Eucalyptus Moonlight by Julie Ann Shapiro

In the interlocking limbs of two eucalyptus trees I see your soul. Can you know it’s me gazing at you from the window? Do you know I dream how it feels to be joined in wood, not flesh?

I see elephant tusks and the flesh of paper in your limbs.

My boyfriend calls, and says “I must stop my staring.” It’s dreaming, I say. Our limbs don’t join as mirrors like yours. Can I wait ’til we grow this close? How long did it take your right limb to match your left?

Oh.you say it was a lifetime, that’s too long. “Commitment shy,” he calls me. No. I look at you. There is contentment the way the top of each limb rests on the other. You touch the sun together; I tell him this is what I seek.

Intimidated, he closes the blinds. I still look at you through the slats. In the darkened sky now your leaves are a tangled web of hair. The way mine looks when I wake up and he tells me I need a brush and I shy away from the mirror.

Untangled and brushed is when I dare to look at my locks and my boyfriend in the morning. But by then he has coffee brewing and a quick peck on the cheek and it’s off to work, while I still gaze at you.

He tells me, “I want too much. People bend together.” Yes, but it is me bending when he says, “I want to close the blinds.” I say yes all the time, knowing I can still see you. “It’s not good enough,” he says, “not a real compromise, not a real bend.”

I know he’s right, too right, when he says, “It’s time to get a second curtain. I can’t compete.” Another one, I question. One is more than I need, I say as I open the blinds.

I see you standing tall with your tangles as he walks out the bedroom door. His footsteps echo on the wooden floor and I think maybe if I crawl on the floor tonight and sleep there, that I’ll know how it feels to rest in your limbs.

Footsteps approached the door. Now what can’t I have this time with my tree. He pokes his head in the room and says, ‘I have pillows and a blanket. You’ll have to make the curtain.”

No, I say and he points to the tree and says, “I made you a house there in the thicket of the limbs.”

It’s a start I say. And maybe tomorrow we’ll touch the sun together.

About the Author

Julie Ann Shapiro is a freelance writer. Her story collection, Flashes of the Other World is published by Pulp Bits. Stories and essays have appeared in the San Diego Union Tribune, North County Times, Los Angeles Journal, Pindeldyboz, Sacred Waters/Fire (Adams Media 2005), Story South, Word Riot, Opium Magazine, Insolent Rudder, Elimae, Cezzane’s Carrot, Mad Hatter’s Review, Writer’s Post Journal, Spoiled Ink, Void, Footsteps to Oxford, Salome, Skive, Barfing Frog, Millennium Shift, Mega Era Magazine, Science Fiction and Fantasy World, Green Tricycle, All Things Girl, Ultimate Hallucination, The Glut, Somewhat, Uber, Moon Dance, The Quarterly Staple, Journal of Modern Post, Rumble, Long Story Short, Cellar Door Magazine (Spring and Summer Issues 2005), Edifice Wrecked, Espresso Fiction, Flashfiction.net.