Endings

How the Redbud Tree met its doom

Is this funny, or is this weird…maybe it is both, or maybe it is neither, idk, but it was fun to write. Thinking it is a Macabre Monday, and not a Thorny Thursday though. :)

What used to be his favorite tree had failed to bloom this year. Patiently Keith waited, watched, even prayed for it to offer up some deep pink blooms but it was not to be - the Redbud, a skeleton of its former self, a ghost in his garden cast its harsh, spiny shadow over the blossoming landscape around it. How strange to think now of the joy he had felt last spring while planting it with Penny. They broke up later that summer and it was not an amicable separation - she had viciously pointed out unforgiveable and untrue things about him. He had hated her for a while until he read that there is a thin line between hate and love, after which he carefully cultivated indifference.

For a time, Keith avoided the tree and used the side door to his house opposite the garden.  During his recovery from the trauma of Penny’s harsh slander, he noticed he would awaken occasionally with earth-soaked feet and hoped he had not resumed his troublesome sleepwalking. Each day (or night) some untimely event would compel him to look out the window that overlooked the damned thing: sometimes, a loud threatening noise that turned out to be a neighbor dragging a garbage can across pavement, other times, a screeching siren that ended up turning onto a neighboring street, off and on he would hear a dog bark in panic only to see it was simply excited for its owner’s return from work. Each time, each and every time though, when he peered into his garden, the tree seemed to know something...to mock him.

Through the end of the summer shortly after Penny’s awful comments and on through the fall and winter, Keith eagerly awaited spring so that in the glory of its beauty, hope and innocence, he could take his new Schrade SCAXE5 bought just for the occasion, and indifferently chop the Redbud to pieces. He intended to burn the remains in his fireplace as he sat comfortably reading some Norman Mailer, sipping Remy Martin, and smoking his favorite cigar. Keith was a fucking man's man...no matter what that bitch said. Now he would have to settle with the completely unsatisfying removal of something already dead, an anti-climactic act. I’ll bet she snuck over and killed my Redbud, he thought suddenly. Keith spent his evening watching his security camera footage though all he could find that seemed amiss were some grainy, nighttime meanderings of a middle-aged man in pajamas peeing on his Redbud.