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Trees
Photography by Shannon Brown
Regarding Shannon’s Trees
by Patricia Boyle
Skeletal limbs reach
Pushing wintry clouds away
Silent harmony
Shannon’s Trees
By Lani Longshore
Trees stretch
when they waken.
Twigs crackle
like arthritic backs.
Old war wounds
from squirrel claws
and beetle burrows
ache in the damp morning.
Trees shiver,
leaves fluttering to the ground
like random hairs
falling from the brush.
Their morning yoga done,
trees stretch their limbs once more
before the humans find them,
and start their secret work
holding up the sky.
Shannon’s Trees Black and White
By Paula Chinick
Contorted and bent
Majestic oaks remain proud
Under grisly skies
by Violet Carr Moore
The trees are silent.
They do not expose the hiker, fallen on the trail.
They conceal young lovers, embraced at sunrise.
They welcome renegades and pacifists.
The trees are silent.
They do not unveil men hiding from a summer storm.
They protect foragers beneath their branches.
They give shelter to the off-road rider.
The trees are silent.
They do not fail to keep vigil as I meditate.
When I leave, they will not reveal my secret.
They inspire me to continue writing.
WINTER’S TREES
By Marilyn Slade
Ensnarled, gnarled
Bare roots, trees, branches
Stand out in stark black forms
Against a grey clouded sky.
An ever changing cycle of
Green in spring,
Blooming in summer,
Autumn’s dry gold and
Red leaves are stripped away.
Blown by harsh winds
Become winter’s trees.
This striking image
Of imperfect symmetry
Calms the eye.
Caught on camera
Trunks, limbs and twigs
Stand tall in entwined patterns that
No design man-made can match.
Here on Top of the World
By Elena K. Manzo
Here on top of the world.
Stands an army of forest titans.
Their arthritic spidery arms of black gold
Twist in an effort to reach one another.
Frozen in a silent battle of limbs,
These giant beasts creak and groan
Waiting for an unsuspecting traveler
To walk their quilted shadows again.
But as millennia kaleidoscope away,
The path to the sky remains untouched,
And only the glowing clouds gain passage
Here on top of the world.
The Reserve
By W. Blake Heitzman
Before the Krauts spot us, we rush down into the fog that crawled up from the marsh. Like an amoeba ingesting prey, it absorbs us.
It’s heavy air deadens the sound of weapon fire and wraps us in silence. The vapor thickens. The terrain dissolves into gray, smothering my sense of direction. It takes away up and down. My balance teeters. My muscles harden, unsure of every step.
I can’t see my feet. To gain my bearings, I glance at Sergeant Stowski. Suspended in the cloud, legs bicycling futilely, his figure is unnerving.
The mist shoves icy fingers down my collar and chills me to my tailbone, but I put one foot in front of the other, churning like Stowski, only sensing progress when an oak materializes out of the haze and slides past me, its twisted anguished limbs disappearing, leaving me again suspended in dimensionless space.
The fog thins, sliding back toward the swamp. We’re in the open, bare as babes to Kraut snipers. Without a word, my men slip into cover and wait my orders.
“Lieutenant, it’s all wrong,” Stowski whispers.
“Yeah, Stow, it is.”
He doesn’t have to explain himself. He’s got the instincts of a street dog. It keeps him alive. It keeps me alive.
This time I feel it, too.
I shove my helmet up against an oak’s gnarled roots. The sound of it grinding and scraping bangs in my ears. Helmet jammed in place, I tilt my head and check out Stowski.
On his belly, he wiggles himself up between the bullet-stopping tubers of another ancient tree. Eyes wide, nose moving back and forth, he’s on alert.
It’s morning, and we’re soaked in mud. Every day we’re soaked, soaked sometimes all day and all night. Socks soaked, feet numbed to clubs. Fatigues soaked, wet itchy wool underwear stuck to us and cold as ice. We just lie in it. The Heinie is out there somewhere, so we stay down. Better to shiver than to get cut in half by machine gun fire.
