When I was a boy my family went to visit my grandparents for Christmas, when we parked we came across an odd tree. I remember being stunned by how weird it looked. The tree looked as if its bark were skin, the hardness of wood was there and it bunched and sagged around the joints of branches forming creases. It had no leaves and the branches were thicker than it feels like they should have been. The skin tree sat as a stark light brown against a garden of vivid green hedges, lemon and apple trees, and other colourful plants.
We didn’t see my Grandad that Christmas, my Grandma said that he went away one day and hasn’t come back. She said the police were trying to find him but had no luck. That dinner we sat in silence, and I couldn’t help but look outside and focus on the tree, it gave off a sound nobody else seemed to be able to hear that called for me; I really wanted to go outside and stand under the tree but my Mum wouldn’t let me as it was too cold out. We didn’t hear from him again
When I was a teenager my parents got a divorce. I didn’t see it coming as they seemed like they were fine with each other, according to my friends I wasn’t the only one, as over the last few years divorces were becoming more and more common in town. “Women are realising they don’t have to stay in bad living situations just because their parents did” my friend Kathy said. I was shocked, I never would have thought he was a bad person to her, or bad enough for that to happen. When it came time for custody hearings my Dad didn’t show up, custody was automatically awarded to Mum. I thought it was bizarre; he was never late to anything. For this they put out a warrant for his arrest, eventually him not being around was getting concerning.
Some time soon after, my Grandma died. Before the funeral I went for a walk by her house, I saw the skin tree. It felt silly to think of it like that, the imagination of a child I guess. On a second look I noticed something off. The image before my eyes gave such a sense of contrast; the brightness of the evening sun highlighting the now pale tree in a garden of rotting darkness as if it had displayed a silhouette of brightness instead of darkness. The skin tree was the only living plant in the garden, the hedges had no leaves and its thicket of twigs had seemingly shrunk, the colourful flowers had withered and gone dark, and the bare fruit trees had led to a throng of rotting fruit on the ground.
Still I heard the sound, it was louder than it was when I was a child. The skin tree had grown somewhat, some of the branches had changed position and the proportions between trunk and branches were different, it was somehow more lopsided, and its shadow crept along the- -my phone rang, I realised the view was darker than it felt like it had been a second ago, after checking my phone I realised I had been staring at this tree for several hours. I pulled out my phone, it was my Mum, she was calling because she was concerned, so I made my way back home.
I don’t know what kind of phenomena it was but on the walk back I started to notice more of these trees, not as big and oddly shaped as the one at my Grandma’s house. Some small, some large, there were more than I expected or reasonably assumed there would be; they were very spaced out, but the idea there were this many was concerning for a reason I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It was until I got home that I felt sick, on the nature strip for my Mum’s house I noticed something I had never noticed before. It was shocking that I had noticed, there was no reason I didn’t, it was right there, another stark light brown tree directly in front of our house-
-I finished getting changed and ready to relax, Mum called me down stairs as she wanted to talk about life going forward. She talked about how we’d be better off in some ways but worse off in others, it became apparent that my Dad was not as good as I had thought. During the conversation I couldn’t help but look in the direction of the front door. I don’t know what I was looking for, if anything at all, it was very distracting.