The Tree of Glass
My sister ate a piece of glass and a glass tree grew inside her.
I think she knew what she was doing. She broke the mirror from mother’s vanity, picked up the tiniest shard of glass, and placed it on her tongue. She would later tell me how it slid down her throat, smooth and cold and tasteless. Soon after that, she could no longer speak at all.
I watched her change in front of me. It took a very long time, as trees take a very long time to grow, but all that time, seeing her made me feel cold.
First, she felt pains in her stomach. She would go about the house, wailing, often wandering through the halls in the night, a pale ghost with her arms wrapped around her torso. Then, one day, she made no sound at all.
She began spending long hours standing in one place, staring. I do not recall ever seeing her blink.
Mother wept on the day the glass first cracked through her. My sister’s forehead bulged and split and from it bloomed an enormous shard of glass. I could feel my sister’s eyes on me as I gazed at my own reflection in the mirror that was she. I think she may have even smiled.
In the months to follow, the tree of glass grew down towards the ground through her arched back, and she grew up, up, up towards the ceiling. When she was almost too tall to fit through the doorway, my mother had me carry her outside, and in our garden her glass roots dug deep into the ground, and each inch brought her closer to the sky.
After the years and years and years, still she stands, ageless and tall, not impaled on the glass, but a part of its system. She is thriving in her way. Her glass branches grow out above the ground, twisting and winding from points and edges.
She chose to swallow that glass when she was still too small to walk to school alone, and now she can never come down.
I have thought about my own life, what I could become, what seed I could swallow, and still have not found the answer she found when we were only children. I do not know that I ever will.
But sometimes in the moonlight, I step outside into the dark garden, tiptoe in slippers past the roses and the lilies and the rhododendrons, and I look up at her. She will slowly, weakly, lift her arm, stretching it to the sky like the branches that comprise her body, reaching towards the moon. And I stand in the silence, reaching my own hand towards her, knowing she will never reach the moon, and knowing that she grew out of my reach long ago. I let the minutes pass in silence and I wonder what she feels, if it is painful, or if she found what she was looking for when she first swallowed that glass, or if she even feels anything at all. And then I turn, and go inside.
