{"id":2587,"date":"2005-06-15T11:45:03","date_gmt":"2005-06-15T10:45:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.yummy-wakame.com\/archives\/2005\/06\/15\/quiddity-requests-a-story\/"},"modified":"2005-06-15T11:45:03","modified_gmt":"2005-06-15T10:45:03","slug":"quiddity-requests-a-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/2005\/06\/quiddity-requests-a-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Quiddity requests a story…"},"content":{"rendered":"

…from a storyteller<\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

“Just because it’s the tallest tree doesn’t mean I can’t climb it.”<\/strong><\/a> The speaker, a young boy, barely double in the digits department, stood, his hands hit on his hips and his head cocked back to stare up at the towering massive sliver of wood and leaf that sat rooted before him.<\/p>\n

“No one climbs that tree,” came the voice of a girl, slightly older than him, with matted puffy hair a ragged old brown dress that she’d been wearing since she was 9. It was her only one. The boy was dressed in similarly weathered clothes, except for his boots, which were brand new and had just been given to him by his grandfather, who made them, and then went off to die.<\/p>\n

“And why doesn’t anyone climb it?” he asked.<\/p>\n

“Because!” she shouted, a declaration laced with the obviousness of gravity.<\/p>\n

“Because why?” he moved a little closer and shifted one of his feet up onto a piece of the tree’s root that was humped up out of the dirt.<\/p>\n

“Because it’s the most sacred tree around, that’s why.”<\/p>\n

“Well it’s only sacred because it’s the tallest, which is a silly reason for something to be sacred.”<\/p>\n

“No, it’s tall because it’s the oldest, and that’s why it’s sacred.”<\/p>\n

“Well just because something is tall or old, well that’s a stupid reason for it to be sacred. Did it help out a king or something? Does it keep the world from falling off of the clouds? There has to be a reason.” The boy put his other foot up on the tree trunk, in turn scratching the perfect shine on his new boots. “Aw man!” He leaned down and, with the lick of a finger, tried desperately to wipe away the scratch.<\/p>\n

“See, you’re going to mess up your new boots and then what?” The girl took a few steps closer, but was sure not to fall into the shadow of the tree. “Look, come on out of there and we’ll go home. This is no way to start a day! We should be sipping on some rooibos and laying by the river.” She turned around and looked back down the path, “Hey! I heard that some of the other kids loosened a vine from a new tree down by the lake, we could go swing on\u00e2\u20ac\u201d”<\/p>\n

“I can swing from vines any day. I’m going up.” He kicked his boots off and wrapped his bare toes between the thickest bark the world had ever known. Each piece stuck out like a short step, allowing him to pull his body, fevered pitch of a grunt and all, right up the side of the thing. Before long, the girl couldn’t see him anymore, as he disappeared into the foliage and into whatever hides behind the leaves of sacred trees. She didn’t suspect it was anything a person would want to come face to face with, but she stood there calling for him to come back down anyway, even after she was sure he was too high to hear her.<\/p>\n

Quite awhile later, as she was still standing there and looking up, waiting for him to come back down but nearly positive that he wouldn’t be, an acorn came falling out of the tree. It bounced off of a piece of the topside root and landed in the boy’s boot.
\n___________<\/p>\n

“This high up in a tree,” he said to himself, “you don’t want to monkey around.” He laughed at himself a bit, but the laugh was only there to disguise what his body was really feeling, like having a good old cry. He had been climbing for only ten minutes, but he swore he saw the sun set twice since his ascension to wherever he was going began. Time was passing quickly and slowly and most of all, painfully. “This stupid old tree is just like any tree, full of twigs and acorns and bark and leaves and ….” He left his conversation drift off as he realized that there weren’t any birds or bugs around. “Yes, I know, that is strange.”<\/p>\n

