by Cassie Lipton

The woman in the tree, whose years numbered nearly too many to count, knew her role in the manner of things. She was an observer to Time itself, a watcher. This was a duty that all tree spirits took on with solemnity: to bear witness to the world in its loneliness, to see all the living things that would find their way into the woods and allow their soul to be heard. Silently, she held the universe.

Many souls spoke of dreams. The flowers dreamed of growth: that they would one day rise to greet the sun. They stretched out near her roots, inching, straining, waiting for the day they could meet the star that gave them life. The woman in the tree knew this was futile: she’d seen thousands of flowers live and die without ever even reaching her branches. Yet the flowers continued, generation after generation, eternally separated by the same world as the Moon when she tried to kiss the Ocean. Each flower was a flare, an explosion of color doomed to burn away. The woman in the tree remembered every one of them.

The animals dreamed of wandering, and this they largely achieved. The worms wanted to burrow through rich soil. The deer wanted to run through meadows and forests and forever feel new dirt under their hooves. The birds wanted to brush their wings against the leaves of the trees as they whirled through the air. They were the heirs to the kingdom of the earth, inheriting absolute freedom. The woman in the tree knew all of their journeys.

The humans dreamed of love. Many lovers had lain at her roots, whispering their affections to each other, entangled to the point where she couldn’t tell where one human ended and another began. Many humans came alone and sat quietly beneath her, and she could hear their soul longing for someone who would never be with them. The flowers were trapped, the birds were free, and the humans somewhere unfathomably in between, victims of choice. The woman in the tree witnessed their joy and sorrow.

The woman in the tree saw all of this. She rode the currents of the feelings that swelled around her constantly, she held them all in her mind with sympathy and love. The woman in the tree dreamed of companionship. She saw the flowers bloom together in dozens, she saw the doe with the fawn, she saw the humans with their lovers. This made her wish for someone to share the burden she carried, the burden of knowledge. The hopes and dreams and memories of every living thing that had ever passed under her branches. Yet she lived in solitude, her roots unable to connect with any others of her kind with whom she might speak. She could hear everything but could speak nothing.

Years passed and seasons changed and the woman in the tree grew weary. Her branches felt heavy, her bark brittle. Slowly but surely, the woman was dying. She felt herself breaking down, felt the worms burying into her bark. With her final act, she gave the stories back to the universe: giving the flowers and the animals and the humans back to Time, who is the only immortal being in the end.

The woman’s spirit became soil, nestled under rocks and trees, quietly remembering and releasing until everything was gone. Then, she began to grow: a flower, beautiful and alive.

The woman in the flower stretched to reach the sun.

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Cassie Lipton (she/her) is a poet currently based in Nashville, Tennessee. She is a graduate of the University of Virginia and has work appearing or forthcoming in Vellichor Literary, The Orange Rose, and Flowermouth Press. In 2023, she was the second place winner of the One Page Poetry Contest.