The Tree

I peered at the old flowering crabapple tree that stood in front of my house’s sizeable picture window. Something about it looked different. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Did it lose a limb overnight? No branches lay on the kelly green grass below it. Did the bark change color? Maybe the sun was hitting it in a different way this morning. I shrugged it off and carried on with my morning routine. I threw a load of laundry in the washer, readied the coffee pot, and ran downstairs to change out of my shorts and tank top pajama combo and into some leggings and a cowl neck tunic. I was having a couple of friends over for coffee to talk about our writing projects. They were novelists while I dabbled in short stories.

“Okay, so how is he going to figure out that the person calling him is the one whodunit?” Shannon queried after I gave a synopsis of the story I was starting. We sat at my kitchen table, situated through the open doorway across the adjacent living room, so I had a full view of the large window.

“It’s going to be in his belongings from the jail,” I started. “He’s going to find out that he was his biological father, and that was his motive for killing the woman who never told him he had a son.”

Cindy pressed further. “But why did he kill her over that? What pissed him off that much?”

“She was having an affair with her doctor that HE sent her to.” I divulged, confident in my outline.

“But that was years later. The kid was already a teenager.” Shannon busted right through it, blowing a hole in my plot.

“He wanted her back? It was a crime of passion…?” I couldn’t really figure out how I wanted to piece it together. That’s why we have these meetings.

“I’ll have to come up with some more notes and work out a better angle.” I felt a little defeated after the exchange, but it helped to get the kinks out. We turned our attention to Cindy. “Okay, where are you at?”

“The protagonist sees that one of the trees in her yard is backward. She has to figure out why it’s suddenly different and embarks on a journey through the past to find out why this Mandela effect is happening.”

“What does she find out?”

Cindy began to paint the scene, but her words faded out as the conversation was diluted by my own thoughts about the tree in my front yard. My head throbbed as I squinted at it across the room. I couldn’t focus on it, directly. It started to look like a painting that got wet, its smeared appearance melting into the landscape behind it. I blinked a few hard blinks, trying to see it more clearly. A glint caught my eye as it fell from the sky. Then more sparkles danced across the pane, as if someone threw glitter into the wind. My ears began to ring, and I was brought back to the conference by the bop of a hand on my wrist. The headache subsided and the ringing stopped.

“What do you think of the plot?” asked Cindy.

“Oh…I think it sounds interesting!” I tried to play it off like I hadn’t been completely absorbed by my own thoughts. Shannon and Cindy went back and forth between their stories and bounced ideas off one another, as I sat and occasionally nodded and smiled, pretending to be present, all the while thinking about the tree with the missing limb.

We finished our last sips of coffee and said our “goodbye-for-now”s. Shannon left first, after she explained her other obligations for the day, but I reached for Cindy’s arm as she meandered toward the door.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure!”

I waved her back inside and led her to the living room.

“Does this tree look weird or different to you?”

“In what way?”

“I’m not sure. I can’t seem to think of what it looked like before?”

“Before what?”

I was taken aback. When did I notice something was off? Just today? What was I doing yesterday? I told her never mind and let her escape before I fell into a rabbit hole, racking my brain, trying to figure out where I went yesterday.

I tend to forget what I’m doing as I’m doing it, so it didn’t surprise me much that I couldn’t remember my actions. Usually, however, I eventually remember. This was different. It was like there was a wall, and I could not penetrate it, no matter how hard I thought about it. I felt like I was losing my mind, like I was being gaslit by myself.

I decided to retrace my steps. I changed my clothes, made coffee and started the laundry, and before that I was staring at that tree…

But what was I doing before that? When did I wake up? I went to unplug my phone from the charger, but it wasn’t there. And I couldn’t call it to find it because that was my only phone. I looked around the house: the kitchen table, the sofa cushions, even the washer. Nothing. Then I heard a distant chiming. I extended my neck to give my ear better hearing access. It grew louder as I entered the living room. I searched the chairs and scanned the floor. It was still kind of faint as I stepped toward the window. I looked outside and there it was, on the ground beneath that crabapple tree. The screen appeared cracked.

How did it get out there?

I pulled on a jacket and shuffled into some sandals before sliding open the front door. The sunlight blinded me instantly, and I tripped over the door frame, down the steps, and onto the sidewalk that lined the front of the house. The throbbing headache I had before returned, and the incessant ringing in my ears was much louder. My eyes drooped as I noticed the ringing turned melodic. My brain pieced together that a siren was sounding, the lights were blotting my vision with blue and red. I turned my head slightly and observed the tree that haunted me for most of the day. A car had smashed into it. The passenger side of the front end was completely caved in, the driver’s side headlight shining brightly on my face. A light rain covered my eyelashes, blurring the scene before me. My phone was lying in a pile of broken glass on the pavement below, chiming as someone tried calling it. A slight metallic smell filled my nostrils as blood pooled around me.

“That’s why it looked weird.” I casually mentioned as a paramedic wrapped a brace around my neck.

“She’s awake!” He yelled to his partner tending to the driver. “You’re going to be okay.” He assured me.

I stared blankly at him while the whole thing played over in my mind, and he slowly lifted me onto a gurney. I was out for a walk around dawn, texting Cindy about our coffee conference in the morning. Thunder rolled in the distance as it began sprinkling. A bolt of lightning flickered, and when I looked up to assess the storm location, a car slammed into my body before hitting that tree. That tree that looked similar to the one in my front yard, except it had one less limb protruding from the trunk. My phone flew from my grasp as I was thrown back, striking my head against the rain-soaked asphalt.

“I knew I wasn’t losing my mind.” I smiled weakly to myself, and my eyes closed as I felt the warmth of the rising sun on my face and heard the distant rumble of a faraway storm.