tossing it on the ground. “Your mother’s got the whole kitchen busy. We can’t do anything in this place.”

            She turns to look at him, her hands wet from washing dishes, her whole body sagging, exhausted.

            I tug on his shirt and take him to the tree stump. I keep him entertained there for hours each day, though he always beats me at chess, and his stomach grows larger from all the KitKats and Reese’s. Eventually he falls back into his old ways and, in order to keep his promise to the police, he torments my mother without beating her: when one night she burns the chili and none of us have anything else to eat, he rips out her hair, throws forks at her, takes swipes at her with his legs. She rails and tells me and my brother to go to our rooms, and my brother picks me up and carries me out of the kitchen, and I hold onto the door frame until one of my fingernails rips off.

*

            “Your mom and I love each other,” my dad tells me the next evening, when we sit playing chess.

            I nod without meeting his eyes.

            “C’mon, I have another back-rank mate on you,” he says. “You’ll never learn. Never learn, I tell you.” And he smiles and cracks open a Pepsi and hands it to me.

            “C’mon, you can have it anyway, you deserve it.”

            But I am sullen, my mood unable to be remedied. My dad recognizes this and suggests we see a movie.

            “Ok,” I say.

            Before I follow him to the car, I touch my hand to the stump. “Come back, tree,” I say.

*

            When we get home, my brother runs from the house and drags us to the backyard, pulling my dad by his forearm. There was the tree, fully grown, with my mother’s body hanging from it, and a large white rope around her beck. The three of us stand in the grass.

            “I didn’t touch her, I swear it, I didn’t, I tell you,” my dad says, looking at both of us, wide-eyed, daring one of us to contradict him.

            I walk up to the tree. My mother’s tongue is purple in her mouth. I fall to my knees and put both arms around the trunk. I tuck my head into my shoulder.

            “Welcome home, tree,” I say.

            Dad wants to cut the tree down. He says it is cursed. I refuse. I tell him my mother’s spirit has gone into the tree. I sit by the trunk day and night. I stage a hunger strike. I climb into its branches and won’t come down, even when he throws forks and rocks at me, and finally climbs up himself. I crawl from branch to branch, moving in a continuous circle, outpacing him. When he climbs to the edge of a branch to grab me, it cracks beneath his weight, and he falls to the ground. I sneak into the kitchen at odd hours for food. He grows tired. He says we can keep the damn tree, but I need to go to school.

            “I’m going to get thrown in jail again for child negligence,” he yells at me, holding up a bowl of cereal as an offering. “You’ve got to go to school, I tell you. You’ve simply got to do it.”

*

            Years later, I no longer climb the tree. I am doing homework inside, when my dad walks into my room with an ax.

            “The roots are fucking up the house’s foundation,” he says. “I’m going to cut the tree down, and I don’t want to hear another word from you. Not another word.”

            I turn my shoulders away from him, hunched over my desk, my hair covering my face.

            “Fine,” I say. “Whatever.”

∩

Brianna Di Monda is the managing editor for the Cleveland Review of Books. Her fiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Oyster River Pages, Taco Bell Quarterly, and Worms Magazine, among others. She’s a recipient of the Glenna Luschei Award for Fiction, a semifinalist in the American Short(er) Fiction Contest, and a nominee for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize.