Aelita Klausmeier † December

They’re cutting down the Christmas trees one by one, dressed in their red and blue jackets like toy men watching toy trees topple into damp grass as if in slow motion. They hoist them up, strong bodies with strong arms, tie them in neon orange plastic and load them into the backs of shiny trucks. They had worked all morning, and now the clouds are stretched low across the sky like strips of gauze, but there is no promise of snow. In the forest behind the shed, animal tracks and children’s boot prints, indistinguishable from one another, clotting the frozen mud. They had been here yesterday at different times, the sounds of many feet and of laughter deadened by the silence of the trees. The children, left to their own devices, had taken to tormenting the strange fishfaced boy, had tied him to a pine with nylon rope and left him to grow cold. They found him later that evening, face wide and pale in the moonlight. He wouldn’t speak. He thought of the family of deer that he had seen earlier, of their manifold hooves running through the trees. As his parents wept, talked to him, wrapped him in wool scarves, he thought of the cold numinosity of the stars, and of the wail of a faraway freight train, a sound like there was a god buried inside the earth.