On Coalbank road there is a bend of listless navigation and beside that bend there is a stump.
Be it a marker or simple piece of passing scenery, this stump has become indelible to the bend of Coalbank road, existing as the setting sun that lives within an amber skyline.
The dirt road of this Eastern Forest was scratched into the earth by hand long ago and was made to wind through the forest simply and without deviation. With weary eyes and strength undone the road would eventually reach a tree that stood too tall to simply cut down. The day was long and the path ahead stretching, and so it was that the road was drawn to bend around this mighty tree, a gentle deviation that listed by its shade and protection.
Leaves would drop and the land became a clearing, fresh grass was encouraged to grow, and a neat fence was steaked down to line the road’s curve. People would rest in this merry place as they travelled. Only wind in the shifting the leaves seemed left for conversation as the bend held a quietness to itself. It was old, older than fire and born before the first falling of rains, the land had been forged by its age and in growth it had spoken each word through only its presence.
Time leads all things to grow and expansion in the valley had called for the tree to be cut down, the enormity of life no longer a marker for its right to remain standing. It fell without breath, and it fell without argument, and only a stump was left to pervade a feeling of profound emptiness now left on this corner of Coalbank road.
The stump would not burn, no axe or spade stood strong enough to dig through its roots, the needs of the present were not focused upon things of the future, and it was decided that nothing could be done.
The wood was put to use, building houses and carts, the leaves mulched and burnt into ember, all but the stump found new use within the world, small pieces of forgotten history holding new meaning, new life in altered spirit.
But the bend was hollow. No longer shaded by reaching canopy, travellers would pass by into the glade beyond, the open plain existing as a scar rather than a place of reflection. Life would avoid this place of silence, the wind without leaves to flow between would only pass over this clearing, a pale howl weakly taking the place of a voice that was once so rich.
The stump grew old, and people forgot the tree. With varnish and laquear the remains were chipped and shaped into a marker.
Sawn into the stump was a bench and upon that bench was a man, looking to the clouds while he fished in a waterless creek with a non-existent rod.
‘How many days until I’m forgotten?’ He spoke aloud and rested his head against the flat of a tree no longer standing. He saw ghosts of leaves, dropped upon the ground in the ides of Autumn and listened for the sound that had long halted its echo.
For a time, the man would count the rings of this absent tree and he would stop as they became hard to decipher. With eyes too old to recount the first days of youth, he saw that the tree had stood before his grandfather, and two generations before that. It had stood alongside forebears of names that he could regrettably never know and had been born within the span of something greater than history, something so tangible that its simple absence could define it.
Movement heralded rain as the clouds dotting the blue began to drift with more weight, a tide of austral frost paling the sky into azure shaded glass and eventually fading to a dullness of opaque grey.
But the man remained in thought, he saw the march of time along Coalbank road, the footprints of each year wash across the glade with banality. His waterless creek would dry at times, sprouts of life blooming without thought or regret, a hope that present should hold no change again. In other years the creek would grow, the entire clearing would be consumed by a river of enormity. Banks ever crumbling outward, all would be lost as the river would sweep the land clean, all life equalised in one single moment.
People walked along this creek at their pace and within their thoughts. Be it with urgency or in ambling nature, all these people were unified by direction, they walked together, each step following someone, each step leading someone else.
The old man knew he would join them, one day he would walk by this place again and be untold by sight and by memory. No longer did the tree exist upon Coalbank road no longer did it count the years of come what may. An archive will exist as finite and the mark of now shall be defined by the creation of next.
Tomorrow can be so many things for this man, the summation of his life still yet to be drawn. In wind and in rain, that is why he sits upon this bend, that is why he chooses to fish in a waterless creek with a non-existent rod.
He dreams.
J. McCray
2022
Sunday Short Stories 