Alyssa Duran- Week 5- Story Nine

The Tree

When Margaret opened the door to her apartment she pulled a leaf out of her hair. “That damn tree’s in my way!” She screamed. Her daughter ran out of the room and hesitated before helping her mother with her coat and asking what happened. “I was walking up to the building, that’s all. This tree, it’s so huge! You know the one, right outside the front doors? Yeah, well, I think it’s getting bigger. It’s so in the way of the door it actually stopped it when I opened it! No tree is meant to be that close to a building!”
It came to be presented then, how does one remove a tree from their apartment complex’s front door? The answer was simple, ask the manager. Margaret went down the elevator after she had plucked all the leaves from her hair and walked to the back room, a sullen little place with a clunking refrigerator, a ratty couch, a frizzy television, and a fat bald fellow drinking a beer. “Mr. Dunkin, that tree has got to go!” Mr. Dunkin stared up from his place and waved his hand in a very offending manner.

Mr. Dunkin was sitting on his couch, a comfy old thing, stolen by his ex-wife, but then taken back again when he broke into her house and pushed it out the front door. She had known it was him, but her new boyfriend bought her a brand new one anyway and all was forgiven.
He liked his room dark when the re-runs of Wheel of Fortune came on in the afternoon. No one bothered him much. The apartment building was cheap and tenants were not one to complain about a funny sounding toilet, only a broken one. That came often enough and they had long since learned to call a plumber rather than Mr. Dunkin. He was settled in his ways, a lazy fellow with no regard for others. He rarely left his room, in fact. When Wheel of Fortune began he heard a ruckus at the front door, a shrill female voice ruining his concentration. Rather than being the good manager he should have been he rolled his eyes and turned up the volume.
Twenty minutes later, as the climax of his show came as a full frontal attack from him---he was shouting the answer out in heaves, the shrill voice came booming through his door saying something about a tree, but he couldn’t afford to miss the contestant get a vowel that was incorrect and all he could do was wave his hand which sent her into a hideous rage of cuss words and spit like a hissing cat. This upset Mr. Dunkin in an unfashionable manner. His pile of beer proved his mindset to the woman only too late. He huffed himself up from the couch and wobbled toward her, drool bubbling down his chin. “What right do yah have walking in here and yellin’ at me like yer my wife? Huh? I’m watching TV, my goddamn show, so you better go an’ fix your own damn problems yah crazy bitch!” He took a gulp of his beer and wiped his jaw with his arm and glared at her with hazy eyes. The woman was pushed against the wall, inhaling his stench and cringing from it. She huffed, straightened herself out, yelled a threat that he didn’t listen to, and walked out of the room.

The tree had a crack in it from a door that had been slammed against it. The glass had shattered on its trunk. The woman had avoided the glass and rebounded to attack some of the lower branches of the tree in a fury. The tree did not know why the woman was angry with it. It could only stand silently watching, feeling the hurt as its leaves were ripped off and some twigs were cracked. The woman left with leaves in her hair and she did not come back that night.
That woman had long since walked by the tree. For years now she had never seemed to have a problem with it. Sure, the tree was close to the building, but it provided much needed shelter from rain and was a good friend of many dogs. This tree considered itself a monument on the face of a city where trees as big as this one was rare. It grew through the cement in a frenzy of high branches and easily topped the third floor.
It was a quiet tree. It kept its leaves from rustling in the wind as best as it could. It watched people walk by in a hurry carrying on with their lives, avoiding the tree trunk, making their way around it as if it didn’t exist. Then, here was this woman and her anger. And now its leaves were scattered on the floor and it sat there one more night before a giant white truck pulled up and chopped the leaves with a great saw and placed them in a giant shredder. When the tree was cut bare it became sad, and wilted. The woman came out and thanked the men. They left with the poor shredded leaves.
Later that evening a larger truck came up the street, a construction crew that dug the tree out and threw it in the back and hauled it to some factory and there on that truck the tree died, its green inside turned yellow, its majestic atmosphere turned dismal. It was nothing but a piece of wood now, and the woman had won.

These are tales of people and a rebel tree or this is a tale about an angry woman, a tale about a wretched oaf, and a tale about a giant tree. They happened in a city up north, with skyscraper buildings and a little apartment building on a busy, crowded street. The woman was, in fact, angry with her husband who worked too much. She took it out on the tree. The man, in fact, was badly raised by his mother and was introduced to alcohol at an early age. The tree had lived there for nearly one hundred years and never had anyone given it any mention to it until that day. The question of these tales ends at who is in the right and who is in the wrong? Who makes that decision? Is it you?