They Crumble in Your Hand

I desperately tried to hang on with all my might. Many of my comrades, my family, had already fallen and I was determined not to suffer the same fate. I knew this was a fool’s errand, that I would eventually succumb to the winter winds the same as everyone else, but I would hold out as long as possible.

I had a bad feeling about all this right from the start. I looked around at the desolate landscape when we all first started arriving and couldn’t help but wonder where everyone was. How was there so much terrain for all of us to sprout up homes and families here? What happened in the past to cause every one of our predecessors to disappear?

But no one wanted to talk about it. Everyone rolled in with blind optimism. As each day grew warmer, we all grew too. We got more comfortable, we spread out, we took over the place. “The good times will last forever,” everyone said, but I couldn’t shake the ominous feelings.

I looked across the field and saw deer stomping on the hardening ground. Then I looked up, startled at the sound of a man on a machine that zipped around the field, chomping and chewing up life and then spitting it out in shards behind him. That’s not for me.

I heard a rustling far off in the distance. I looked across the field at the neighboring tree. A hard wind rippled through the branches. The leaves all shook. Many of them held on to their branches, but just as many released their grip and went fluttering to the earth. The man on the machine headed right towards them.

You could see the path of the wind. You could see it headed right for us. I braced myself, recommitting myself to my branch, vowing to avoid the man and the machine. The wind crashed into my body, flinging my upwards then pressing me against my branch. I held on, but many of my friends weren’t so lucky. Friends I had known since birth released their grip.

They were old though. Their once green and lush bodies had slowly given way to crinkly, wrinkled brown ones. Just as I heard myself passing judgment on their decayed frames, I looked myself over. I was looking every bit as brown as everyone around me.

The next wind came suddenly and with surprise. I was so focused on my deterioration that I forgot to gird myself. I was unmoored. Freedom never tasted so sour, so terrifying, so final.

As I fell, I angled my body to catch the wind. Perhaps an updraft could lift me back into my tree. The wind caught me and my body swirled and I became disoriented. In all my life, I had been attached to one limb in one place. I had never swirled before, and I didn’t know up from down.

I looked desperately around for something stationary to fix my gaze upon. I saw a tree. I saw my tree. My instinct was to float to it for protection. It had given me life months ago and I had returned the favor every single day. I caught sunlight and fed it to him. I scooped rain and guided it to the ground around the trunk. We were partners. If he died, I died too and I assumed the reverse was true, but here I was flying, dying while he looked like he was going to be just fine. A hibernation looked to be settling in, but not death.

Then I felt stupid, naïve. I finally realized why those limbs were barren when we arrived. The tree did this last year too. It created thousands of leaves just like me and then used them to gain nutrients and life, only to discard them months later when they were no longer useful. Then, they were all replaced by me and my friends and family. The tree didn’t love me at all. It used me and now that it was done with me was ready to fling my body under the man and his machine.

Perhaps if I could float over to the base of his trunk I would at least be protected from the machine and maybe, just maybe the tree would see my brittle body and feel remorse. Maybe the tree would look at me, broken and discarded, and would try to find a way to keep every future leaf alive with him forever so that my descendants wouldn’t be forced to suffer a similar fate.

I tried catching the wind. I tried to let it push me over to the tree, but I failed. I fluttered to the earth, surrounded by old friends. The wind would push us around the field, but it didn’t matter. I heard the machine growing louder. Eventually, I felt the strongest gust of wind I had ever felt suck me upwards and a sharpened blade ripped through my body and tore me into a hundred pieces. I flew out the back, a fraction of my former self, and looked up at the limb that I used to call home.

I saw my old friends, the last of us, clinging desperately to that branch. “It’s no use,” I wanted to call out, but didn’t bother. They would learn soon enough.

Over the next few months, the machine ran me over more times. I got covered with snow, then the snow melted and then I got covered again. I lay here, little more than a speck of dust. The melting snow turned into spring rains. Worms ate me, digested me, and expelled me. The ground was soft and I could feel myself becoming one with the soil beneath me.

As the air and the ground warmed, a gentle churning began to engulf me. The churning was nearly imperceptible, but it was there nonetheless. A blade of grass not yet emerged from the ground took me in and unified itself with me. Together, we became one and burst into the sunlight.