I raise my arm, hand in a fist, signaling the patrol to hold position. Though I don’t see them, their faces pass through my mind: Reynolds grins sarcastically; Brown’s terrified, his eyes wide and dancing over the brush; McWilliams’s lips move in silent curses but his ears listen for movement; Adams lies on his side, watching to the right, calm and waiting for something to come so he can kill it; and Rubens, backed up against one of these trees, scans our rear, his rifle swaying left to right and back like a branch in a breeze.
But there is no breeze, no sound. It’s dead silent.
“Call Cutillo off point.” I signal with a fist to my helmet.
Stowski nods and makes a weird sparrow warble that only he can do. Tiny, but shrill, it knifes through the haze like a bullet.
I tense, glance about without turning my helmet. My heart bangs my rib cage, and I think, Shit, my heart’s too loud, the Krauts can hear it. Then I catch myself, Calm down. Calm down. No jitters, not now.
Stowski peeks around his tree, sticking his head out, daring Heinie to take a shot.
Slowly, so slowly, you wonder if he’s crazy, he pulls back into his little oak fort and shakes his hands, palms up, at me.
“Bob, that ain’t like Cutillo. He hears that whistle and he’s back in a snap,” Stowski says. “Think he didn’t hear?”
I shake my head. “It’s dead as a graveyard here. If he’s there, he heard.”
“Last I saw, he’s twenty yards up by that tree. Had to hear. Want me to send Reynolds to check?”
Stowski runs his finger over his throat like a knife and mouths, “SS, ambush”.
“Nah,” I whisper back. “We would of heard a tussle if someone got to him.”
“Too quiet, Bobby,” the sergeant says, again. ”Look at these trees. They’re all wrong. We’re in the middle of a war, but no artillery since we moved into the fog. No gun shots neither. Nothing.”
I look up at the trees, medieval oaks, twisted and gnarled. An hour ago we were in a splintered forest, topless sticks poking out of the earth, pruned by TOT, dozens of artillery shells exploding together in one spot, shredding lumber into mulch, and every other living thing into mush.
These druid oaks here—not a branch, not one twig broken.
“At least one stray shell had to wind up here,” I whisper to myself.
“Yeah, that’s it, that what’s wrong. It’s like a reserve or something,” Stowski says and grins. He’d found the words to pin down the wrongness he feels in his gut.
“We walked through the fog, how long, you think?” I ask.
Stowski goes adventurous, like now he‘s sure there are no Germans, no SS ambush, just us, and he pulls himself up out of the roots and pushes his back against the tree.
I know he’s right, but I stay low anyway. One thing war taught me: never trust the obvious.
“Time seems longer in a fog,” he says. “So—an hour?”
“How far do you think we came?”
His shoulders jerk as he expels a perplexed, “Huh?”
I suggest a mile.
“Not even—you move slower in a fog. Ain’t no way we wandered out of the action.” His statement, half question, gets to my point. He knows what I’m thinking.
“Yeah,” I say. “This front is 40 miles long, how does this place go unscarred. Like you said, ‘a reserve—or something’. Krauts should be here, or have been here, but no sign of ’em, not even a sheet of shit paper.”
Stowski stares up at the twisted branches, bare and black against the sky, then says, “Garden of Eden, maybe? Guess we got lucky, stumbled our way out of the war. Maybe I should celebrate with a smoke.”
“Not yet,” I warn.
He chuckles and scans to his right, still suspicious, still tense.
I thrust my thumb forward and say, “Give Cutillo another whistle.”
We wait, but Cutillo doesn’t come. It makes me edgy. We both are.
“Maybe he’s pissin’,” Stowski says, a half-hearted lie meant to calm his anxiety.
His eyes go dog wild.
Seeing that, I tell him, “Call the men up. I want them in here close—real close.”
Stowski waves his arm in a circle, a signal that will be passed back through the patrol until everyone gets it. Then he juts his chin at the tree where Cutillo was.
“Hey, Bobby, the fog’s blowing in again. You think it’ll bring the war back?”
“No—something else.”
I stand up and yell back through the woods, “Everybody get up here! Fast!”
There isn’t a sound.
The End
A Gray Area
By Carl Gamez
Two days in Paris and off to see the country, Ricky could do without the country–more vineyards and boring small towns. For a sixteen year old American, Paris was heaven. “Where to now Grandpa?” He asked.
