I am short and bent, but I used to be tall and proud. I sat tall and free when the lumberjack came. He looked at me smiled as he surveyed me and said what a beautiful being I was. The trees around me all whispered in the dark of night when he was gone about that damage and destruction a lumberjack like him could cause. When I asked him about this he retorted, “I’m not like other lumberjacks who would swoop in make you feel special and then stick a knife into your back.”
I believed him because I knew my lumberjack and the words he told me must have been true. We spent day after day together laughing and getting to know one another in many deep, spiritual ways. I was so wrapped up in my own little world with the lumberjack I didn’t notice the cries in the night and all the trees disappearing from the forest around me.
Until the day came when the lumberjack didn’t show up at his usual time. I searched like a little girl lost in Wal-Mart and noticed that I was all alone in the forest. Then when the sun was just beginning to tickle to horizon I saw him, he drove up in big yellow truck. I was so confused and hurt when he wrapped his chains around my waist and started ripping into my bark with his blades, sharpened with his promises to never hurt me and when he had removed all of my limbs and left me just a bare stick of scrap wood he attached a hook to his truck and pulled me down and snapped me in half.
I sit here now in the empty forest the only empty shell left staying around at all the destruction and I cry in the night woeful, sorrowful cries. I’ve become nothing but a stump and an eyesore to the world but the lumberjack wouldn’t get rid of my stump like the rest of the trees in the forest no because he needed me to live. Thrashing around like a leprechaun about his gold he took pride in what he had done to me. Like he wanted the whole world to see the empty shell he made out of me.