But he kept climbing anyway.
\n___________<\/p>\n

“Well I’m going home then,” she said to the boot after it had refused to coerce the acorn into telling her what was going on up there. The little girl walked away and the shadow of the tree told the sun to set for the night. And the next and the next and for enough nights after that to allow dirt and dust to blow into the boot and water to trickle down in and the acorn to take root.
\n___________<\/p>\n

The boy could see the top of the tree. His arms had long ago gone numb from the burning pain of overexertion but he ignored it, mostly by talking to himself. He chatted with his own head about the shape of the leaves and the color of the sky set to motion and the way the clouds only went so high, something he realized after climbing past them. It had been days but for him it seemed like years and his body was tricked into thinking the same, so he’d grown a few inches and started sprouting little fuzzy hairs on his top lip and just under his chin. “Well, what’s that then?” His neck may have permanently grown at a 90 degree angle to his backbone, as he couldn’t remember the last time he wasn’t looking up. He didn’t dare try and turn it now in case it snapped off. “It’d be a shame to have to climb all the way back down there to get it,” he mentioned to a hole in the bark.<\/p>\n

He had been looking at the same thing for the past few days: up. And up tended to look the same way back at him, only from the other direction, and on most days they both looked completely the same as they did the day before. The boy looked limp but steadfast and up looked far away but achievable.<\/p>\n

Today, however, up put on a new hat. “The top!” he shouted, so loud that if a tree were to fall in the forest, someone would certainly here him, regardless if they were around or not. He pushed on and made it to the very highest branch before the sky had a chance to change out of it’s sweaty old sun of a work suit and into the relaxing moon and stars attire it preferred (at least at these heights.)<\/p>\n

As he reached the final branch, he wrapped his arm around the tree’s trunk and pulled himself as snug against it as he could. At this height the tree was really swaying and the boy could see that the sky had turned from blue to black. Daylight was below him but night swirled all around him. He hugged the tree even more tightly.<\/p>\n

“Halooooooooooooooo!” came a great bustling bursting moan of a sound from deep inside of the tree. The boy scattered back and lost his grip, falling two branches down. Luckily, he had now spent enough time in trees to realize how to make his way around the top of one. The sound echoed off into the distance while he repositioned himself.<\/p>\n

“Um…..” he was shaking in his callouses, knees knocking and teeth playing Beethoven’s Fifth (for all Beethoven knew, anyway), “hay-lo?”<\/p>\n

“What?!” boomed a sound from between the bark.<\/p>\n

The boy sat completely still now, forcing himself to keep completely silent.<\/p>\n

“Did you want something?” questioned the voice.<\/p>\n

“Well. I’m not sure. I suppose it would depend.”<\/p>\n

“You’ve come an awfully long way to be uncertain. So what exactly does it depend on?”<\/p>\n

“Well, it depends on whether or not I’m talking to someone else, or if I’ve just gone crazy.”<\/p>\n

“Ahhh, yes, well that would change alot.”<\/p>\n

“So which is it?”<\/p>\n

“Which what?”<\/p>\n

“Am I talking to someone or am I crazy?”<\/p>\n

“Well ask yourself this, would a sane person climb a tree just to get to the top?”<\/p>\n

The boy rolled his eyes up into head, perhaps looking around for the answer on the back of his eyelids. “Yes,” he replied, “I did.”<\/p>\n

“Then I guess you’re talking to someone else. Probably me.”<\/p>\n

“And who exactly are you?”<\/p>\n

“You should have figured that out before you decided to climb me.”<\/p>\n

“Ahhhh, so you are the tree.” The boy loosened up a bit and leaned forward, dusting off his arms and patting down his pockets. “Then I have a question for you, if I may.”<\/p>\n

“Well yes, but only because it would rude of me to decline you a simple answer before\u00e2\u20ac\u201d”<\/p>\n

“Well I can’t promise the answer will be simple.”<\/p>\n

“And you also have no manners. I was going to say, ‘it would be rude of me to decline you a simple answer before you die.'”<\/p>\n

