Everywhere I go the trees scream and burst into pieces. They moan and barf up explosions of bark, leaves and sap spraying their bloody mixture onto my arms and shoulders and face until I cannot move, but I am not angry at them—the trees. For they are not dead; they are dying. You must understand that they are not like trees from your world. Our trees are not stoic and proud. Our trees fight back with giant ferocious limbs that cut through the air like long knives. Their bellies are spotted and speckled. They can choose where they root, and often they move toward our homes forcing us further and further together until we have no room to breathe. While yours are typically a neutral brown or beige, ours are red and angry as if yours communicated what you have done to yours trees and not what we have done to ours. Where I am from the trees are like your gods. We water them from the freshest of our springs and make offerings of food, our best bread and wine and cheese, which they gnaw on with their teeth that look like leaves until the mixture is mashed down to a good pulp pooling out of the ground, ripe and ready for their roots to slurp up.

And although our bodies are the same, look the same and feel the same, and I have hair on my head, I must warn you about your trees. For you do not know this, but your trees connect to our trees through the ends of their roots in what you could only understand as a natural form of wifi, an internet of living things. And they feel the pain of their other-worldly brethren the way you feel pain when one of your own dies if you knew them well, but these trees feel the pain for those they have never met or spoken with. And it is for this reason that I have tied myself to the tree in this backyard on this grass that you claim is yours—to feel the heartbeat of their pain, so I can hear the heartbeat of my world—and when you ask me to leave and threaten to call the police it does not mean anything to me, because you cannot see there are much bigger concerns beyond what you can comprehend. And you say what about your kids who play in this yard? And you tell me you protect these trees and would never cut them down. And you say this is your tree. And when you say this is your property and you will protect what is yours, I realize you do not understand, so I must let you be, but first I must ask you to put your head to the tree and feel the drumbeat that is the connection between your trees and my trees, and ask you if you too can let go of the rhythm.

But he did not listen. He called the authorities and they took me away. The man invited his children out to play. They jumped around celebrating their freedom in the summer air, splashed about in the pool, and the man grilled his meat, but couldn’t get his mind off the piedmont oak proudly standing there with its arms aghast. When he walked across his backyard and placed his head against the bark to listen to the tree, he heard nothing, smiling to himself, proud, not knowing that he only heard what he expected to, that the heartbeat could be silent if you did not listen close enough, that your own heartbeat could drown out the noise in syncopation. When he got into bed that night and listened to his own wives’ chest hoping to hear her heart beat the way he used to when they were first lovers, he could not hear hers either. And when he told her this, and that they needed to go to the hospital for her heart was not beating, she laughed. You’re going mad, she said. And the man wrapped his arms around his wife to listen again and pretended this time that he heard the rhythm that he knew so well, the thumping and the da-dum on the off-beat.

Ryan Davenport grew up in Virginia and currently lives in Brooklyn. Previously, he worked in the film industry serving as a writer and producer. His screenplays received recognition from contests and festivals including Final Draft’s Big Break Screenplay Contest. He is excited to be making his short fiction debut.