THE MYTH OF FURNITURE

by Melissa Bell

Once there was a boy who loved the green things of the earth – the grass, the leaves, the curly ferns and pillowed mosses. He drank green tea and wore clothes of woven reeds and herbs. Whole days he would spend deep in the nearby forest, strolling through glades of bunchberry and trillium (he always carried a guidebook), and would sleep away whole afternoons in a sun-warmed patch of sweet clover (the bees never bothered with him). 

He ate a lot of lovely salads and nurtured a healthy garden and he smoked green leaves when his parents weren’t looking. 

He began to hear the subtle voice of plants one day when he was a child of six, listened as their frequencies would come to him in vague, rhythmic hummings, felt just behind his eyeballs. He heard:

• the tenor throb of bulbs emerging that spring, and the sigh of petals spreading. 
  

• fields of winter wheat breathing in slow waves and midtones. 
  

• grapevines and wisteria whispering constantly like psychopaths. 

Redwoods emitted a deep, low vibration that he could feel on the back of his teeth with his tongue. 

Not having much luck with (nor interest in) the local girls, it was only a matter of time before the boy fell in love with a tree. 

It was a tall oak in the middle of a field, lonely and hardened by many years of solitude. The boy would sit beneath its shady branches and listen to the tree as it told him stories of the earth. At night, the boy would climb the tree and sleep there, and the tree would bend its aged branches around the boy’s young limbs and give him shelter. And his parents never worried.

Sometimes the boy would write down the stories of the tree and the advice it gave from the earth and he would share this information with his parents. Sometimes they would listen. Sometimes they would not because he was, really, just a boy claiming counsel from an oak tree. But when they listened, their harvests were bountiful, and their wine would win prizes and everyone would be quite happy. However, when they did not, the family would have to “do without” and there would be no wine to help them forget about the things they couldn’t yet have. Eventually – not too long, in fact–they decided that the boy and his tree were right more often than wrong, so they followed their advice for many years and became wealthy and, therefore, despised by the rest of the villagers.

One day in January, the villagers decided they’d had enough of the boy and his secret information. They found him in the tree and pulled him down. Cracked his skull against a stone and kicked the air from his lungs. His eyes dulled and they bound him to the tree hanging by his neck and left him there. The trunk of the oak tree split wide open with its own sorrow and the body of the boy fell within the wound and lay there while the tree healed and grew up around him.

Many years later, the children of the violent villagers grew up to be thieves and tricksters, the kind of people who spat on sidewalks at the feet of girls too clean and pretty, people who made unnecessary noise and broke things for sport. People who would not wash their hands, regardless of all the signs and effort. They died gruesome premature deaths involving battery acid, gasoline and jumper cables. Their killers were never caught because nobody ever really bothered to look too hard.

Many years after that, the oak tree is cut down and used to make two items: a dining room table and a piano.