Free A Matter of Life and Death or Something by Ben Stephenson

whole treehouse is a “house” in fashion only. This is no shelter, no residence. It provides for no physical need. But in the moments to come, it transforms from fort to castle to clinic to airship to hotel to laboratory to lifeboat. To the boy running climbing stomping and yelling, to the boy growing, it is anything.
    We don’t mind this, this use. As much as they confuse us, we trust the humans. What reason would they have to let us go to waste? They can sense our value, in some way they must feel it. However, one thing we do find confusing. Sometimes after we are cut, they will count the rings exposed on our cross-sections. They count our layers, and this counting seems somehow important. Is it a game? “This one is fifty years old,” they say. “This one is almost a hundred.” Is it a joke? Surely they know that we, who have seen nearly every age, who have been here for so long, passing our vision through time in all directions, we who live in all time as in a single moment—surely we are not years old. Why do they want the rings’ number? Do they even notice their shape?
    Now the man and boy return; again they are building. The boy is taller and needs a bigger palace.
    The two builders drive a circuit of the neighbourhood, searching for supplies in roadside junk piles. It is “spring cleaning.” They collect as many building blocks as will fit into their car and they return home.
    They are adding and climbing and reimagining. This addition will be several times larger than the first; in a sense it will make the original an annex. Like its tinier parent, it also gets two floors, built of varied length two-by-four and other scrap beams. Inside, a ladder leads from top floor to bottom, then a set of stairs connects the bottom to the soft leafy earth.
    See them stitch its walls together like wooden quilts, like pages of a wooden scrapbook, tightly sewing in all their neighbours’ discarded window frames, their rusted screens with holes punched through, a gunrack that will never again hold a gun, sturdy railings draped with stiff wire mesh, a small family of shingles, a burgundy paint-peeled door. See them top it with a half tin, half mint-fibreglass roof.
    The man places a four-foot piece of ply between each of the first floors connecting old to new, the boy nails the bridge down and the treehouse becomes a whole. They sit in the top floor eating ham and cheese sandwiches, swatting mosquitoes and watching the river.
    The boy darts around in the treehouse’s crow’s nest. It pours. His ship has taken in too much water. He bails it over the railing with an orange bucket.
    He stands on the bottom floor’s stage; it’s a hot afternoon. He’s narrating his first one-man play, about a boulder who wishes it were an acorn. It’s opening night and a chipmunk watches, apparently captivated.
    He balances on the outside of the wall, with his stomach and spread arms pressed against it. His feet perch on whatever jutting beam or convenient branch might support his weight, exactly as the man had made him promise never to do. But he is inching along one final rock face and he is so close to the summit.
    Then he is not here. When the book falls and the man walks to the water, the boy is not in the treehouse. It sits empty. We still see the boy, and he is often near us, but the boards of the treehouse hover virtually untouched. Now they’ve weathered so much rain and snow and wind that they match the colour of our skin. The shrine’s mossy wood blends seamlessly into our bark and we embrace it. The boy still leaves it alone. Should someone come and pull out every one of its nails, we know the treehouse will still float here, fused to us.

NOW
ALONE
ONLY
HEART HER
    I haven’t written in days. I was feeling quite a bit better for a while there but now today it’s hopeless. I’ve literally been pacing down the hall for like an hour. Lost. Can’t sort