Branches

Purple, broad-petalled and venomous. The flowers of the large tree in the yard were almost too much. The fragrance was pleasant, yet so intense and overwhelming that many of the inmates called it a stench. It was a strange tree to plant in a prison.

She would watch it each morning from her cell, knowing every leaf and every twig. Watching had become the most important thing in her life. The rest was just life, just something that she should be over with.

In the three years she had been here she had watched the tree grow. A large branch had been ripped off in the hurricane a year earlier, and she had wept each morning before going to the sewing room. But only in the mornings. Crying in public would get you beaten up.

After a while she realised the tree had become more beautiful without the large branch. It had stuck out like an obscene penis, almost touching the barred windows on the far side of the yard. There had been many flowers on that branch, and the smell had probably been terrible for the occupant of the cells over there. She knew she would have cherished it if those flowers had filled her cell with their intoxicating scent, but the tree's shape was now more composed, more harmonious — more aesthetically pleasing.

One day, as she sat looking at the tree, the door to her cell was opened early. She had noticed gun shots and shouting, but there had been lots of unrest lately. She had been dreaming and watching the tree and did not want to disturb the moment. Standing in the doorway was Martagia, the worst of them – the one who had beaten her on her first day here.

“He's dead,” she said, tears running down her cheeks. “The General is dead. They've liberated the prison. We're free!”
—
A week later she sat in the yard of her new home – a small flat in the suburbs, as far from the prison as she could manage. She was planting a tree.

She had found it and dug it up in the large marshalling yard nearby. It had grown beneath the railway tracks and had a strange shape. One of the branches had reached out – away from the mayhem of moving steel.

“It will have a more pleasing shape if you cut off that long branch. These trees tend to grow those odd, elongated branches.” It was a man. He had been to prison too; she could tell. He looked like an intellectual, much like herself – the worst crime of all under the General's regime.

She looked at him and smiled. “I will never cut this tree.”

I almost dropped this one, as I was ahead of the text as soon as I wrote about the ugly, obscene branch. I just knew what it meant and were it would go. But sometimes things are obvious and nice and you should let them pass. And then this one is also for @owasco who likes openings, and hope and promise. Not my usual trapped and paranoid cellar person, caught in existence.