The Whipping Tree

I: Charcoal and Cerulean

I

Charcoal and Cerulean

         When Joan blinks her eyes open in the morning, her head is a slab of marble while her thoughts slip and slide off of it, unable to find purchase.

         She allows herself to come to before rising and going through her everyday motions. She is in the midst of pulling on her stockings (there is a breath of frost on her windowpane) when she remembers where she and the rest of the town must gather today.

         The Day of Choice.

         The process is short from what she remembers. Her father told her once how people tried to trick the Whipping Tree. They believed that if they were not themselves on the Day of Choice, the tree would be confused and decide on someone else.

         The notion is ridiculous to Joan. What did they not understand? Though she has only faced a Choosing twice in her life—the first too early even, for her to remember—she knows if it was so easy to delude the tree, there would be a solution to their Noci problem already, and that is something no one is close to discovering.

         Vera appears in her room shortly after her pondering and runs a comb through her hair. The two have become a mother-and-child pair, and while Vera has warm thoughts of Joan’s infancy, she wants more than anything to see the girl return to herself.

         Sometimes she sees Joan as the child she once was, and other times the glimmering in her eyes makes her seem a thousand years old. The in-between has disappeared for her, a chasm having opened up and swallowed the bridge between her past and future, and that is a perfect way to describe it, thinks Vera, because the girl is nothing if not stranded.

         “Have some breakfast before you leave, Miss Joaneveive. Please.” She offers a smile in the mirror, a hopeful one, and she receives her answer in the form of a nod.

         “I will.”

         Joan forces down a slice of bread and a handful of fruit before she is following the path to the tree.

         There is no one there at this time and she is not surprised. The townspeople avoid the tree like they would a disease, for even without a criminal chained to it or a Choosing looming ahead, the still tree elicits a chill that wriggles to the core.

         She faces it with her arms at her sides, palms facing forward. A burst of heat hits the back of her head and her eyes squeeze shut.

         “A memory. Nothing but a memory,” she tells herself, and the warmth disappears just as quickly as it came.

         Four steps take her to the trunk and she places her feet in the footprints from the previous day when she visited.

         She imagines she can hear the tree breathing, that Byron sits before her.

         She wants to say something to the tree, ask it whether it is painful to feel the minds of hundreds before it and still choose whom to send to their death.

         “I don’t despise you,” she ends up murmuring. She traces the knotholes in the trunk and wraps her arms around it. “You did what you could to make amends afterwards.”

         She stands there until the rest of the townsfolk begin to appear, and all that she thinks about is how different, how opposite she was and is to Byron.

         “Miss?”

         Joan barely registers the tangle of voices behind her.