Dahlia and her twin kindergarteners sat on their front porch and watched the arborists. A man scaled their ash’s thick trunk like a tree frog, the boys cheering as each yank of the climbing rope propelled him higher. When he found a sturdy branch to support him, the arborist took out his chainsaw and attacked the surrounding boughs. Mateo hid his face in Dahlia’s lap, but Javier whooped as each branch fell. In under an hour their once-majestic tree stood limbless, bare bark against blue sky.
It was the emerald ash borers’ doing; the opalescent beetles had burrowed into the tree’s bark to lay their eggs. Once hatched, the larvae had tunneled into its living tissue and consumed it, cutting off its circulation system. If Dahlia had been more vigilant, could she have prevented its slow, inevitable starvation? Her shoulders tightened at the thought. But oh, how she had fought for the tree! As soon as she had discovered the infestation, she had called the arborists and insisted on every treatment: imidacloprid injections, soil drenching, bark spraying. But the borers had already burrowed too deeply, severing the tree’s flow of nutrients. If they didn’t take it down, it would become a liability.
The arborists began to pull on a rigging rope tied around the tree. Dahlia could hear it creak and groan as it resisted its felling, and her eyes burned as she thought of how similar people were to trees. After her husband’s confession, he had committed to treatment; he was three years sober. But the deceptions and half-truths, the other women — they had hollowed out her insides.
When the ash toppled, the impact shook them, and Dahlia hugged her boys close. Her yard was bare, bleak — but free of infestation. She stood, and the three went inside.
Kate Champagne lives in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. A lover of languages, she holds a Master’s in Spanish from Middlebury Language Schools in Vermont with a specialization in linguistics. She teaches Spanish by day and writes in the in-between, especially moved to give voice to the everyday experience and the complexities of the interior life. Kate has been published in Allegro Magazine and Chariot Press and has work forthcoming in Veritas Journal and Quillkeepers Press.
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