IT STARTS WITH A CRACK IN THE WALL.
It is a thin line, barely visible and it runs along the molding of the staircase leading upstairs.
***
They stay at a hotel the night of their wedding, though they already signed the contract for their home.
“Just so nothing distracts you from our night.”
The way her husband pronounces ‘distracts’ bothers her. The word seems to be hiding something in it and she wants to find a way to discover what is hidden or ask her new husband whether he knows what the word is hiding and in the process she loses the meaning of the rest of the sentence.
But they stay in a hotel and she asks no questions.
***
The next day he leads her to the front door.
The house is as she remembered.
Except for the crack.
He pulls her up the stairs so fast to their new bedroom that she is not able to fully see how large it is. But it is there.
***
She dreams about it. The crack.
The day they conceive their daughter, she dreams a tree grows from the crack. It is small at first and then increases in size until it takes over the house and breaks it to pieces. Her husband gets out of the house in time but she is caught up in one of the branches by the back of her shirt. The branch grows until she can see nothing below her but clouds. She hears the branch snap and she wakes up.
Three weeks later she misses her period.
***
Her daughter sleeps during the day within her.
During the night her daughter wakes and kicks and swims and spins.
So her mother paces.
All night every night.
Her eyes search the walls for more cracks.
They are everywhere. Thin wisps. Barely seen, but they are there. Along the molding at the ceiling. Along the walls near the floor. In the kitchen, living room, and even in the baby’s room.
This, she fears the most.
But she remembers the dream, and fears if spoken aloud, it will come true.
She says nothing.
The cracks still grow.
***
On her way to the hospital, for false contractions, she notices some of the cracks have widened. But there are places where the cracks don’t exist. Or at least some distance between cracks, and any way they are still thin wisps, not as high on her priority list as the birth of her child.
The contractions turn out to be gas.
The cracks grow.
***
On her way to the hospital 13 days, 4 hours, and 2 minutes later, she does not notice that the cracks run along every seam in the house and that they have started to widen. One crack in particular is especially bothersome. It is slightly wider than the rest, and a thin green shoot has started to push its way through the foundation of their home and through this crack.
***
Sitting in the rocking chair, in their bedroom, holding their child, she hears the door stick as her husband tries to open the door.
He curses and forces it open.
Covered in spit up, urine, breast milk and sleeplessness, she forgets about the dream.
She mentions the cracks off hand.
He nods, a tired automatic reply.
***
A few years later, the husband takes the bathroom door off its hinges to free their 3 year old daughter from a prison of her own making.
She runs into his arms and he holds her while she hiccups in his ear. It is at this moment he looks at the seam of the wall next to the bathroom door and sees a crack following the length of the door.
He looks up the problem on his phone and receives an answer. He runs up to his wife and tells her about the question: the crack, and of the answer: the foundation.
They debate back and forth, but it comes down to a question and answer once again. The question:foundation, the answer: we don’t have the money we wait.
She watches the crack at the seam of their doorway, after this exchange, and she watches as it widens slightly. She looks away, afraid to confirm it.
The dream rises up like bile in the back of her mind.
This house is falling apart, the cracks were only the first part. The second part would be the fall to her death.
***
Years pass.
Then, the tree.
She wants it to be a mistake.
But it is unmistakable.
In the corner of their dining room, between the molding and the wall, along the floor, a small tree is growing. It is merely a branch, but it has leaves hanging from it, and it reaches towards the sun coming in the window on the wall.
She touches it to ensure its authenticity.
It is, indeed, real.
She grasps it in her fists and pulls it out.
Then she pries the molding away from the wall just to see if the shoot is still there.
The shoot came out too easily. There had to be part of that shoot in the crack in the wall. She feels this instinctively.
She goes outside to the side of the house the dining room is on, with a shovel. She digs and digs until she sees the spot. She brushes the dirt away from the foundation and sees it.
The crack.
She puts her hand up to it and feels the air conditioning blowing out of the crack.
This was it.
Her death.
She pushes the dirt back in the hole with her hands. Then she sits on her knees in front of the hole, and cries.
When she is finished, she stands up, takes the shovel back to the shed, and goes inside to feed their daughter.
That night she has the dream again. The house comes apart and she watches her husband jump safely out of the window with their daughter while the branch takes her far away from them.
She is not surprised when the next morning she comes downstairs, and the tree is back. It is bigger this time. The crack is now a hole in their wall, and the tree’s trunk is thick enough for their daughter to put her whole hand around. Their daughter stands laughing with her hand around the tree.
Their daughter looks up at her mother and laughs gaily, a tree inside the house.
She grabs her daughter from the hated tree, the harbinger of her death, and puts her in her room with the gate up. Her daughter cries.
She goes outside with the shovel once again, and to her astonishment, there is no sign of the tree on the outside of the house. She digs the hole once again.
There is nothing.
She keeps digging.
The shovel hits something hard. She brings the shovel up into the air and uses her body weight to hit the root with the edge of the shovel. It barely penetrates it. In fact it doesn’t even mark the root.
Her husband comes outside and laughs at her, taking the shovel in his hand. He brings the edge of the shovel down hard on the root, they hear a crack, and the sound of something breaking.
It is the shovel.
He goes to the shed and picks up an axe.
She smiles. Which feels alien, and she realizes she has not smiled in quite a long time.
He breaks the axe on the root, and she loves him more in that moment, because she realizes he will break every tool in their shed to fix this for her.
***
They resolve to sell the house.
They prune the branches as best as they can. The branches are weak enough to cut here and there. Their daughter dances in the room as they work, singing a made up song about trees in the house. This also makes her mom smile.
***
The realtor comes the next day. He is confident and looks in their eyes with a warm smile. He shakes both of their hands and lets them lead him through their home.
