The Blossom Tree

Charles stood and admired the building he owned. He was a dapper man in a black suit and a bowler’s hat that was a little too big for his head but Charles was awfully wealthy so he thought it was okay to look like a cliché. If anything, he thought, it was his duty to stand out and if that meant hewing a little too closely to the unfashionable trends of the monopoly man, well so be it.

With a building that big, and that full of smart, hard-working and attractive people, Charles felt a little entitled to extravagance. There was a whole world, a whole microcosm of office culture, in that building and he’d started it forty-three years before with a desk and a typewriter. Even after all that time he still crept out of the office at around half two every afternoon to look and admire the place while he quietly munched a sandwich from a greasy brown bag.

Next to him were some trees and Charles was suddenly surprised to hear one speak up and start talking to him.

“Psst,” he heard as he looked around with a furrowed brow. “Ey, me, me, I’m calling you!”. Charles couldn’t help but instinctively look upwards to the pink blossom tree that curled its branches upwards. “No ya blasted goon I’m not a bloody tree. Down! Look down! Here on the floor!” Charles tilted his head feeling a little foolish and found himself looking at a squalid drifter laying down in a peculiar pose with one arm behind his back, and his head against the trunk of a tree.

“My god,” the cracked lips said with a smile, “you can see me!”

Charles pulled himself together and looked the ragged man in the eye.

“What do you want?” he asked and was promptly put off at the sight of the haggard man’s black-toothed laugh.

“My God,” he said in a breathy and teary-eyed sigh. “No one sees me, nor looks me in the eye. No no no. It’s the signals see that come down from up above and stop people wanting to look me in the eye and I can’t get out myself you know what with the hand problem and I’ve been here an awful long time even if people don’t think I have been because when they look I think they just see a tree but I can’t say for sure what they can and cannot see because I can only see what I see and I see me stuck here and unable to… excuse me?”

Charles had stood up and was counting out some change from his wallet and into his hand. He was content to let a few copper coins plonk down into his palm was interrupted by an iron and desperate grip on his ankle.

“No no!” Cried the homeless man. “I don’t need that! I need help! You don’t realise I’ve been here for blinking years. There’s some kind of twisted magic at play, I don’t know what it is but you’re the first person to have seen me in years and… will you stop that!” The man cried furiously as Charles, with a concerned frown, placed the coinage gently on the floor and then shook his leg free from the grip. “For goodness sake!” the man shouted as Charles walked backwards and turned to hurry towards the large office block. “You have to help me! I’m stuck!

Charles left work later that day at some time around seven when the summer sun was still going strong. Such times of the day are a gift to late-workers like Charles who appreciated the small amount of time he spent outside on his walk home in the natural and healthy evening light. Not that he got far on this particular day. He was caught off guard by the sight of his own money looking back at him from across the street.

Feeling a little curious, Charles immediately walked over and found himself looking down at the one pound and eight pence he’d laid on the floor. Throughout history some men have seen some truly strange things but none could come close to displaying the same expression of utter disbelief that Charles had on his face. For one, he would have kissed a rattrap for the smallest amount of money on Earth and it was exactly this sort go-get-‘em capitalism that he worshipped and believed in. And for another thing, Charles was shocked to imagine that there were vagrants—actual bloody vagrants!—who would turn down free money. He could only imagine that the man had left the money there as some kind of insult to Charles and he certainly felt insulted.

He leant down and scooped up the money with a scowl on his face but not before catching sight of a glimmer within a small hollow at the base of the tree. Charles, trying to see better, stopped himself mid-bow—with his hand still gripping the change—and squinted into the dark recesses of the tree trunk. Where the branches above drifted in the wind sunlight drifted down and moved with the breeze, catching some shiny object at just the right angle to make it twinkle.

After a quick check of the street to make sure it was empty and no one would think he was barmy, Charles got on his knees for a closer look. He tried to reach in but found that at such a top-down angle his hand couldn’t quite get between the fat cheek-like walls of the tree. He knew he’d have more luck if his hand were reaching up into the hollow but for that…

Charles had one more look around for possibly-amused-spectators and, feeling overwhelmed with excited curiosity, he laid down prone onto his stomach and reached into the hollow.

Have you ever been bitten by a dog? Surprisingly, it’s not the teeth that hurt. It’s the pressure. It’s hard to describe, really, but Charles reached in and fumbled about clumsily with his fingers and thought something along the lines of the following:

*A lot of bark. It’s all rough. Things are a bit damp, as is expected. Smaller than I thought, it looked quite foreboding from the outside in. No spiders, I think. Wait! l I can feel something smooth, yes. I’m sure it’s a… it’s a ring. Smooth, perhaps a wedding band? How remarkable. I wonder what its worth is. I’ll know now as soon as I can just… wait a minute. Oh, that just doesn’t make sense.*

And then the pressure came. It cracked down on the bones across the flat palm of his hand and snapped in such a way that his wrist was pointing down but his fingers were pointing up. But the pressure kept on building and his outstretched fingers had to go somewhere. The largest, his middle finger, was snapped back at the knuckle and he managed, despite the pain, to fold his pinky and ring finger towards his palm—well it was his palm but now it was v-shaped where once it had been concave—while all sensation in his pointing finger was lost entirely.

