Tether Ridge
By Logan Anthony
What once was Tetherman’s Bridge, in an instant, became Tether ridge.
The old stone bridge named for the family of farmers who’d kept the valley alive through the Depression had long since lost its wooden railings to the boring of beetles and the heft of the wind. But the stone held itself together through the decades since it had been built. Until, that is, the derecho storm tore through and flattened an acre or so of trees. A mighty pair of which were interlocked oaks. Their wide, coiling trunks spanned too wide for a pair of humans to encircle even with four arms.
These two trees, as saplings, had seen the fall of flora that came before this younger forest had sprung up from those ashes to grow anew. This pair of oaks crashed down heavily with the weight of their centuries of life. All they had been witness to. In their careen, the tangled oaks tore through what had been Tetherman’s Bridge. They punched through the stone, toppling it from the center outward. The stone came apart in crumbles, raining down in the valley of dune and swale below that dipped into a steep drop-off. The bridge once formed a seam over that gaping space.
The oaks felt no remorse. They had lived long before the bridge had come to pass over the foliage below. The oaks’ branches and upper stories were entangled together impossibly after their centuries of life. As the tree trunks cracked and fragmented, leaning into their fall, those branches appeared to reach out wide like open stretched hands. The younger of the trees, hunkering down to their roots to avoid a similar fate, stooped below and wondered just what their elders, in those last moments, reached for.
The scope of the conjoined oak trees was massive. They obliterated what obstacles dared come upon their way. The trees busted through the south-facing sign above the bridge in addition to the bridge itself. The destruction of the sign rechristened the landmark with a new name. A misnomer that would remain for the next few centuries it would take for the tumultuous cycle to repeat. The next two generations of humans would only know the ruins of this bridge as “Tether ridge.”
In explanation of the ruins, legends would spin and unravel, pass from hands riddled with wrinkles and sun spots to the youngest in their families: those most likely to believe. As the wrinkled hands would come to fold together for the last few times, and the youngest ones had grown bigger, memories of those legends would splinter. Few and far between would hold claim to the stories of what happened to Tetherman’s Bridge. Most would have no knowledge of the bridge’s true name.
The pair of oaks splintered, too. They had stood together a long, long time, pulled farther into a crooked lean each year. Some of the roots had become waterlogged in poorly ventilated soil. Other roots strangled in chemical pollution that ran into the earth from the feeble human hands that made their messes uphill, always misunderstanding. The oaks had drunk much of what they should not have, out of necessity. Often, they funneled the purest resources to the younger trees surrounding them, carrying on what they had carried on their backs, as if they had not learned by the example of older trees that had been churned back into soil long ago.
The oak trees, in their youth, had grown accustomed to depending on one another and no more. It had taken a century and a half for the other foliage, other trees, to poke out of the soil. To grow tall enough for the pair of oaks to catch in a squint from above. Another century or two passed before the oaks stopped coiling around one another long enough to notice the rest of the forest stretching upwards, towards them. It was hard to tell after time had muddled the past with holes half-filled by golden, lying nostalgia.
Saplings did not draw much attention from the elder oaks. They knew how easily the young generation could be wiped out, all at once. Nothing they had not seen before. But after some years of continual upwards growth, the pair of oaks came to stake hope in the younger life beading up and budding all around. And when they finally did crash, the oaks fell upon each other like lovers in tight quarters. Entangled once more, they found themselves inside an acorn that lay half-buried in the forest soil, stony as it was with the rubble of the collapsed bridge, strewn with the splinters of the parts of the forest taken down in the storm. The oaks knew, despite the rubble, that the soil held the makings of their next lives.
The pair of oaks, now each a half of the other, smacked their lips and tasted one another. In the dark, in the damp, tightly coiled around one another in a knotted bundle of seed and cell and nerve, the oaks awaited the next opening of the acorn. The next kiss of their beloved, golden sun. The rekindled beating of the wind in their ears and hearts: ALIVE. ALIVE.
