A tornado hits their town. Trees are down all over town, roofs are blown off historic buildings on their main street, small businesses destroyed, two lives taken. Her husband is extremely upset about the trees. He was already upset about the trees around town, the way they get trimmed into un-treelike shapes to accommodate electrical wires, or cut down entirely to accommodate one thing or another that isn’t a tree. Some of them were pulled right out by the roots. Some of the trees have been split open by the force of the winds, to reveal that they were rotten inside, he says. It seems like a metaphor.
You think? she says. She does not think. Which kind are we, are we a rotten tree? You wanna do this game? Maybe your tree is rotten inside but your roots are tangled up in mine. My tree is a goddamn redwood. My tree is a motherfucking sequoia all the way through. A tree falls on his client’s car. The husband moves out the day before the wife’s birthday.