And it just didn’t stop. In a continued series of cracks, snaps and shuddering agony the tree’s trunk continued to enclose Charles’s hand with such mind-numbing fury that at least one finger was shunted down into the ball of his palm where it popped out back-end first. Charles’s screams were electric and violent and shrill, a bit like a pug under a lawnmower. But unlike a pug under a lawnmower it wasn’t over quickly. It would be a full forty-five minutes before whatever forces animated the tree were finished with him and he was left, pale and quivering with red-rimmed eyes and a teary face, on the ground.

Charles passed out.

It was morning and Charles had spent the night vomiting profusely all over the ground where he lay. He was cold, sweaty, afraid, and for the first time in life he was scruffy and unkempt and it revolted him. His trousers were damp from where he’d been forced to soil himself (and his stomach felt that it was unfair his bladder was relieved but it was not afforded such a luxury but it only had a matter of time until it got its turn). He was emotionally distressed, feeling as though he’d been hurled backwards sixty years to those primordial years where his mother wiped pale yellow-green shit off his lower back and pampered talcum-powder onto his pink and spotty cheeks. At this juncture, the author feels compelled to clarify that Charles is sixty-eight and had an awfully strange childhood, but the point is that Charles felt as though he’d been reduced to a childish state of affairs.

It was humiliating.

Also, his hand had been eaten by a tree and some fundamental part of Charles’s mind was reeling from the impact. It was an irrational experience and he hoped he could still yet be free of it in a way that his understanding of the world would remain intact but he was soon to disabused of this notion. The bus pulled up at a time that seemed about right to the half-conscious Charles (he didn’t actually catch the bus) and he watched as pencil-skirted women with high-collared blouses, and pastel-suited men in pointy shoes, stepped down off the steps and turned towards the building Charles owned.

“E-e-excuse me!” Charles stuttered, but no one turned. “Excuse me!” he cried a little more defiantly, but no one paid attention to him. This was pretty confusing to poor Charles so he immediately became angry and started crying after his employees, “God damn you, you worthless bunch of blasted pencil-pushing morons! Look at me! I’m Charles Calridge and I demand that you turn…”

Charles was caught off guard when a young woman tossed a small piece of half-eaten ham into the wind while muttering to a nearby colleague,

“I asked for no ham, I mean honestly…” and the ham, through some quirk of physics, slapped Charles across the face. He promptly erupted,

“Jesus fucking Christ when I’m out of here I’m going to rip your bloody head off! Not one of you will have a single job left just you watch! Destitution will the only word your children will know! Just you—”

And then the bus doors closed and Charles watched in open-mouthed defeat as the last of his employees, no more than eight feet away, crossed the street and entered the office as though he didn’t exist. Confused and angry, Charles wept.

He also ate the ham.

Charles was quite happy with the new jacket. He’d managed, through a complicated series of manoeuvres, to catch a cyclist off guard and with his free hand grip him by the collar. There, anchored to the tree, he’d used every ounce of leverage he had to wrestle the coat off the man who seemed incredibly baffled as to why he’d crashed into nothing whatsoever. Charles had sworn furiously as the cyclist picked himself up, looked at everything but Charles, and then got back on his bike and rode off. But what mattered was that Charles had wrestled a water-proof overcoat off the man’s back and was tearing at the shoulder of one of the arms so that he could effectively wear it with one arm pinned.

With a cry of triumph, he slid it over one and comfortably pulled it up and around his neck. Charles had, throughout the years, acquired all manner of clothing using this bizarre method and he was pleased to see that he’d gotten much better since the first time he’d tripped a passing office clerk in the hope of stealing his shoes. He never did get the shoes but with time and effort Charles was an expert at sending anyone on wheels flying through the air and towards him with the hapless and harmless series of objects that had come his way.

Charles had a small radio, some cups to fill with rainwater, a few bits of newspaper that covered his head when the rain became unbearable, and a pile of sticks as ammunition. Food came sparsely but, and this was an unpleasant consideration, Charles could clearly feel some sort of exchange of fluids between himself and the tree deep within that bowed hollow should the wait between passing crisp wrappers and crinkled pastry bags become too long. As for the toilet, well let’s just say that Charles missed the attention of his mother and her wet-wipes. Charles had no clue as to how people who passed by couldn’t smelled him but he supposed that was just part of the tree and its potent effect.

He imagined his hand was quite rotten now. Almost definitely dead and, during times of investigation, he could clearly see that roots had grown through chunks of his flesh. In fact, and this was a little too scary for Charles to admit, he was adamant that it was pulling him in. No more than an inch a year but it mattered. Eight years in and Charles was missing a hand and a wrist, whereas at the start it had just been a hand. He missed those bones, but obviously he missed his freedom the most.

