Jacob Mack

The tree had always been dead. When one looked at it, though, they could just imagine where all the seasons had touched it: the blooming youth of spring, the aged warmth of summer, the withering of autumn, and now the death of an eternal winter. Its whole history seemed visible upon the wood of its trunk, like a book which, while closed, still looked fit to bursting with pages.

Some had cited sorcery as the cause, claiming an ancient warlock had cursed its branches to never again bear fruit, nor even the scarcest hint of flower. Others claimed a scientific cause, some sort of instant and perpetual petrification brought on by unknown means. Still more professed a belief that it had been touched by the vengeance of some god, wrathful that something so beautiful could exist without the hand of divine creation.

Two brothers, the elder a man grown and the other but ten and one, walked together through the garden of the dead tree.

“Each story,” the older brother said, “is a lesson in living. The ending – nor even, truly, the beginning – is never so important as the middle.”

“And what about the tree?” the boy asked, pointing to it. The older brother looked first to him, then to the branches, extending out like the hand of a specter.

“The tree has always been dead.”

Jacob Mack is a writer and English teacher from Macon, Georgia.