Unholy Trinity: “The Magic Tree,” “The Dead,” & “Rebirth” by Fariel Shafee

Our church worships at the altar of the Unholy Trinity. Its gospels are delivered as a trio of dark drabbles, linked so that Three become One. All hail the power of the Three.

The Magic Tree

“In the morning, we shall find that tree.”  His voice was deep, confident. The book on the table was fully illustrated.  The picture of a tree resembling the torso of a senile lady stared vividly.  Its head was filled with thin grayish leaves and vines shot to the ground like locks of uncombed hair.  The branches looked like crooked hands with long fingers.

In the morning, he was nowhere.  The police searched.  Nobody believed me when I said that a two-legged monster with antlers, a body filled with dark long hair, stared at me ominously before disappearing in the haze.

The Dead

The tree was more alive and darker than what I had imagined it to be from its picture.  The roughness of the barks, the silky leaves, the subtle smell that was sweet and rotten simultaneously, made me nauseous.  Yet I felt addicted.

The crack in the bark was the entrance to another world and I walked along, surrounded by moss and rodents, bones of rotting corpses.

He lay at the end, now reduced to a skeleton.  His eye sockets were two holes gaping at the universe.

It was the tree who had devoured the hunter.  Now it was my turn.

Rebirth

Encased by the mythical tree of death I weep at the skeleton I know belongs to my beloved.  “You shouldn’t have pursued this tree!” I curse.  The tree is silent, but his emotions prevail: “ It called me.”

Now I’m sensing the darkness of this world beneath.

Suddenly, I see a shadow, the same two-legged monster I had glimpsed when he had disappeared.

I am ready to die.

Then I hear a howl with a familiar humanness buried underneath.

“You?”

“Mankind gave me nothing.”  His silence mocks.

“This tree gave me a new life,” he derides as I cry out hysterically.