Building Suspense

Maggy gathered herself. Or, at least, as much as she could gather herself whilst a tree waited impatiently for her response.

“I’m sorry?” It was all she could manage to say. When she had begun her hike, she had been hoping for a sense of calmness in solitude. After months of improving her new house, a lot of which involved do-it-yourself renovations, she wasn’t used to any social interactions besides her coworkers and the cashier at the hardware store near Bayside.

“Can I ask you for a favour?” The tree groaned again. It talked slowly, as though the conversation was taking even more of a toll on it than her. Pieces of bark splintered off and floated to the trail below. Maggy looked around, hoping for once to spot another hiker to validate she hadn’t lost her mind, but it proved pointless.

She was the only living thing around. Aside from the tree, that was.

“How can you talk?” She said, trying to find a logical explanation for the events occurring. The tree swayed slightly in the breeze, giving her the impression that it was shrugging its long limbs slightly. For a moment, Maggy wished she was back hammering a bookshelf together in her apartment in Cheltenham. Timber planks never talked back to her, at least. 

“It’s a long story,” it groaned. Maggy took a step back as its long branches swayed toward her. The sun was still high in the sky, but the world around her suddenly felt darker.

“I’m losing my mind,” she whispered to herself. Maybe the sounds from all the power tools had finally made her mad. It could have been the stress and loneliness, as well. It would make a lot more sense than the one truth that Maggy’s mind couldn’t bear to accept: that trees could talk. “Do all trees talk?”

The question came out despite her attempts at denial. The tree blinked; a slow, strenuous activity that creaked in the silence of the mountains.