The tree that was
The wood was quiet as he walked through it. No birds calling out, no creaking of branches, just the steady crunch of his feet trudging through the snow. There were no others in the area, none he could feel anyway. He’d been here once before, he needed to return, though he didn’t know why.
He looked around - it all looked so different under the white stuff, but he thought this was it. Brushing aside thick drifts of snow, he slowly uncovered a tree stump, blackened and destroyed. This was it, this was where it happened.
She was angry with him. She didn’t understand what it was like, but she was angry. A sinner, that’s what she called him - but she said only people can sin. She was mad at him.
Rocker reached into the cracks in the stump and slowly extracted the two items concealed within, a lock of hair and a plastic guitar pic.
She threw it back at him while he played, trying to drown it out. The pic bounced as it hit him, and she left then, no longer willing to count him as a friend.
He looked at them in his hand, considered them - what they meant. How much it had hurt when she threw it back at him.
The electricity crackled around him, surging along the strings of the guitar as he played, before he reached the crescendo and unleashed the torment-charged lightning into a nearby tree, super-heating the sap and making the trunk explode.
He stood up, tokens in hand and considered the remains of the tree.
As he left, he dropped the tokens, his and hers onto the broken stump before walking away, never looking back, just like she did.
He paused, hand outstretched, ready to cast them to the winds and the snow. Should he return them to the stump, or take them with him.
A friend lost, over an act he would never regret. He hated her for doing that, for leaving him. But the hate wasn’t as strong as it was. There was no pain in it, no crackling anger bursting from him in electrical energy. He slid the tokens under his wristband - he would find her, and talk to her again. And this time, maybe it would be different.