The trees make it possible to breathe heavily here. She sees it on the faces of the land people as they enter the park. It is as if they have slipped inside a bubble of decompression from the world that circles the nest of greenery and she observes, many times in a single day, the expressions break out from their aspects like flowers uncurling in the sun.
For the adults, there is a relief that pushes outwards around them, spreading out in concentric circles, as the compacted emotions slough off their hardened shells. The world outside the park is one of pressurised materials. They wrap themselves in blocks of clay, fired in the steel bowls of raging furnaces, packed tight with sand and lime. They hew up the soft elements of the earth and press them into service. Peat and coal are harvested and peeled apart and pooled into black sludge that tars their roads. The trees find this egregious, as it is their kin, dead ages past, that are exhumed and rolled thin across churned stone. But the trees have grown numb to the many atrocities aligned against them, with the frequency and brutality of these acts increasing with the voracious demand of the land people as they perpetuate themselves. Not much gets by the trees. What the nervous system of roots doesn’t transfer, fast as lightning, then other news soon carries on the high currents of the wind. Grim tidings come from the far west, where the greatest kingdom of wisdom is burned back with little hesitation and no resistance. But the trees in this park can barely decipher the messages between the thick particles of smoke that block up the air. The land people do not see this, as they rarely see the fruits of the seeds they push hard into the earth. She, in her pond, does not know if this is willful blindness or just a condition of their constitution. Either way, the stones are equally offended by the land people and their incidental cruelty. For it is their living bodies that are chipped into forms that best suit the needs of the land people and are unceremoniously dumped on the floor as gravel for their feet. She wonders if it is an insecurity that drives them to walk on anything taller than themselves. And so living surrounded by dead things packed into tight vessels, she is unsurprised that the feelings they carry are so claggy. Naturally they clod, when there is no space for them to expand. Which is the phenomenon she so frequently observes, when adults enter the park. Their return to this small patch of earth, graciously spared by their leaders, is essential to their unpacking. Without it, she wonders if the weight of their heavy senses would drag them down into the tarry bedrock of their world. It begs the question, if this drop of green is so essential to their cycle, why did they dry out the whole ocean? The land people are a tricky contradiction. One she has yet to solve under the many cycles of the sun.
Children are different though. It fills her with an old glee to see them enter this leafy bauble. They do not throw off feelings here, they shoulder them. Joy. Wonder. They express freedom and load memory. They come charging in from the cobble world with howls and woops, crashing into their years with abandon. Nothing can stop them. Nothing would dare. Their wild, boundless curiosity is closer to that of the squirrels and the ducks than it is of their adult ancestors. They are wise in the ways of the world in a medium that is unknown to them, as it is unknown to all creatures, one that has become suppressed and forgotten by the adult land people. It is plain to see when they get close to her home. She peers out from under the pondweed, her yellow eyes just breaking the surface tension of the jade water. Sometimes, they see her. It is more than the adults do. But their fear is only momentary and is squashed by their overwhelming desire to pluck the unknown from its shadowy boughs. This is where she has heard what they call her, when it is shrieked in surprise or whispered in mischief. Nymph. Sprite. Faerie. But it is ‘troll’ that sticks with her. She likes the sound it makes when she says it and the words go burbling up to the surfaces amidst the tangles of hornwort. She has heard it in many tongues over the rotations and it has always amused her.
They go in circles, these little pods of land people. Both in and out of the park. They circle the pond on paths of their own making, standing in the green shade of the canopy and the understory. The children go crashing through the underbrush while the adults stick to their flat stretches of short grass. But nearly all the land people, young and old, admire the great trees as they pass in their circuit.
Today, some children stop by the old oak by the pond. It is one of the few things that has been here longer than she has. Its roots extend into her murky waters and make shelter for the budding insects and fish that dwell there. When she touches their gnarled knuckles, they tell her great and terrible secrets from the wider world. The peace is splattered by the surface of the water as it breaks. She dives down and sees the tracer of bubbles left by the bright yellow ball as it careens like a shooting star down to the depths of the pond. She does not need to surface to hear the groans of the unlucky children who have lost their plaything. Just as she does not need to surface to hear the unexpected joy when, minutes later, the children return, trailed by bemused adults, as the yellow ball sits wet but inexplicably unsunk by the edge of the pond.
Paddy Dobson
15th July 2020