Gemotions

The saw's teeth, she imagined, must have sung a hungry song as they bit through the trunk. It was a vicious wound, a fresh scar on the earth where her sapling, her defiant little oak, had once stood. Her hands clenched into fists at her sides. She wouldn’t cry. Not now. Not for these… *people*. The ones who’d sanctioned the butchery.

She kicked at a scattering of wood chips, sending them skittering across the exposed soil. They were little coffins, she thought, for all the years the tree would never see. The audacity! To just… take it. Well, they hadn’t taken her spirit, not yet.

She went to her truck, grabbed the shovel. She would plant something else here, something the earth would remember. Something that would grow, and *thrive*, despite their efforts to erase it.