The Treasure Is You
The shovel shivers in her hands, wedge shaped head chipping its teeth against the frozen ground. Hands, numb with unraveling gloves, ache.
The dryad told her to dig, so after huffing a hot, haggard breath into her palms, she braces the shovel and jumps on its rusted metal ledges with both shoes. A little bit of dirt pushes up against the blade. It’s an insult. A mockery. And now her feet hurt.
The only warm thing is the seed in her pocket, but if she puts her cold hands in her jacket, the shovel will become abandoned. She will return home, make weak coffee, wonder why things never change as she rocks in her chair.
She raises the shovel over one shoulder like it’s an axe and swings like when she went to the dryad for help in the first place, even though everyone told her being a tree wouldn’t solve her problems. The handle, old and brittle, shatters in her fists.
The wood falls to her feet like kindling.
Should have done this last summer when the dryad first told her to dig, but that’s what she’s good at. Procrastinating. Waiting and seeing, hoping that whatever is wrong will come to its own resolution because what everyone has said about her is true — that above all else, she lacks resolve.
Not today she doesn’t. Nor tomorrow.
She chips away at the dirt with what remains of her shovel until there is no more light.
She digs past self doubts and false spring, when the earth loosens and the worms move through the dirt, and brave green things put their buds to the sun. The hole she has scraped is not deep, but it is long, and it is just wide enough. The dying breath of winter whispers in the breeze that pulls at her clothes, at the seed still in her pocket.
It’s not a grave, but she lies down in it anyway. The seed’s hard-shell has cracked since the dryad gave it to her, and green fuzz pushes through. Last chance to turn back, but that’s what she’s always done.
She puts it on her tongue and waits. The seed swells as her mouth waters, while the wind pushes the pile of dirt she’s left behind over her body. The seed splits and roots her deep into the bed she has made. Her limbs, fragile and new with electric chlorophyll, push to meet the sky and its moon, its sun, its stars, everything in its beyond.
