THE LAST STANDING TREE - MRUNMAYEE

I have always found the owner at the food shop very erratic in nature. He has the air of disregard towards some of his daily visitors. I am one of the daily visitors, I had no other choice, but to be at the mercy of the only food shop around.
He definitely had his crowd of favorites. And I knew I was not one of them.

Every time I found myself resisting asking him the dreadful question, ‘A bun and tea. please, Sir'.

After having said these words, all that danced around my head was this picture of me trapped in a cage with the last of the species of the 'Kingdom Animalia', waiting hungry for a chunk of meat to be thrown inside. First, a hand slowly making it’s way through the cage holding a big piece of meat with all the trickling fresh blood running downwards. Then, the meat purposely would be kept at a height to tease all the creatures in the cage. In this situation, the only thing one could do was taste the dripping blood as it dropped slowly onto the tongue making you want to grab a big bite from the meat.

I finally rested comfortably on a dilapidated and shaky part of a house with my bun and tea trying to snap out of my disturbing daydream and at the same time thinking how revolting is the feeling of being teased..

Teasing. One of the things that really makes me unhappy is being teased by anything. Everyone knows how much I hate being teased and being proved wrong. Yet people do it – because, that very act of doing it is defined as teasing.

Still attempting to snap out of the torturous daydream, I started thinking about how not laying out the bed-sheet neatly would make bed-bugs crawl into my bed; how my lost eye-pencil was finally found stuck in the keyhole; how paranoid I was about my mirror balancing on one nail and all the work pending from last week. All these purposeless thoughts crossed my mind as I sipped my tea.

A feeling that I had forgotten something occurred to me. Suddenly I saw a hazy image of these two people of whom I am not very fond.. And there! I finally remember, as it registered that my vision was fuzzy, that I have forgotten my glasses!

I took a big bite out of my bun and finished my tea; I was all ready to get up and leave when something gleamed right into my eye. It was really shiny and indistinct. I knew it right away, that it was the big, bright sun. I remembered the shiny yellow sun from a photograph of my grandma’s ‘Old-Memories Diaries’.

"Alas, it had finally blessed us with its presence!” I squealed in my mind.

Grandma would always say that the day the yellow globule would shine in the sky would be the day; this land of debris would cover itself with a green blanket.

In this state of happiness, I heard a loud swoosh. I looked around. Everything looked unfocused. So I followed the loud sound to find myself under the ‘The Last Standing Tree’.

It was the same tree my grandma would ask me to pluck flowers from every evening. But, now, the authorities had banned others from plucking any more of those flowers, because then, there would be nothing pleasing left for the eyes to see.

The tree stood tall above me. The leaves of the tree swooshed and rustled out aloud. It felt like the movement of branches that had lost all control and were about to unleash the energy trapped within. The sun gleamed through the leaves blinding me with every uncontrolled movement of the branches.

I stood there speechless.

AVY COMMENTS:
Yep, I like it. But I want more meat. I want to know more about the last standing tree. The title promises so much but the story delivers so little. I want to know more about the condition of the earth. I want to know more about Grandma’s prophecy. This could be a great eco sci-fi story. Do you want to develop it in that direction or try an absolutely new story?