“Perhaps this time around,” one oak whispered, daring to hope, “the humans will be kinder.”
The other oak snorted, a shadow stirring inside them.
“Perhaps this time around, we show them the faults of their ways.”
The oaks shared an echoing laughter that rang sinister and cold. They wound tighter together and thought of warmth, willing the sun to find them.
The oaks waited, and as they waited, they planned.
Those Who Prophesize
It’s been many generations since the agriculture we cultivate as a species has given more than it has taken. We now live in a world where cornfields bear stalks that snap before fruiting. Where the sun burdens more than it sustains. The fields have withered inward, a collective shuddering of the leaves, stems, vines.
The ones who prophesize reference recent events. They hike their shoulders up around their ears, eyes darting all around, and choke out hoarse smoke wisps, incense billowing from the throat. A whisper the listener must lean in to hear: tangled language of metaphor without reason. Listener squints through the smoke to find meaning behind the language.
Self-appointed prophets weave a barrier of abstraction to shudder behind. They use language as a weapon to distract. They name omens where they would not have otherwise been identified; remember the flock of ravens who passed over, not a full moon cycle back? A prophet would tell you they were the first living birds anyone in the valley today had seen in their lives.
Me and my sisters, we can’t say for sure. We’d grown up in the age of screens. We’d seen the reality of birds in the world even if we hadn’t experienced it ourselves. Made it hard to say. When the ravens spilled over us, the thick mass of them coagulated like a blood clot sluicing across the sky. The hairs on my hide stood on end and sent a chill through me; the world seemed to darken more than it likely did. Their cawing, so ominous, trapped the breath in my lungs. I had expected the singsong voice of the birds I had watched on my screen in my room on my bed on the nights I could not fight to sleep. But these thick-bodied birds had the croaking voice of shadow, hanging over me in a stifling web.
Later that night, I pressed my sisters for answers. They did not wish to discuss the birds, and anyhow did not share in my feelings. After the second attempt that ended in ridicule, I stopped trying to convey what I meant. It wasn’t that I had something I meant: it was that I needed to talk about the way the ravens had made me cold. The way that, even from the ground, I could see the empty pits of their eyes. I needed to talk about it to make sense of it. I thought on all this as I continued hanging the laundry and making the bread and beating clean the kitchen rugs. I left the butchering to my sisters. This, they often ridiculed me for, too.
The ravens had lingered above our valley only a moment or two, but it was enough. All around, the people were drawn out of their homes like puppets. Where had the beasts flocked from? Where had they been all this time? Were they real ravens? The sounds of the crowd drowned out the cawing of the birds. Parents shushed and stilled their charges. Children sniffled or cried. Amongst the crowd, some bodies slipped off in return, presumably to their homes.
These, the prophets, huddled inside the cob meeting house. They built fires and warmed palms. Incense thickened the air with scents of damania, eucalyptus, and wormwood. The prophets bowed their heads and waited for water to boil, for herbs to steep. They drank tea, cleared their throats. They would be speaking for some time, they anticipated. A crowd was gathering, one ripe for captivating. Their tongues crackled like live wires. This is what they endured seasons of silence for.
The prophets knew, everyone has a tree planted when they are born. To find it, one must close the eyes and imagine the meadow of their birthplace. They understood, some have to tether themselves to their tree’s trunk just to keep growing alongside it. For the prophets, however quickly the season of being needed passed, it was enough to keep the tethers around their midsections knotted, their fingers idle. For now, they would break from picking at the rope.
Their fingers were calloused, throats not yet hoarse.
The prophets awaited their call.
Logan Anthony is an American queer writer and transgender artist from Indiana. Anthony holds a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing & English and works as a curriculum developer. Find Logan’s poetry in Thin Air Magazine, carte blanche, Hive Avenue Literary Journal, Papers Publishing Literary Magazine, Hare’s Paw Literary Journal, The Madison Review, and more. You can read their short stories in Stoneboat Literary Journal, The Write Launch, The Ulu Review, and Hare’s Paw Literary Journal.