They leave the dining room for last.
He is delighted. “This house will sell fa—”
He stops mid sentence seeing the tree, now half a foot taller than when they pruned it the day before, and all of the branches have grown back. The leaves are bright green, and their daughter jumps up and down proclaiming, “it’s a tree in the house.”
“The tree must be removed.”
They nod in turn and looked at each other. She wonders why they have never communicated like this before. He smiles at her and she back.
They call someone to remove the tree.
He arrives, dirt caked jeans and mud caked sneakers. A cigarette hangs loosely from his mouth, but he quickly picks it out and throws it on the ground as she walks up to him. He smiles politely and asks where the infamous tree is.
She smirks at him and points. He smirks back, “don’t worry I’ll handle it.”
The husband walks up, but the man that has come to cut down their tree does not look at the supposed man of the house that can not protect his family from a tree.
What a man the tree cutter thinks.
The tree cutter pulls out his shovel and digs up the root. He hits it with the shovel and of course, the shovel chips.
Next he uses his axe, and it still doesn’t work
He tries a few other sharper, stronger, diamond edged tools.
Nothing works.
“I’ll give you your money back.” The tree cutter says to the wife.
The tree cutter doesn’t look at the husband. The tree cutter’s pride is chipped, shattered, and torn in the truck. He keeps his eyes to the ground.
So they are stuck with her tree.
Her husband doesn’t know it is her tree. But it is.
They start to share more with each other, but she holds on to the dream.
The tree gets bigger.
Soon they have to move the dining room table to the kitchen.
This becomes inconvenient. They bump into it and there is no room to prepare food. So they move the dining room table and chairs outside.
Birds sit on it to rest. Spiders make their homes at the bottom corners, so that their webs won’t be blown away by the wind. Squirrels climb the legs and stand at the top of the table so they can look across the yard and decide where they want to hide their food for the winter.
The tree inside, grows. It drops its seeds on the floor. It invites its inhabitants to stay awhile in the house. Beetles and caterpillars find nooks and crannies to hide in.
The house starts to slant, as the tree grows, as if it is trying to escape the slow impalement that has been happening for years.
Soon only the daughter, now a little girl, can venture into the dining room. Which is now just the tree with some bits of wall left over and around it.
The wife and husband make an unspoken agreement to ignore it.
The wife still keeps the dream.
She keeps another secret as well. The inevitable truth: Her husband could make her smile and love her enough to break all of his tools, but he could not save her from the inevitable death she faced.
For this truth, she grows embittered.
She starts to blame him for all manner of things. For pushing her to buy the house, for impregnating her, for chaining her down in marriage.
Then she walks away.
After these arguments, he looks toward the tree, his greatest failure. He blames her new found bitterness, toward him, on his inability to save their home from the tree.
Her bitterness grows.
The tree grows.
The house is indistinguishable from the tree.
The walls tremble.
The leaves on the branches shake.
The floors rattle.
The bark stands stoic.
The roots continue breaking through the foundation.
The trunk continues pushing the house sideways.
The windows groan and sigh. The glass starts to crack and crumble.
***
Her husband decides to punish himself. He sets up a cot in the room next to the tree and sleeps there. Their daughter often comes down to join him.
The wife often comes to sit on the stairs and watch them, cuddled under the tree, asleep. She smiles sadly, and wishes she could lay with them as well, and never leave.
She feels how disingenuous this wish is and walks back upstairs.
She wants them to get used to her absence.
She wants to become used to being alone.
***
Then comes the day, the front door jams.
The tree now takes up half of the downstairs and has broken through to the second floor. Half of the house is tangled in the tree and lifted in the air.
The frame and the wall it rests in are lifted, the door has not gotten the message and sits stolidly refusing to move.
She sighs upon this realization and goes around back to slide the screen open in one of the few windows still left intact around back.
She lifts the screen and steps inside. She hears the door bang and jiggle.
She waits.
Her husband hits the door.
“Shit.”
Her daughter giggles and guffaws at her daddy’s use of “a bad word.”
She smiles. She touches her mouth amazed at the length in time since her last smile.
She looks toward the room.
The tree’s leaves shake. Recognizing her realization and affirming it.
She nods and walks upstairs, smile forgotten and lying on the ground behind her.
He comes around the house and climbs in the window as well. Then he lifts their daughter inside and squats down so she can climb on his back.
As he squats down, he senses his wife’s forgotten smile.
He remembers the dimple in her cheek and the smell of rosewood behind her ear.
He calls out to her.
He runs up the stairs, his daughter clinging to his back.
She is halfway up, he grabs her hand and pulls.
He tugs her down and pulls her toward himself. His daughter reaches out trying to embrace her mother as well.
The memory of rosewood makes him feel something he has never considered and is afraid to say.
He holds her and then turns around, pulling her behind him.
The tree grows.
She looks behind her as her legs keep up with her husband. She watches as fruit actively grows on the branches. Apples, peaches, mangoes, oranges.
It is life giving, she thinks.
She looks forward at her husband and at her daughter, who faithfully clings to him. He is looking forward carrying them both out of this place.
She looks back at the fruit and then back at them.
They stop at the window.
She looks in his eyes and sees hope.
Good, she thinks.
She turns and runs back toward the stair and jumps on a branch.
It soars upward.
Rebekah Blake currently lives in Virginia Beach. She is a Black American mother, wife, sister, mortgage processor, student, graduate assistant, editor, and writer. When she can find time she loves to read Toni Morrison, Albert Camus, and nonfiction focusing on Black history. She identifies as an existentialist and love to watch movies and shows that make her cry or that scares her enough to keep her up at night. She’s been published in Adelaide and Opiate literary magazine.
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