Author: Archer Glory. Archer is a keen writer of short stories who is currently working on their debut novel. They also enjoy Japanese Anime, video-gaming and music-making.

I had always dreamed of freedom. How was I to know it would come at such a price?

I used to gaze up at the heavens, jealous of the birds flaunting their feathered liberty. I would stretch up as far as I could with my very top branches but with no hope of wings, how could I ever touch the sovereignty of the sprawling sky? My roots were too deep; entangled; entrenched. I was bound since birth; fixed into place by family; imprisoned by the very arteries that brought me life.

It was the first shedding of snow, the night I saw him for the first time. I remember it well.  My sisters and I were enjoying the first few frosted flakes flittering onto our crowns. The cold and wet felt pleasing on my branches; the harsh winter wind ruffling my hardy needles.

I had never seen a man in our forest before but I’m certain that even before I noticed him, he had seen me first. I think on some level, I must have known straight away:

This man would be my freedom; my folly; my downfall.

My sisters didn’t trust him from the very beginning. I mistook their warnings for jealousy. It was me he wanted- not them. I drank in his flattery like the sun: the way he celebrated my strength and height, my greatest insecurity, and scorned my scrawny sisters. He saw in me a potential that I could not conspire of, he boasted of my beauty and made me feel singular amongst a forest of my kin. My sisters warned me not to be taken in by his intoxicating words. I should have heeded their wisdom, but I didn’t. Instead, my vanities dined on his adoration until they became drunken, bloated and foolish.  

I despaired when he turned to leave. I did not want him to go; to forego his promises of liberation and to be forced to return to loneliness and inertia. He told me he would come back for me. My hope did not dare to disbelieve him. As we parted, a whisper resonated through my bark:

‘Evergreen…Evergreen…Evergreen.’

And so, it seemed I had been named.

The man snuck back into our forest when my sisters were sleeping. I was awake with the stars, too excited for slumber. He brought something with him, no, two somethings: rope and a long sheet of metal with jagged teeth. I didn’t understand but before I had time to guess, he took the blade and sliced it into my trunk. I could feel my bark breaking and my wood weep as he dragged his sharp instrument back and forth, cutting more and more of me until what felt like only a thread remained. It hurt at first; shadows cast on the newly fallen snow. Is this what love is supposed to feel like? I asked the moonlight.

I told myself not to scream. I didn’t want to wake my sisters- I couldn’t stand their shame.

As the last clean cut sliced through my base, I felt the full force of my body fall through the night air and crash into the fresh snow. It was a strange feeling- freeing but frightening. For just a moment, I felt weightless in the air, like the birds I once envied, emancipated from the shackles of my roots. But before I had a chance to explore my independence, he came upon me with rope in hand; strapping me; strangling me.

Cut from my very roots, I watched my sisters and my forest fade into the distance as I was dragged through the frigid snow with my bloody stump and bound branches.

At journey’s end, he carried me over a threshold into darkness that was covered at the sides and above. Was this to be our home? It didn’t feel like one. It felt like a prison. It was hot and stuffy. There was no breeze to ruffle my branches. He shoved me into a corner. I shuddered in fear as he built a fire underneath a wooden mantle with hanging stockings. He prodded and poked at the chopped wood in the grate as heat and light devoured them. I reviled at the scent of burning timber. Was this a warning?

With fresh light from the flames, I watched his face as he removed my ropes. Any relief was short-lived as he soon set to work. He twisted screws into the fresh wound at my base to straighten my posture. He encircled me with new ropes that dug into my branches like barbed wire and were fettered with glass bulbs that emitted light so brash it blinded my senses. He placed heavy glass ornaments on little loops, dangling them from the ends of my branches. All the while, I just stood there, manipulated into position and with no means of escape. A blanket with a furry trim was placed at my base, to hide my mutilated trunk. I quickly learned that this man’s primary concern was to hide my pain, not heal it.

Finally, he fixed a twisted crown of wires atop my head in the pale imitation of a distorted star. Was this his idea of pity or did he mean to mock me? When I looked up, all I could see was that disfigured, cheap imitation of the heavens that were stolen from me.

Each day and night was agony: bound by barbed and burning lights, fixed into my position between the sweltering fireplace and the frosted window pane. The flames terrified me, but they were far easier to stand than the taunting view outside. Through the glass, I could just make it out: over the snowy hill- a patch of fervent green- a forest, my forest. My sisters still standing tall in all their glorious bounty.

Do they grieve me? I asked myself…What is left of me back there? Do my roots still grow or are they withered and dying like my falling needles?

And fall they did, with no air and light and earth, I had no way to grow and so I shed.

The man spared me no sympathy. He was more concerned with showing me off. Every day people came to admire me. No, not me…his trinkets. Whatever natural beauty I once possessed was marred and cloaked by his synthetic artifice. At first, I would scream, begging for someone to free me but when no one heard, instead I just bore my pain in weeping silence. The man would boast, and the people would laud. It seemed however that even our visitors’ adulation was not enough to sustain his approval.

‘I thought you were supposed to be Evergreen’, he would mutter under breath as he carelessly gathered my fallen needles and emptied them into his firepit.

It was his fault. This man had stripped me of the very gift that he had chosen me for. It was not just my needles that fell. With no fresh air to invigorate my soul and no roots to draw strength from, I could feel a little bit more of me slip away with each passing day. My glorious green was now tinged with brown; my powerful scent paled to staleness. My beauty was fading and so was my life. What would become of me when I was no longer beautiful enough for his purpose? Would I be cast into the fire like the remnants of my youth and innocence that had perished there? What other great trees had ended up as kindling before me? How many lost descendants abandoned in that cursed grate? Was I merely the latest in a forest’s worth of victims?

Now, as the man sleeps by the blazing fireplace, here I linger still, awake but barely living; tortured by the memories of my past; solemn in regret of my naïve youth. How I long for my liberty; how I long for home. Though I might have never reached the sky, at least I could still gaze upon it and dream.

I listen to the crackling fireplace. It whispers to me as an idea forms in my fading consciousness. The flames that once tormented me now beckon me towards them as my only escape.

I can feel the tawdry baubles weigh down my boughs, stripping them of whatever beauty they once had. I use their weight to pull me further and further, leaning away from the memory of my home and towards flame and oblivion.

I feel invigorated by my dawning certainty and my first taste of autonomy.

If I must die, so must he. I know what I must do.

I lurch myself into the fireplace with whatever life I still possess within my bark. I feel the sweet release of falling like I did in my forest the night he cut me and brought me home: that weightless orgasmic fall but this time on my own terms. I delight in the crashing of the infernal glass trinkets and the sparking of the lights as the flames enshroud me. As the monstrous aroma of burning wood is joined by a new scent, I know my work is done. His screams are drowned by my joy. I turn away from my captor and betrayer, as he is obscured by smoke and rapture. I turn instead for a final glance at my forest through the glass.

My last wish is that the benevolent winds might carry my ashes back to my forest so that I may return to my sisters; to my home; to my lost liberty.

I had always dreamed of freedom. How was I to know that it was within me all along?

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