my brother should have been a pine tree by Annie Marhefka

                 ​Kaarina Dillabough CC



my brother should have been a pine tree
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The forest was planted, not wild: perfectly seeded rows of pines that grew to thirty-foot beanstalks disappearing into clouds, evenly lined aisles of sap-covered bark coats. You carved the skin off the trees with your machete, etched not initials of lovers but faces of imaginary friends—Sam, Peter, and Bob. You lifted fallen timbers onto muscle-tensed shoulders, a familiar dent creased into the space between neck and shoulder so that even when you weren’t carrying a log, the silhouette of a ghost tree was perched atop your too-tall, too-lean frame. You erected logs into teepees and tree fortresses with nothing but twine and discarded nails you found at the barnyard. The ghost tree followed you into adulthood—the first few years of which you survived.

I followed you through evergreen aisles, dodging branches that whipped off your arms, my shorter legs quickening the pace to keep up with your long strides. I built daffodil gardens beneath your treetop palaces, replanting those wild bulbs from around the forest floor, and trimmed the ends of twine that hung down from your walking bridges.

We created our own little city amongst those trees, a pine-needle carpeted community free of bullies, of those who shunned you, who cast judgement. It was our little escape, a place to pretend those others didn't exist, or didn't matter, anyway. They didn't understand you like I did, like the forest did. You were planted among them, in rows like them, but you were different. Your branches hung differently; your needles didn’t have the same prickly touch; the inner core beneath the bark was softer, malleable.

If you had been born coniferous, you might have lived to a thousand years instead of twenty-three. I would have loved you the same, would have embraced your whorls of branches and the sticky, scaly cones that fluttered to the soft bed of your fallen needles. I would have peeled the scaly bark tenderly from your trunk to show them what I saw inside. You could have just been you, standing firm with roots snaking through acidic soil, unbreakable. 

When they held a gun to your temple, smashed it into flesh until the bones beneath started to give, you fled not to the safety of home, of the police station, of the open road, but to the same forest that first gave you shelter. You found solace there, swiftly climbed the boughs in a silent vertical ascent and waited. You listened to their footsteps on pinecones, the occasional snap of a limb underfoot as they tread through your wooded haven. I imagine you are still perched there, in your treetop sanctuary, waiting for me, amongst the pines. I will greet you there one day, climbing hand over hand up aged limbs like a ladder, until I have found you and your toothy grin, and you won’t say anything, but simply hold out a piece of twine, and we can go back to weaving it like lace to bind our wrists together. 

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​Annie Marhefka is a writer in Baltimore, Maryland. She delights in traveling, boating on the Chesapeake Bay, and hiking with her toddler. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Coffee + Crumbs, The Phare, Sledgehammer, Capsule Stories, Versification, Cauldron Anthology, The Elpis Pages, The South Florida Poetry Journal, For Women Who Roar, Remington Review, and The Hallowzine. Annie is working on a memoir about mother/daughter relationships; you can find her writing on Instagram @anniemarhefka, Twitter @charmcityannie, and at anniemarhefka.com.

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