Climbing Trees

CLIMBING TREES
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

It wasn't all tea and crackers. No sir, not by a mile. We all laughed when we first heard the reports of trees climbing people. I mean, that's funny stuff, is it not? Then it started happening to us. With the saplings it was innocent enough, we'd take photos of little trees on our shoulders and shoot them around the net. Good fun. But when the mature trees climbed a person, what you were left with was people juice, and lots of it. Mashed, people were rich in nutrients and so even this was good for the trees. My own grandmother was soaked up by the thirsty roots of a great weeping willow.

Once the trees knew they had the upper hand, they really threw their weight around. The little ones made people houses up around our chests and heads. Then there were the Christmas people. The trees would hang decorations all over us and light us up. We couldn't run away because there were presents all around our ankles. I'd always thought trees were pagans but it turns out that cross Jesus got crucified on? It used to be a tree.

We tried fighting back, but try and start a forest fire when the forest can just get up and walk away. Soon their destructive ways caught up with them, however. As the human population dwindled, the oxygen levels in the atmosphere went up, carbon dioxide emissions fell drastically. Global cooling set in and those trees choked themselves with their own program of rampant environmental destruction.

Hah! Stupid trees!