Rise of the Man-Eating Vendetta Tree

On a disheveled king bed under the whirring of ceiling fans in a big empty house at the edge of the Phoenix suburbs is where our hero lies, night after night, contemplating life; glad for new opportunities.

I see how it happens now.

You don't agree to it, you just slowly run out of other options. Its a surprise, like a Jack in a box; sometimes its funny, and sometimes its startling. Sometimes the handle is defective, like a pin on a grenade; you crank it and nothing comes out, but you keep turning it, possessed by horrible anticipation. Years can go by while you work even harder, making time go by faster, afraid you are going to miss something that you have already missed.

Something happens after the death of your childhood. I don't mean the transition to adulthood - I'm referring to the experience of looking back over your shoulder, down the mountain at the now-unreachable city that was your home for your entire life and realizing that you've got to figure a way to extract all of the emotion from that place and transport as much of it as you can to wherever you're going before the image of it completely falls out of your sight and you're left with a bunch of confusing new feelings that you have no emotional frame of reference for.

In our backyard in the 80s there was this huge old tire that someone had cut open and made into a decorative piece for the flowerbed. In a dream I had as a teenager I witnessed a rape occur in that tire from the kitchen window that looked down on it. That was shortly after I had my first brush with death.

In 1991 at Children's Hospital of Detroit a ten-year-old me lay bandaged from head to toe, jacked on morphine, unknowingly fighting textbook odds against a rare form of illness associated with complications like blindness and death. Slowly over the years after recovery, my skin went back to its normal color, my doctor visits stopped, and I forgot all about it. It was like burying a bomb; instead of exploding, it sprouted.

It grew into a destructive and terrifying thing nobody had a name for.