The boy furrowed his brow in puzzlement, but was not genuinely worried by the threat.<\/p>\n

“Hmmm. You’re right, that would be rude.” He stood straight up on the branch he was resting against and asked, “Why do people think that you’re a sacred tree? What did you do to become sacred?”<\/p>\n

“People think I’m sacred because I’m old.”<\/p>\n

“Yes, I know, but why do you think that makes you sacred?”<\/p>\n

“I don’t think it makes me sacred. I said ‘people’ think I’m sacred.”<\/p>\n

“Oh, okay, now I see. Well. Hmmm. I guess that’s all then…”<\/p>\n

“Not exactly,” the tree twisted the top of it’s trunk, the bark contorting to reveal a face. “There that’s better.<\/p>\n

“So, do you have all of your answers?” the wooden lips turned themself into a purposeful grimace.<\/p>\n

“Well, not all of them. But all of the ones to the questions I’ve thought of so far.”<\/p>\n

“No need to worry about that, because you won’t be thinking of any more questions. I have to kill you.”<\/p>\n

“Why?”<\/p>\n

“Well, because I’m a sacred tree. And you climbed me.”<\/p>\n

“But you just said that you weren’t sacred.”<\/p>\n

“But to people, I am sacred. And so to keep the respect of the people, I need to keep up my allure as a sacred tree. People aren’t allowed to climb me, or so they’ve set that rule, and if they find out that you’ve climbed me, they’ll lose respect for me.”<\/p>\n

“Ahhh, I see. Well, you do have a dilemma. I don’t think you’re sacred, though.”<\/p>\n

The tree’s eyes came close together and one of them looked straight up to the farthest star, which twinkled several times before shooting off. “Well then we do have a problem. Yes, a dilemma indeed. You see, if people find out that you’ve climbed me, which they will, and that you’ve made it back down, then they’ll lose respect for me.”<\/p>\n

“Well who cares if they respect you or not?”<\/p>\n

“You don’t get to be the oldest tree by looking weak in the eyes of people. People have saws and people like to cut down trees.”<\/p>\n

“Well I’m sorry, but I don’t want to die either, and I don’t really see how you can kill me, what with you just being a tree and all.”<\/p>\n

“Hmmm. Yes, well I hadn’t thought of that. You are bigger than most birds.”<\/p>\n

“Yes, you’re right about that, but why, what do you do to birds?”<\/p>\n

“Well, like I said, I need to keep my respect among people, and the same goes for birds and animals. Otherwise I’d be pecked full of holes and my trunk wouldn’t be strong enough to support me. It’s a real shame, truly, because I get so lonely up here.”<\/p>\n

“Yeah I know what you mean. Well, I don’t kill people or anything, but I get plenty lonely down on the ground as well. If you let me go, I’ll come back and visit you. I promise you, I’ll come back someday.”<\/p>\n

“No, that’s not possible. Besides, that would only make things worse…”<\/p>\n

“Okay, I understand. Well, there must be a solution.”<\/p>\n

They both sat there and thought for a long time. And then for another long time.<\/p>\n

“So,” the boy asked, “what do you do to the birds, anyway?”<\/p>\n

“I turn them into acorns.”
\n___________<\/p>\n

The acorn had sprouted and was well on it’s way to growing up and out of the boot. It took it’s time and had the shadow of the sacred tree to contend with, but managed to grow tall and thick and as strong as it could anyway. The girl came back one year, when she was much much older, an old woman now, and walked very near the tree, careful not to fall into the sacred tree’s shadow. It was still growing.<\/p>\n

This story was written by Nathan Swartz<\/strong><\/a> for Quiddity<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…from a storyteller “Just because it’s the tallest tree doesn’t mean I can’t climb it.” The speaker, a young boy, barely double in the digits department, stood, his hands hit on his hips and his head cocked back to stare up at the towering massive sliver of wood and leaf that sat rooted before him. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[212],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogalog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2587\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yummy-wakame.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}