An excerpt from the short story, Treedaddy, by Travis DuBose:
My father-in-law had decided to turn himself into a tree. This happened before I ever met my wife, so I met him when he was well into the change. She was in college, I think, or just about to leave for it when he sat her down in their living room with all its tea cozies. Her mother, whose eyes were always watery, was crying in earnest. Her father informed my future wife that over the next decade or so he would become increasingly tree-like until he would require planting. A greenhouse addition would be built at the rear of their split-level. He was mum on the how of the whole thing and wouldn’t even acknowledge the question of why. Of course she didn’t believe him, thinking that her serious old dad had found a sense of humor in his early retirement. When she hugged him good-bye, his skin felt like old callous.
She was long past believing by the time I met her seven or so years later. He was more or less able to walk by shifting from one great stumpy leg to the other and flexing slightly, but the noise it made rattled the china in its cabinet. He spent most of his time standing still in the greenhouse, accessed through a pair of glass doors that made a great whooshing sound when pushed through. The strain was obvious when he bent his arm to shake my hand with his twiggy fingers. “A pleasure,” he said in his papery rasp. “Likewise,” I said in a voice that, given the circumstances, was far too high up in the register. Her mother gave me a trembling hug—we had already met once before, when she came for a visit—and invited me to sit in a voice equally tremulous. I waited a beat for him to sit before realizing he couldn’t. There was uneasy silence as my future mother-in-law stepped in the great depressions of his footprints to retrieve coffee and cakes from the kitchen. This left he and I to size one another up as my wife (girlfriend then) sauntered around the room looking at the latest photos from the extended family. It seemed his feet were tendrilizing, toes stretching out to become roots. There was a terrycloth towel sewn around his waist to hide his wooden genitals. Her mother returned from the kitchen bearing a platter of tiny cakes and cups of coffee. Mercifully, she and my wife broke the silence in conversation about the lives of various cousins.
They seemed unable to acknowledge his condition, and I could think of nothing else. She had prepared me on the way over, saying that her father had a condition that turned his skin hard and made it difficult to move. She claimed she was unsure what the disease was called until I finally wrenched it out of her that he had made himself into a tree. Of course I was disinclined to believe, but the way she said it—the dejection and simmering fury—checked my doubt. And then I was sitting in front of him and had so many questions. I wanted to ask what species of tree he was, since he’d yet to put out leaves. His arms were stretching out of his shoulders, and their natural resting point seemed slightly higher than normal, as if they were lifting up slowly to become great branches. (This is what eventually happened.) I especially wanted to ask if he expected to remain conscious as himself for the duration of his life as a tree or if he would, in effect, die as his organs became fibrous and could no longer support a brain turned to wood. I’d read a science fiction novel as a teenager where something similar had happened. Fear of mortality was behind that man’s scheme, and I suspected it was behind this one too. These questions were too personal, especially for a man who had never been tender. So I cut through a long silence by asking, “So, sir: what are your hobbies?”
His expression didn’t change—to be sure, a difficult thing by then—and his mouth hardly moved, but his normally gruff voice grew winsome: “Drinking. Growing. You?”
I’ve never understood the concept of hobbies; they seem like far too much work where the only reward is being able to tell people that you have a hobby: “I build model rockets in my spare time” to which the stranger must reply, “Ah, interesting.” Then he introduces his wife by saying, “Honey, this is Terry. He builds rockets.” To which, invariably, she says, “Oh, how interesting.”
I told him that I liked to watch movies and he grunted acknowledgement.
Read the rest of Treedaddy in Issue 2 of Petrichor Machine, coming in May 2012.
