The boy stood looking at the tree. The tree was old. A grandfather of cottonwoods, that bent with the summer winds and smelled of hot nights and summer sun. Eighty-three feet tall, the boy knew. He had walked its shadow and knew. He knew its height by its shadows length, though each fell differently. The shadow with a coolness, and a tinge of night, and the tree with a groan, and the heady smell of sap and decay. But that was all to come, at the moment the boy stared at the tree, tracing its bark, his green eyes twisting upward along the wooden tendons and sinews that raced towards the sky. He breathed deep of the summer air, felt the moisture of the creek behind him expanding with the heat, pushing down on his skin, holding the sweat in. But the tree seemed unfazed, swaying softly in the sticky breeze.

The boy was barefoot. The gravel bar hot beneath his soles. The boy caressed the soft grass at the foot of the cottonwood with his eyes. He knew the coolness of it, the softness like fine silk. But he remained on the gravel, letting the heat burn into his feet and surge upward like magma to sear his head with the tingling sensation of pain. He tilted his head to the right listening to the soft murmur of the leaves in the summer wind. He smelled the heavy scent of sycamore leaves and the bitter smell of crushed nightshade. His skin felt heavy from the heat and the humidity, his mind felt poised on the edge of numbness and pain.

He remembered his mother’s voice, light and clear. It would certainly have carried over the rustling leaves and the valley with the creek. If she had called. But she didn’t, she couldn’t now. So he imagined what the grass would feel like beneath his toes. How soft it would be, how cool from the shade. He imagined the difference between the grass and a slab of stone buried in the earth on this summer’s day. He thought it too would be cold, but not soft, maybe smooth, but not soft. He realized that there would be no padding, that the rock would be hard, it would not give like the green grass. His feet would not sink into it as they would the soft earth at the foot of the cottonwood, damp with the creek’s water and the dew. There would be only unyielding resistance, nothing would remain when he stepped off of the stone. There would be no footprints, no crushed grass springing back towards the heavens. There would only be the cold hard stone. That thought made the boy grimace and his mouth turned downward a bit on the edges and his green eyes narrowed a bit and he raised his hand and pushed his thick brown hair away from his face.

Then he began to dig his toes into the gravel beneath him, and the burning increased and his mind sang with it. But he kept on until his feet were buried beneath the small river rocks, buried beneath the heat of the surface, buried within the shadow of the gravel where the small rocks kept cool. And he thought of the sensations, the difference between hot and cold, and pain and comfort; and he decided that it did not really matter, either of them, because here on top, even on the gravel you made an impression. You could always look behind you and say look, there are my footprints, there where my mind sang with the pain of the heat on my soles. Or, there where I cooled them on the green grass, or even there where I partially buried them and found the edge of the heat and the cold in the layers of gravel. Those are the places of my passing.

And his body shook a bit, with the sun pouring over the top of the cottonwood, bathing him with light. And the short rasping sounds of his weeping mingled with the rustling of the leaves and together they became a whisper of that one day, that one moment, in my fifth summer. The summer when I decided that I would rather be there on the edge of the river rocks and the grass, where the trees grew by the side of the creek, feeling the edge of pain and heat and cold and comfort; than with my mother.

And I cried because I knew it, not the words for it, those came later. But the feeling of it I first knew then, beneath that tree. The feeling of separation, and isolation, and being forever alone.