The Stealing Tree

"What did you take girl?"
"Nothing I swear." She rushed to the other side of the room, clutching her arms to her chest. Tears welled to the corner of eyes.
Footsteps pounded on the wooden floorboards towards the poor cowering girl. The mans ominous, dark body hung like a tower over her trembling body. Her lip quivered and her face contorted.
He repeated himself is such a way that made her shudder all the more.
"What did you take?"
Tears pushed past her eyes and down her cheek, the old man almost took pity on her, but his humanity was stolen a few bottles ago. He swung his hand on a downward arch and a loud crack, like that of a snapping twig rang through the small cockroach of a house.
The mans great brutish hand had split the girls check. A deep red canal opened, reveling the flesh beneath her skin. It was small, about and inch long and no more than a few millimeters wide, but it burned like fire.
Her body fell, as nothing more than a sack of bones. Her arms fell too and with them came 6 tiny acorns.
"Why?" The man asked as his boot slammed down to the floor, smashing three of her beloved seeds.
She whispered through sniffles "I wanted to grow a tree."
"So you stole them?" He barked.
She didn't answer.
"They were five cents. Why didn't you just ask me?"
She didn't answer
"I didn't raise a thief." His boot fell once more and crushed the last of the acorns, turning them into powder and jagged shards.
He spun on his heal and shuffled out of the crippled house, knocking green hued bottles aside as he went. The bottles clattered and rolled making loud clinking noises.
"Bitch" he whispered as the door slammed behind him.
The sound of an engine sputtered and coughed into a roar and then left in a black cloud of smoke.

The girl, once sure that the engine wouldn't return, crawled to her seeds. They were crumbled and dead.

She remembered first seeing them. They sat on a small cart, surrounded by various other seeds and plants, but the acorns caught her eye, he light brown hue of them almost like a tan in the sun light. They were cute, each of them sitting there neatly in rows and each with little hats. She smiled and felt an overwhelming sense of wonder as she realized, for the first time, that seeds contained more than seeds. They contained sprouts, and beyond that fragile little trees, then great and mighty oaks, which dropped thousands of acorns and thus started the cycle over again. This emotion quickly flooded into a desire to own her own tree.
One that would live far beyond her and make acorns of her own.
So she did what any other child would do. She grabbed some. Just a few, just enough to make sure a tree would grow, compensating for duds and all. She stuffed them into her pocket and if she were more coordinated she would have gotten away with it, but her arms were still a bit stubby, and her fingers did not yet work so well at the joints. The result was 6 acorns clattering and clacking to the ground. The old weather worn shopkeeper who had been snoozing until this point, woke with a start and went to investigate.
He bent down near his acorn cart and beneath it was a very guilty looking young girl. He smiled at her and helped her gather the acorns from the other side of the cart.
Without saying a word he shuffled back over to her, two acorns in hand. He dropped them into her hand. She looked to him, fear dancing in her eyes.
He then whispered in a quiet raspy voice.
"Have you got any money?"
She shook her head back and forth.
His smile grew to either side of his face, so wide that all his wrinkles seemed to disappear.
"Would you like to have them?"
She looked to the old man. His face was like that of leather, wrinkled and worn greatly, his hair light blonde and scattered on his head. It looked as if he had taken a
birds nest and flipped it over directly on his head. In fact, she thought, he rather looked like an acorn himself.
She nodded her head up and down.
"Well, then you may have them. As my treat."
He smiled again with a warmth that the girl had never seen before and would never see again.
Just then a familiar man came around the corner, carrying nothing, with a scowl on his face.
"You..." He barked "what are you doing with my girl?"
The man stood, as he had been crouching to meet the girls eye level, and rose to the oncoming man.
"Oh nothing. We were just discussing current events." He winked to the poor girl.
She smiled and looked down gratefully at her seeds.
"We'll discuss them with someone else. Come." And the girl left but not before trying to wink back at the old man. It came across as a very gallant blink. The aged man chuckled to himself as he returned to his post.

And now here they were, crushed to a fine powder with no chance of resurrection. She pushed the corpse to a pile in the middle of the room. She wept fiercely, then not at all.

She stayed that way for hours, until the sun had fallen below the tress and the moon rose to take its place. Tiredness consumed her. She set her head down and fell asleep in the moonlight that streamed through a hole in the roof. She slept without movement.

In the morning she woke to the sunlight burning her skin. She opened her eyes and saw hope. A tiny acorn sat toppled on its side underneath a chair. It was merely half the size of all the rest but it didn't matter, it could grow. She scrambled to the chair and knocked it over. She pulled up the tiny acorn and looked at it closely. It was recognized as one the old man had handed to her. She smiled and sprinted outside out the crooked door half stumbling out of excitement.
Outside the trees swept back and forth in quiet, solemn wind. It must be Sunday she thought and looked for a place to plant the tree. She looked and looked, circling the house a few times before finally picking one. A small section to the west side of the house. She put it there because it was next to her window. And she would be able to see it when it grew fully.
She grabbed the soil with her bare hands and pulled. Her body jolted back and she was left with a handful of grass. She did this a few time before realizing that it wouldn't work. She got an idea.

She went back to the house and found a nice green hued bottle. She looked through a few until she found what she considered a good one. Then, she grasped it by the neck and slammed it against the door frame.
She smiled at the sharp points she had created.
Then she charged back to the place she had picked out. The makeshift shovel tore the ground easily and she tossed a few piles of displaced soil to the side when a car door slammed behind her.

She gasped and dropped her precious seed. The clean and nicely dressed man saw it fall from her hand. Pure and irrevocable anger flooded his being.
"You stupid idiot." He shouted at her with the most intense anger she would ever hear.
He charged her like a bull and the girl, in a panic spun, bottled gripped in her hand.
She flinched waiting for pain that would never come. Her eyes were squeezed shut and all she heard was small rustling in the grass. She opened her eyes confused.
The mans black clothes had turned a deep almost purple red. Blood seeped out of a jagged open wound in his stomach. His eyes starred upwards, blank and with little anger.
She looked at the lifeless body and wondered if she had done it. A ring of flesh showed in his gapping gut. Organs were beginning to flop out like dead fish.
She looked at the man and was reminded of the splintered remains of her acorns.
/ / / /
The jury had come to a conclusion. Most believed that such a peaceful leader of the church could never harm a child, much less his own and that it were only fitting that they follow his own teachings: An eye for and eye.
And by the time the trial was over the tree was fully grown. The leaves rustled quietly and our poor girl looked up to them as she was given a collar. She looked especially to her dear acorns, that were budding amongst the copious green parchments.
She looked away from them, to the cast of people that stood before her, then back to the acorns. Those lovely seeds that would forever be full of endless life. Life that would supersede hers and everyone else's.

She shook fiercely and then not at all.

The End.