when he was twelve he planted a sad tree and watched it grow up into a
mordantly depressed bastard of an arbory specimen. the way it drooped
incessantly troubled him unnecessarily. today, he was visiting the sad
tree twenty-one years later. a tragically unlucky man who had looked at
himself in the mirror and reacted happily to his reflection for the
first time in his life.
a sculptor by birth, the man was in the process of fashioning a glass
woman, with whom he intended to procreate and make beautiful see-through
babies. perhaps when they grew older, the unlucky man would bring his
translucent children to the sad tree and they could marvel at its
obscene exhibition of sadness together.
when he was twenty-one, and only tall enough to just barely see over the
bank-teller counter, he had been studying electrical engineering at a
well-respected institution in the orient jungle. while he fancied the
idea of capacitors and varistors and alternating current and
oscilloscopes, he found them largely unsatisfying in a sexual sense. he
wished to do something sexy with his life. so the unlucky man became a
sculptor and created the most beautiful women with the most excitable
media he could find lying about the house. he began with wires and
circuits, since these are what he had at ready in the beginning. but he
moved on to trees shortly. when naturalists began to protest his
nature-subversive sculptures (he carved them directly from the tree, as
it still stood there) he began to construct them out of knots of
different kinds of rope and string and twine. still unsatiated, he
found himself drunk and in a psycho-sexual haze brought on by the sexual
shape of the absolut vodka bottle from which he had been drinking.
this was it. the unlucky man had found glass. the problem inherent
with sculpting the most beautiful women out of glass was inherent in his
negligence to wear saftey equipment. consequently, he was constantly
met with a barrage of glass slivers which inevitably found their way
into his eyes and burrowed deep into his skin. usually, by the end of a
sculpture he would be bloody and in tatters, fleshy bits hanging off his
clothing, his hands nearly undefinable. he would have to wait months
before he had healed and was able to start anew.
it was while the unlucky man was healing that the sad tree had occurred
to him again. he remembered his fat and ugly twelve year old self
planting it. he embarked then, still unhealed, on fashioning his future
wife from a beautiful blue stained glass. when he was almost done, he
could wait no longer and ran into the bathroom to tidy himself, clean
off the bloody fleshy bits. it was then, when the blood was gone and
his eyes had somehow magically persevered the assault, that he saw
himself in the mirror, a somewhat attractive white male who had grown
from a pudgy unpleasant ruddy twelve year old child. the unlucky man
was endlessly pleased.
he visited the tree that day, just to spite the tree.