“Today is my day. It’s something I need to do.” Henry Chadwick glanced over at his grandson and said, “I’m taking you to the place where my father died.”
“He was from Europe? I thought you said your dad lived in Colorado?”
“No, it’s a little confusing. I never told you, but that was my stepfather. I didn’t even know about my real father until my mother died. She told me just before she died.”
“Your real dad? What was he doing over here?”
“The war, World War II.”
“Huh?” Ricky turned away and watched the trees whiz by. The twists and turns of mountain roads made him queasy. “Gramps, how much further? I don’t feel so good.”
“It’s the snails isn’t it.”
“No, I only ate two. It’s these roads. I feel like I’m going to puke. Couldn’t they make these roads straighter?”
Henry put his hand on his grandson’s knee and said, “It’s not far. Open the window and get some air.” It wasn’t that far, for a hawk or a pigeon, but for a small rental car, it was hours.
They got to a small park in a valley surrounded by forested mountains. “So this is it?” Ricky climbed out of the car and stretched his legs–A meadow, a stream, a monument to honor the dead and the thick, cold forest. He ran to the memorial and asked, “Is great grandpa’s name on this thing?”
“Should be Sergeant Stowski. Sergeant Henry Stowski. Hey, do you want your jacket?”
“Stowski?”
Henry plodded his way to the monument. He balanced himself with his cane and stood straight. He removed his hat and pressed it to his heart. His face wrinkled with sadness. His head dropped. “Come here Ricky.” Almost frightened, Ricky moved closer.
“What is it Grandpa?”
“Come here, give me your hand.” His grandfather started to cry. Ricky held out his hand. His grandfather took hold of it and squeezed. “I never knew him. He died out here–In the middle of nowhere.” He let go of Ricky’s hand and pressed his palm to his forehead. “Come with me. I want to take a walk. “
“Sure Grandpa, but what’s going on?”
Henry let the cool air fill his chest. “He never married my mother. She lived in London, pregnant by some G.I. Her name was Ann Chadwick. She married another soldier, an American. For forty years, forty God damned years, I thought he was my father.” They walked across the stream on an old wooden bridge. Behind them a heavy fog drifted down the hillsides. “Out here somewhere is my real dad. They never found his body. They don’t know what happened. If he was captured, killed or what–Probably he was blown to pieces.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me any of this?”
Henry smiled and rubbed his hand through Ricky’s hair. “I don’t know why I’m telling you now. My dad was a no good scoundrel. He got a sixteen year old English girl drunk and had his way with her.” His eyes turned hard. “You’re getting to that age. You treat women with respect you hear.”
A nightmare of events went through Ricky’s mind. Things he’d brag about to his friends, but never tell his mom or grandfather. At least I wore protection. He thought. And those French girls said they were on the pill.
“What’ya thinking about Ricky?”
“Oh nothing.” He glanced behind him and said, “It’s getting really foggy. You wanna turn back?”
“Can we go to the top of this hill? I want to get a bird’s eye view of the valley.”
“Grandpa, it’s too foggy. You won’t be able to see a thing.” The gray cloud covered the valley and moved toward them. “Grandpa, I’ve never seen fog move that quick.”
“Oh my God, Ricky sit down and hold on to me.” Henry surrounded Ricky with his arms and body.
“Grandpa, what’s happening?”
The fog rolled on past them, but it took the mountains, the meadow and the stream with it. Ugly, gray gnarled oaks covered an otherwise barren hill. No leaves on the trees, no flowers on the hillside, everything was gray, even the sky. Everything looked dead. A shout broke the silence. “Hold it right there.” Ricky and his grandfather lifted their heads. All they could see was a colorless blur and a rifle pointing at them from behind a tree. “You guys French? Do you speak English?”
Henry stood and shouted, “We’re Americans. Where are we? And, what is this place?”
“Americans? What in the hell are you two doing here? Don’t you know there’s war going on?”
“Sir, there’s no war. World War II ended more than sixty years ago.”
He lowered his rifle and said, “Okay, now I know I’m going batty.” He shouted, “Hey Lieutenant, we got some visitors.” There was no answer. He walked over Ricky and his grandfather, held out his hand and said, “I’m Sergeant Henry Stowski. Who might you be?”