Charles dwelt on these thoughts after failing to notice that the cyclist had left something else nearby. It was only after the day had passed and the summer sun started to drift away leaving behind long shadows that he noticed its shimmering wink in the sun. It was a red little oblong thing, shaped a bit like a giant four-inch long of rice dipped in blood…

“It’s a knife! A bloody knife! A bloody bloody pissing blasting fudd-fuddli-bl… It’s a Swiss army knife!” Charles cried out, barely able to think clearly in his excitement. It was only three foot away but that might have been a mile as far as he was concerned since it was on the side of his trapped arm. Still, it was worth a try, and Charles reached across his chest in a desperate attempt to stretch his free hand and reach but it was no use. He tried a leg, and then his arm, and then his leg again. And then he heard it. A most terrifying sound.

“Huh, is that Swiss army knife?”

The sounds of a skateboard clicking rhythmically against the pavement grew louder and Charles waited in horror as he knew his one last chance at escape was rushing away from him.

In one swift movement Charles reached around and grabbed a stick and hurled it with the accuracy of a man who’s killed at least one magpie using the same method through the magic of practice. He sent the backwards-capped teenager rolling across the floor. Now, this wasn’t one of those friendly run-of-the-mill falls. Bones were broken and at least two other adolescents appeared out of nowhere to pat the boy’s shoulder, help him up, offer tissues to wipe away the blood, and ignore any signs of tears. All the while Charles was spread eagled across the floor trying to reach the knife with his foot and hoping that they’d just bugger straight off to the hospital.

“Is she on her way?” Charles heard.

“Yeah, she’ll take me to A&E.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t have a clue, I think… I think there was something on the ground. Must have tripped me up.”

“Is it that red thing over there?”

Charles, hearing the approach of large feet, became frantic and desperate. This is it, he thought, I can’t rely on my legs! I knew I’d have to do this one day! And with his free arm Charles reached across his chest towards the knife, twisting against his old shoulder blade and straining until his bald little head grew pink and a loud agonizing pop rang throughout his bones. With his shoulder dislocated, and on the verge of weeping, Charles rotated freely and snatched up the knife.

The teenager stopped dead in his tracks and stared at the spot where only a few seconds ago he’d been looking at a clear red object. He turned and swallowed his thoughts of The Matrix and The Truman Show and, like most people when faced with the unreal, just carried on like normal.

“Can’t see it anywhere. Is there something wrong with your board?”

Charles sighed, unfolded the knife and then tried to think of where he should start cutting.

Charles missed his hand but he certainly felt renewed since being released. His estate had prudently waited before declaring anyone legally dead and when, on that first day of freedom, Charles had clambered past the great big double doors of his prestigious lawyer’s office and collapsed onto the floor while blood flowed freely from his rotten stump it was to his surprise to see that his lawyer was somewhat expectant. In fact, and this was truly strange to poor Charles, no one seemed that bothered that he returned from an eight-year absence stinking of excrement and dressed like a vagrant. If anything, the whole system seemed designed to accommodate the most unbelievable acts of eccentricity on behalf of anyone worth more than $500 million. It soon became clear that disappearing for prolonged periods of time was remarkably common amongst the obscenely wealthy.

One client, his lawyer told him, disappeared to become a wrestler in Mexico for nine years and returned only after defeating the man who killed his brother. Charles was thankful he didn’t have a brother to be killed or else he too might have been expected to visit Mexico. Still, after weeks and weeks of rehabilitation, infection, disease and, eventually, recovery Charles started to wonder whether he too had his own kind of payback due.

He decided he did and proceeded to return to the tree with a few provisions—one of which was a three-hundred-pound weightlifter who was handcuffed to Charles’s remaining arm while clutching a backpack full of saws—and burned the tree to the ground. Up in the office block that had faced Charles for the last eight years he could glimpse the huddled and confused faces of hundreds of employees keen to catch a glimpse of their mad boss who had disappeared and returned only to promptly attack the nearby foliage.

What they didn’t expect to see, however, was the smoke to clear and the revelation of a pile of skeletal and ancient remains. Charles himself counted eighteen bodies with their fists haphazardly inserted into the base of the tree. Later forensic reports would confirm that the bones had been compacted with such force that they had fused into a single calcified lump. Stranger still were reports that on the day of the burning a strange smelling smoke crossed the downtown area which, when inhaled, provoked strange cases of absent-mindedness and selective blindness.

A few forensic experts dared to consider the possibility that Charles’s mad and wildly fantastic account of his disappearance was somehow true but by that point Charles had already left the city and refused further questions. He has, however, been spotted visiting various cities across the world and dropping the odd packet of crisps and pocket knife at the roots of blossom trees and waiting to see what happens next.