The Flight Of The Tree

• Toby Trevenen, Grade 9
• Short Story
• 2013

The boy stared at the other side of the estuary. And where he looked, sat a old, dying fig tree. His father, a boatman, had told him it was a Moreton Bay Fig Tree, ‘Ficus Marcophylla’.
But the boy didn’t agree. He couldn’t agree.
He believed it was an angel, a messenger of god, though he didn’t share his opinion anyone else. Neither artists, musicians or even the world’s best painters could have compared it so, but the boy believed. He believed because, as the sun sank into he horizon, birds would flock to another tree. As their feathered wings flew away, it looked as though fig tree was trying to leave them for the sky.
The boy sat on the jetty, watching as the fig tree attempted to fly away.

As the sun rose again, the boy decided to go; go to the tree and find out once and for all what it really was.
His father’s boat seemed fit for the journey, so the boy rode away to the tree he so longed to question. The ride took him a while, as the sun was soon to set on him. The tree was even more beautiful up close than he first thought, its leaves like angel wings over his head. The corella parrots and the galahs were calling to each other in the treetop, as if they were the angel’s trumpets welcoming the boy.

The sun was setting. As the boy climbed the tree, he decided he was going to see the tree fly. While climbing he stopped. He heard someone else. He clambered up higher to the branch in the tree to see the other person.
That is when he saw it

The angel.

The boy stared. On the other side of the trunk, the angel stared back, with the same curiosity as the boy.
He asked the angel why she was climbing up the tree, if she could just fly to the top.
She replied by asking if he was an angel, why we he be earth and not in heaven.
The boy asked was she the angel, the one with beauty equal to the tree?
She asked was he the angel come to bring happiness to the tree’s last years?
He said to her that he thought angels were blonde haired and clothed in the finest cloth, when she had long, red hair and dressed in a dirty, flowered dress.
She replied by saying she thought angels had wings, wings of a swan. Not having none at all.
They stared into each other’s eyes.
They decided to sit together in the tree and wait.

Waiting for the tree to fly.