MicroHorror

The tree was evil.

Just as they said.

She and her parents had moved to Lyons Grove when she was seven, after her father got a position at Curtis Laboratories. She’d been wearing red and white checkered skirts and white collared shirts at Divine Grace Catholic school ever since.

Sammy had been going to her new school for only two years but her mother had already become a nasty piece of gossip among the kids with her addictions to Virginia Slims and Popoff vodka, and her father’s job allowed him almost no time at home. Sammy didn’t dare take her friends to her house after school. She would save herself that particular humiliation. A staggering, mumbling drunk haranguing her friends or passing out. As a result, she and her friends spent a lot of time outdoors, in the parks, baseball fields and forest preserves. Bethany was the best of the few friends she had. She had a big, fluffy dog that never left her side and seemed to shed a pound every time it moved. His name was Sidney. Bethany would bring him with on their little after school hangouts and he always proved to be a good playmate, even though he would send Sammy into one sneezing fit after another.

One day in early fall, the leaves just starting to bleed yellow and orange, Sammy and Bethany strode one of the forest preserve paths with Sidney lumbering between them. The sun was hidden behind dark patches in the sky and a fine, almost imperceptible, mist hung in the air. It blanketed them with the exhilarating sense of the changing seasons. As they walked, they realized they were coming up on the dreaded “turn,” where the white tree stood. The monster tree. The one that looked like a great bucket of white paint had been spilled over it. The older kids spun tall tales about how it had eaten up some kid like ten years ago and now no one would go near it. The grown-ups won’t even cut it down, they’d say. They were all apparently too scared of it as well. The girls came to the turn, and stared at the tree. Its trunk was a light brown but was overtaken with pure white bark as it climbed. Its smooth, leafless limbs dangled in the air, with random knobs that looked like joints bulging in witch’s fingers. “Well I don’t know about you, but I’m scared,” Bethany quipped, and they giggled. Then there was a scratching sound, something stirring in the branches, but not even a breath of wind. Sidney started to bark and seemed to leap amid the branches, then vanished. A high-pitched gasp, a crushing sound, then nothing.

“Sidneeey!” Bethany cried out, and reached both her arms into the branches. As her fingers pried into them Sammy’s eyes froze as the branches raised up as if on a hinge, or a jaw, and hovered over Bethany. There was a dark red passage leading into a tunnel of darkness, like an open throat. There was even a huge dangling bulge, like the one that hung at the back of her own throat like a boxer’s speed bag. It was even darker red than the surrounding walls, with white spots of what looked like her Elmer’s glue drizzling down. The branches thrust down, all at once, and bit into Bethany’s lower back. Her legs fell flat against the dirt as the rest of her, above the waist, vanished. A spray of cold blood speckled Sammy’s face, hair and clothes. The tree’s mouth opened again, and bit down with force. Bethany was gone except for one shoe that had come loose.

No one believed Sammy. Not her parents. Not the doctors. Not the nurses who brought her meals, in this awful place her parents had put her in. She could still feel the blood on her face, and her hands. But the tree was the killer. It ate her friend and her friend’s dog.