Joshua Tree

The Joshua tree stationed next to the driveway sagged in the Victorville summer heat. If he could stand tall. If he could, like his brethren who hopscotched across the desert floor, but here roots were cramped by cement, and instead he crouched like he would spring free at any moment. But he never did. And the crouch became a slouch.

His was a crown of crow diadems.

Red velvet curtains lined the living room window. Every morning he greeted them as they faded from black into blood. Faintly, he once heard them referred to as hooker drapes, then laughter. The brown haired human who turned the lights on and off, and who every few days dripped a water drink on the brown dirt, that would be her laugh.

He did not have hands.

He did not have fingers to brush her soft cheeks, or a mouth to speak with. Only his many arms could stiffly wave, when fickle Wind chose to visit. Not so fickle, perhaps: the human brought out a stick with thin twigs and brushed away his fallen skin, which Wind would shake free on her visits. His skin, once green, then yellow, then brown, would snap free and flutter. They could be butterflies, if they could fly upwards, couldn't they?

His other skin was also his tongue and nose and ears and armor. Its name sounded nothing like the voice of the black and white creature who squatted and made water and who had a mouth. He had skin that fell away and drank the sun and changed colors, and he had skin that had long memory and was constant and rough.

If he had had fingers that could have caressed her cheek, he would have found it soft as the underside of a new leaf. For her kind, she was old. Sometimes her acorns came to visit, parking their cars on the cement shoe that kept him contained. They would slink past him on the walkway carrying bags and boxes, commenting on the drapes, on the bright, on the dry air. He knew their names. When she watered his roots, she talked to him, words tumbling from her human mouth. Without a tongue, he became adept with his bark ears and listened.

Once when she was young with child she had sailed across the blue water and landed among dark haired people. There she had more young with black-brown hair, five in total who knew of each other. If there were others that didn't breathe, well, he had no mouth to speak for them. He listened as the bombs fell and rose in her voice, between the tinkle of water splashing from leaves to earth. He heard the march of millions of feet, and the grumbling hunger from millions of mouths, and he was curious why they didn't just turn skin into leaves and drink the sun?

She stayed with him for a number of turns. He was not old for his kind; trees don't count so much as live. He paid no attention to the flickering box that somehow deafened all the people. He didn't use soap, and if he was happy, it was when the damp earth cozened his skin and he could stretch another few leaves into the sky, and breathe in the wind and the sun and the sharp stars who kept him company in the dark.