Tree Trunks
By Elizabeth Coletti
Hollie found a knife in the woods and began carving her initials into every tree she could reach, brambles cutting at her short, eight-year-old legs and branches pulling at her hair as if begging her not to continue, to find some other way of making herself feel permanent. But the way the rusty blade bit through the bark felt good, piercing the flaky birch, burrowing into the soft, patched pine. It felt good, too, because she knew she shouldn’t, that her dad would be angry with her for leaving scars so thoughtlessly through the forest, and she fantasized about telling him, listening to him shout and getting sent to her room for so long that cicadas would nest in her ears and moss would grow in patterns over her cheeks and make her look different from her mother, so he wouldn’t be reminded of her when he looked at Hollie.
She would wake earlier than him, the morning cold in its youth, and go to his room, watch the empty sheets on the other side of the bed where he still left space for her mother, as if she was merely late coming home. He always slept on his stomach, steady as a fallen cedar, face pressed into the pillow, and she would look for the slow rise and fall of his back to see if he was breathing. One night, he’d gotten out an extra quilt, and beneath the scraps stitched together by her gramma’s ancient sewing machine, Hollie couldn’t tell if he was alive. She had jumped on him to wake him up, and he’d yelled like a bear in its cave and told her never to do that again, even when she tried explaining she just wanted to know if he was still there.
It had been night when her mother left. Hollie hadn’t been awake for it, but she could guess, could put clues together from other evenings when they’d shouted at each other—her dad cleaning dishes so loud he was close to breaking them and her mother stomping her feet and flapping papers, talking about bills and all the futures she wasn’t going to get to have—then one or the other of them marching out, slamming the screen door on its abused hinges. Sometimes they would sit her down the next day, tell her they loved her and they loved each other, too, and it didn’t mean anything. Sometimes they wouldn’t. Her dad hadn’t bothered since the morning when the truck was gone and all the clothes were missing from her mother’s closet, like they’d never been there at all.
She started writing her name in permanent marker on her belongings, branding doll foreheads and bleeding through the cotton of shirts, and did the same to the Tupperware in the kitchen, the soap dish in the bathroom, the thermos her dad carried coffee in when he went to work. That way if they disappeared, anyone who found them would know whose they were, where they should be brought back. She had dreams where she woke up and the house was empty and the trees outside had been replaced with strangers.
At school, Hanna Bent’s cat had run away. Hollie didn’t like Hanna very much because their names were too similar and sometimes the teacher would say one when she really meant the other, but she listened rapt in the cafeteria as Hanna cried, little hiccupping sobs, about how Mittens had stopped eating from his bowl, wouldn’t let her pet him, and, that weekend, never came back even as dusk fell. Another student said that he must have found another home, one that fed him better and loved him better. Hanna cried harder. Hollie went home and etched her initials between the deep cracks of an oak.
That night her dad dropped dinner on the table, didn’t ask her how her day was, stared into his bowl. She imagined him leaving, like Mittens, finding a new home without old pains. She slept uneasily and woke in a panic, fearing with deep certainty that he would be gone when she rushed to his room. But he was there, his face buried in his pillow, like even in sleep he couldn’t risk looking at her, her eyes so similar to her mother’s, her chin with the same tilt.
How silly Hanna Bent had been, not to notice her abandonment in progress, not to seize her cat by his scruff and lecture that this was a family, how dare he leave without permission. She should have locked the screen door and put her name on a tag around his neck. She should have stopped him from leaving before he never came back. Hollie’s home was hers, her toys and clothes labeled, her trees in their permanent places, carved with her initials. They would not desert her now, she thought, and took her knife, set it to the strong trunk of her dad’s back.
THE END