Open the Earth to Enclose Me
When I was a girl, my mother told me that someday I would be a tree. But I was young and didn’t understand.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It will happen all at once,” she said. “Your soft skin will grow hard and thick, your arms will give way to a network of branches, your hair will turn to foliage, and your feet will root themselves to the earth.”
I looked up at the barren branches of the lone chestnut that once shaded our lawn. “But I don’t want to be a tree,” I said.
“Someday you will.”
***
At school, we took classes on the metamorphosis. The change would be beautiful, they told us. We could prepare for the becoming, they said.
“I want to be a sycamore,” said one girl.
“I’d like to be an apple,” said another.
“But why do we need to become trees?” I pressed.
My teacher looked me up and down, wishing I was a tree already. “It’s just the way things are, Daphne.”
I put my head in my hands and looked out the window to watch the boys and their long legs speeding through the tall grass. “Why do you teach the boys to run?” I asked. “You could teach them something else instead. To sew, or to read, or even to walk.”
“Daphne.” My name came out so sticky-sweet bits of it caught in her throat. “The boys need to run. It’s in their nature.” She smiled.
“Running is in my nature, too.”
Her lips fell into a hard, thin line but her eyes still held enough warmth that I didn’t wither. “You will find stillness.”
***
I died one hundred times before I became.
The first time hurt, as first times so often do. We sat by the water and angled thin rocks at the river’s skin to see if we could make them fly. My rock skipped eight times before the water claimed it. “Hah!” I said. “Did you see that?” When I turned to face him, he was staring at me as though it was me, and not him, who was the sun.
His hand moved so fast I almost believed that he’d been cradling my head for as long as we’d been sitting there. And he tilted my chin up, up, up, with the confidence of a man who has been carefully taught that he and he alone can decipher the ancient language of a sharp intake of breath. Newly awakened nerve-endings rippled my skin. It felt good, the way my heart could no longer keep time. He was the brightest light this moth had ever seen.
Then his hands roved down, down, down, tracing my untouched curves in search of a place I’d yet to discover on my own. I twisted my hips and untangled my arms. “Not yet,” I said. “Not now.” The sun god did not falter. The corners of his lips lifted into a smile that lit him from the inside.
“It’s all about the chase,” he said, knowingly.
He pulled me close and I closed my eyes. Is it time? I wondered.
He pressed on and I sent every racing thought on to my fingertips. Before I have even begun?
His fingers probed for entry and I felt my hard fingernails softening to make room for new life. Should I sprout leaves? I wondered.
He rooted his hands in my hair and blew honeyed breath into my ear. Is this what I’ve trained for?
“It’s all about the chase,” he said.
***
I taught myself to run.
In a hidden glade in the bowels of the forest I dodged rocks and roots and branches until I’d forged a well-worn path. Shaded by towering cedar, peeling birch, and sticky pine I called out to my sisters who had known deep in their bones that they would never be able to outstrip the many-faced god.
My heart pounding with exquisite exertion, I placed a hand on the thin trunk of a fledgling elm. “When did you know it was time?” I asked.
My sisters said nothing. They were trees.
I measured the years in sprints. I ran so hard and my legs grew so strong and supple I could no longer fathom conceding a single day to the static existence my change would spawn. As the lamb flees the wolf, the deer the lion, and the dove the eagle, I scrambled over rocks and roots and branches, my predators in tireless pursuit. I was behind even when I was ahead. I ran, and they ran faster. I leapt, and they leapt higher. I yelled, and they yelled louder. But each time my strength was spent, I learned I could keep moving without the fragments of myself they took.
***
The day my blood sang that it was time to shrug off my earthly form, the sky was dotted with just enough cotton-wool that I could convince myself there was some delineation between earth and heavens. I was laying in the meadow where the grass is tall and the wildflowers burgeon when I heard his voice.
“Don’t be frightened,” he said. A hare without cover, I froze. He held his hands high and cocked his head to the right. For a moment, he looked innocent as a young boy caught with one hand in the cookie jar.
“You were right to be scared of the wolf, and the lion, and the eagle,” he said. He took one small step closer. “But hear me, nymph. They pursued you for conquest. But me? My motives are pure. I pursue out of love.”
Love. The word buzzed through me and settled like a stone in my gut. “Love?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Love.”
“This is not love.” I took a measured step backward, testing his resolve.
“Feel the way your heart trembles.” He took a measured step forward, closing the gap. “Those are the stirrings of love.”
And at last I understood. “You find me more beautiful in flight,” I said.
He smiled and I was a young woman again, daring rocks to fly and staring too long at the sun. “It’s all about the chase.”
I ran.
He pursued.
My lungs ached.
He recited poetry.
I wore through the soles of my shoes.
He had wings on his heels.
When I’d run far enough and long enough, when I’d taken him deeper into the forest than I’d ever dared venture, when I could see his outstretched arm about to pull me down, down, down, I called on my sisters. “Please,” I said. “I am ready.”
The moment the prayer tumbled past my lips my soft skin grew hard and thick. My arms gave way to a network of branches. My feet, once so swift and sure, clung to the forgiving ground. The earth opened. At the intersection of violence and beauty, I was born.
***
I am a tree. I do not know where I begin, but I know where I end. When I am old enough, the fungal blight that drove the chestnut tree to near extinction will take me, too. I have much work to do.
I am growing nuts. They are small and heavy and full of promise. Some will not take root. But if the earth can open to enclose just one, a new tree might grow. That tree might live long enough to send up new shoots. And those shoots might sprout in a world with no blight.
Evann Makati Normandin is a 29-year-old editor working in educational publishing residing in Harvard, MA. She completed her BA at Middlebury College in English with a focus on literature of trauma and traumatic memory, and her MSc at the University of Edinburgh in English with a focus on trauma and post-apocalyptic fiction. Her work has been published in Broadway World, Rewire News, Slush Magazine, and The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts.
