Free Dead Willow by Joe Sharp Page A

box.
    What it had found inside was a puzzle.
    The pieces did not fit and the pattern eluded the Willow. It had cobbled them together, bit by bit, merging them with its own life’s blood. But, something was missing, some key that the Willow was not seeing. For it had never before been inside of a human.
    Then, the woman came without a pine box.
    She dressed darkly, her face behind a veil of thin, black lace. The Willow had seen these women before; they were different from the men. Emotions radiated off of them in waves, but they never uttered a word. They would stand before the markers for the longest time, squares of white cotton cloth in their hands, dabbing at their eyes. Small moans escaped them. This was called mourning.
    The Willow did not know how it knew this, but it did.
    The woman was covered with long black folds of cloth, showing little. Those in the boxes had been covered in such. The Willow could remember having pierced through the layers before it could penetrate the flesh. After that, the cloth fell away as the flesh was liberated. The Willow had no use for these coverings.
    The woman entered the shade of the tree, planting her footsteps in the black loam. She reeked of loss and grief … and anger. She canvassed the markers, tracking through the hallowed ground with her leather boots until her eyes fell on a single stone. She stopped before it, and a tremble ran through her body and through the soil and through the tree. The Willow could sense it; the woman was unbelieving … and now she had seen.
    The woman went down to her knees, the folds of dark cloth splayed out all around. Her sudden impression in the soil sent a tingle through the heart of the Willow that jolted its senses. It sent roots to the surface of the soil, tiny tendrils that probed her gently. In her state, she would not feel the sensation. She was riveted to the stone, and to whatever its carvings implied.
    The Willow reeled from the mix of emotions, rage and confusion … and a piercing sadness that was chipping away at her stubborn refusal to believe. The tree could sense the importance of this marker and it needed to know more. It sent the probe deeper, penetrating the woman’s flesh tenderly. It was not enough to draw her from the pain that had shredded her heart, but it was enough for the Willow.
    A key had been turned in the lock of its understanding. It now saw the ladders of life spiraling into long twisted ribbons of pulsing information. The rungs on the ladders showed it something new, some new line or angle or curve in the blueprint of this woman. As the Willow flowed in and around each rung, bits of image and thought and feeling flooded the tree’s matrix.
    It glided about on the vortex that defined this woman, infusing its life with hers, until it had come full circle. By then, there were no secrets or puzzles. It knew this creature intimately, just as it knew what was next.
    The woman mourned her mate, lost in some great conflict that the Willow had only experienced in the abstract. Now, it felt the loss, the anguish, the quaking hatred. It had lived each day of her life in a blink, and now it understood.
    The woman who loved and had been loved, was utterly alone, her only family a moldering corpse beneath the tree’s roots.
    She would not be missed.
    Its root, like a fist, punched up through the soil and through the woman, impaling her like a boar on a spit. Her red-rimmed eyes shot open and she stared, no longer comprehending, into the stone marker that was a monument to her late husband. Her hands pawed the earth as she tried to push away from the root. She could not.
    Tiny wooden fingers wrapped about her and tugged her down into the black dirt. She gagged on the soil that she inhaled into her mouth and her lungs. More and more tendrils sprang up until the woman was a writhing mass of vines and leaves, pulling her down into the grave with her beloved.
    The vines caressed her as the clothing was torn from her body and left