Daphne - Rachel Sloan
Long-listed written pieces of 250 words or under submitted to the 2021 Urban Tree Festival writing competition on the theme of “trees close to you”
Daphne
One night when the moon is full, twelve village girls desperate to escape the husbands chosen for them steal into the beechwood. In a circle they dance, faster and faster, faces washed in moonlight, until some long-forgotten god of moon or earth or forest takes pity on them, and their feet take root, their bodies fuse into a single column, their arms writhe skyward, sprouting leaves. Flesh turns to wood, blood to sap, and iron-grey bark swarms over them, covering their heads but unable to absorb them entirely.
Centuries pass. London swallows the village. A road slices the wood in two and the Forestry Commission parcels off what remains. But as tree after tree topples under the whining saw, they refuse to touch the giant beech that stands alone in a clearing, its serpentine limbs and roots stretching in all directions, its trunk studded with twelve knots the size of heads. The official line is that the trunk is misshapen and will produce faulty timber. No one will admit the true reason: that in certain lights, traces of a nose, a brow, a cheekbone, a chin can be seen in the knots. That if you press your ear to the bark and listen hard enough, you’ll hear the beat, faint but steady, of twelve hearts.
Rachel Sloan is an art historian, curator and writer. Her writing has appeared in Stonecrop Review, STORGY, and was Highly Commended in the 2020 Bridport Prize.
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