The Threshold

The storm is memory now. The branch it tore is gone; the knot remains – a dark whorl where the grain refused to yield. What was lost has lost its name. Only the shape of the reaching is seen. Then spring. Sap rises, meets the whorl and bends. You have carried it so long you cannot tell: did you grow around the wound, or inside it?

The Way

You trace the rings. There – the year the wood tore. The grain has not run straight since. The impulse to lean overwhelms – to offer the scar to every traveller. Then the urge to force the grain straight, stretching the wood until the knot disappears. But the knot is compressed wood. It will not yield. So you grow. Not towards the wound. Not away from it. Another ring. Another. Each one touches the knot as it passes. Each one moves on. In spring, a bird settles where the branch once was. You built no shelter for it. You grew, and growing made a hollow for it. The knot becomes one whorl among many. The wood alone knows which ring is the storm.

The Shadow

The Immaculate feeds only the bark, letting the heartwood dry. She names the storm a blemish – something to be buried under smooth rings. She forces the grain straight, refusing to draw sap from her depths. She becomes all sapwood; nothing remains woven through the core. That was long ago, she says. The wood has closed. One spring, a child carves initials into her bark. The blade slips clean through, meeting only air. The hollow she had denied opens to the sky. She grows upward still, trusting the smooth exterior – until the canopy weighs too much for a hollow trunk. In the cross-section: nothing where the heartwood should pulse. The knot sits at the centre, untouched. Every ring grew around the knot. None grew through it. ❖ The Transparent turns all his sap towards the knot. A traveller rested in his shade. Praised the leaves; left without seeing the knot. The years of surviving, unwitnessed. He learnt to lean – to turn toward every visitor until the break was all they could see. Once, it worked. A stranger stopped beneath him, looked up, and stayed. I see it, he said. And stayed. The wound found its witness, and in that moment it was enough. Something in the grain almost straightened. Almost. The stranger walked on. The grain curled back – but it had learnt the shape of straight. Years later, a traveller stops below. How alive you look, she says. He twists his trunk to expose the rot, desperate to correct her. Before he can finish, the wind returns. The trunk splits, tearing down the exact line he had spent a lifetime begging the world to witness.

The Cut