Timber
We grew tired of standing with no one reclining in our shade, climbing our trunks, or hanging swings or birdhouses from our limbs. What were we even here for? There was no solid line of us bordering a park, no cluster forming a cool forest. Just yards between us.
Maple dropped her lowest, heaviest branch as a warning. It was hard to give up something so meaningful, but she admitted she loved swaying in the breeze with that weight gone.
It wasn’t a conscious decision to fall, but as the air gave way beneath me, it almost felt like flying.
~
If you didn’t drink the Kool-Aid
You could slip beneath one of the half-completed houses you helped build while everyone around you takes their last breaths. Combat crawl to the middle and try to quiet your heart to avoid the armed guards following orders to ensure no one makes it out alive. Wait as the FBI make their way through what was left behind—chairs pulled up to a table, books open, a doll with its head twisted to the side. When it’s clear, you can finally escape through the jungle, make a life of your own, find something new to believe in.
~
When you find yourself inside the walls of your house
Breathe, feel the sheetrock expand and contract as you calm yourself just like you learned in hot yoga. Stretch your studs and let the cottony insulation swell to fill the space. Sing a song with the clang of the porch swing chains that sway as the wind whistles by.
Neighbors walk their dogs, reverse down driveways to go to work and run errands. They don’t realize that you are blinking the blinds open and closed, watching even though you’re beyond those chores. Everything you are, everything you need, is built on this solid foundation you will never have to leave.
~
Allison Renner is the author of Green Light: The Gatsby Cycle and Won’t Be By Your Side. Her fiction has appeared in Ghost Parachute, SoFloPoJo, Gooseberry Pie, Roi Faineant, and others. She can be found at allisonrennerwrites.com.