Four weeks before his death and two years after beginning the gradual descent into crippling senile dementia, Thomas St. Thomas wrote his Last Will and Testament. In it, he stipulated that his posessions would be granted ownership of themselves, a move that would blindly infuriate remaining members of the St. Thomas family only marginally less than fulfilling the other condition, namely dipping all remaining funds in honey and feeding them to wild bears. A grandfather clock, a small townhouse in the Lake District, a handful of miscellaneous heirlooms—all of them granted immediate autonomy. The best story to emerge from all this however concerned an oak tree of Thomas' that would come to father what is known today as The Son Of The Tree That Owned Itself.
Despite his dementia, Thomas showed a bewildering amount of forethought in detailing that should the original tree die, an heir would be grown from one of the tree's acorns and inherit ownership. When a seedling had emerged, local civic authorities (under the bemused eyes of several rabbits in hiding) read the plant its rights, erected a commemorative plaque and left The Son Of The Tree That Owned Itself cowering under the surrounding trees, beginning an almost two hundred year rift in the forest, that would ultimately lead to its demise.
The area surrounding the Tree—not including that within an 8ft radius of its trunk, which it also retained ownership of—would gradually become dark, inhospitable and resolutely unfriendly. The stoic regiment of older oaks that surrounded it heavily resented its steady stream of tourism and Strictly Capitalised Title, and chose to deal in the sort of barbed taunts that trees of their age should have grown out of hundreds of years previously, each one punctuated with a chorus of jeering leaves and a satisfied folding of innumerable wooden arms.
As the tension mounted, it began to infect the rest of the forest. The stream that ran between the trees cowered and rushed off efficiently with a thousand places to be, while the fish inside swam determinedly and praying for invisibility. Birds pecked at the branches of trees to let light into the dim clearings before the trees shook them off like insults, while the remaining animals bickered and moaned and tore the grass from the ground. All the while the Tree remained a picture of grace and civility. The 8ft radius of land it owned remained green and lush, while the animals that lived within it stood at the boundaries, growling nose to nose at those stood outside.
Throughout his final few years however, the Tree had remained silent, weathering the derision of the forest with the worst rains, until one morning, when locals discovered him and his detractors leaning forward like timid gravestones in collapsed soil, checking to see if their named bodies were still present. Authorities would later dig up the ground to find every one of the Tree's roots wrapped around the roots of every surrounding oak. Some suggest that before the Tree was removed, it seemed somehow at rest, satisfied that his demise was his own, and through his actions the harmony of the forest would return. Though this has since been largely discounted as just the sort of dementia that began this whole story in the first place.
You're looking at an excerpt of
I Am The Friction, a book by Sing Statistics in which five very short stories were swapped with five illustrations to create five more of both. The story below inspired the image to the left.
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