Flash fiction, Chris Cottom

Salix Babylonica

We match on Treehugger.com. Sal is as slender as a wand, lives on a slip road, and has a drink problem. ‘I’m parched,’ she gasps, eyeing the watering can I’ve brought instead of flowers.

She fills out as I nourish her with organic mulch. Eventually, blossomed and glorious, she cascades over me, her pointy tresses tickling my skin. Soon, I’m spending every weekend with her, oblivious to the roar of the Corby Orbital.

I’ll lie cocooned in the dappled shade of her canopy while she teases me about my past. I tell her how it all started with a stately cypress at Sissinghurst, how I’ve dated sweet cherries and twiggy hazels, and even had a fling with a late-blooming jacaranda.

In time, graceful but scratchy, Sal sighs in the wind, groaning about brittle boughs and claiming I’ll leave her if she loses a limb. When I reply ‘never,’ I realise she’s weeping.  

I arrive one Saturday and she’s trying to hide something. Through her yellow-green curtains I glimpse a cross painted on her trunk. ‘Road-widening scheme,’ she sobs. I gabble about reviews and appeals but she stops me. ‘It’s too late. Go and find yourself a nice young sapling.’ 

Through the night, she talks of whips she surrendered for baskets she never saw, how kids never collected her catkins, how her broad-rounded crown never sheltered a courting couple. She admits she’s sad not to have lived in a meadow ‘or just near a stream.’ 

At dawn, Sal doesn’t flinch as bulldozers rumble and chainsaws growl. I tell her I’ll stay. ‘No,’ she insists. ‘Time to go.’ Instead, I press my lips to her silver furrows, squirt my palms with superglue, and wrap my arms around her.