The trees near me - Georgia Cook
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”
The trees near me
The trees near me aren’t trees at all. They appear as trees, reaching up between pavement slabs with their grasping Spring-cut fingers, jabbing the air, tumbling leaves and pink apple blossom down across the pavements, but they don’t fool me.
The trees near me aren’t trees at all; they’re Giants.
As I walk between them, I picture wrists winding down beneath the roads, attached to arms the length of Tube carriages, shoulders as long as streets. I picture a crowd of subterranean Titans, squeezed shoulder-to-shoulder between basements and subterranean rooms, twisted awkwardly to accommodate the crush, each breath the rumble of the Underground, each shifting movement (sometimes to scratch a leg, sometimes to work life back into a frozen wrist) the clattering of train tracks.
In the time before motorways and skyscrapers, people would see the forms of sleeping Giants in mountain valleys and rolling hills; Giants curled against the landscape, worn featureless by time and idleness, their backs flush with moss. Now the Giants lie beneath us, tangled with the internal organs of the city, cramped and uncomfortable, their fingers curling towards the sky. The trappings of drowned mythology, dozing fitful London dreams.
I know what the trees near me really are; they don’t fool me.
I know.
Georgia Cook is an illustrator and fantasy writer from London. She can be found on twitter at @georgiacooked and at https://www.georgiacookwriter.com/
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