Sublime

Chris decided the outcome he’d invested in was making his children happy at any cost in order to avoid his wife’s anger.

“First I thought he’d fallen out and was crawling around the store somewheres. I wasn’t even panicked. The place wasn’t that big. So I started looking around. You know, calling his name. But he wasn’t there. I’m looking under counters and even in the beer and soda cases. But he was gone. Then I look in the back, could see daylight coming from a ope

His scream pierces the air, and his body tumbles into the branches of the banyan, that one-tree forest that has grown up over the course of three hundred years just in time to break his fall.

Every notch scratched in the kitchen door frame marked the growing up of someone now long dead.