I love the way the setting sun casts enormous shadows onto the trees.

The winter time has rendered some of the foliage that surrounds me into skeletons; thin and lanky arms reach to the sky as if in prayer, uncountable off-shoots branch out in seemingly inscrutable patterns. The trees lie in wait, dancing softly in the wind, waving the setting sun good-bye.

A shadow crawls across the football field and the houses and the roads. The cars run in and out of the darkness, none the wiser. Soon, the dark reflection cast by my apartment complex will reach the clustered trunks. Then, it’ll continue its incessant journey, until it covers every branch, dead or alive, indiscriminate as it is.

Even having lost their leaves, they pray. Even as they lose their light, they pray. The sky grows darker as the sun is snuffed out by time, and the trees still pray.

They look desperate. Underfed, famished. I wonder if each tree prays for something different, or if their connected roots, winding and touching and hugging and crushing each other, I wonder if their mouths that melt into one all whisper the same hymns and the same obsessed desires. A thousand, maybe a million tiny fingers reaching to the heavens all singing the same song, begging for life, and still the shadows cover everything.

They have no eyes of course. Even if they had had them, once, I’m sure they would’ve already gone blind from staring up.

Their steps are perfectly choreographed; it’s a slow, methodical service. The priest speaks and whispers and blows, and the trees bow their heads, though they never kneel. They sway, but never lower their craving, reaching arms.

The moon takes the place of the sun. Maybe they’d recognize their god’s light, I thought, but they didn’t. Just as the shadows chased away the heavenly father, as is the mindless march of time, so did the trees’ prayer warp. It no longer carries that same warmth and understanding, that scream for life. Now, it cries and it thinks and it rages.

Their fingers don’t yearn and they don’t dance. They reach like blades. The trees see a different nature in the moon, they see it as a phantasm, a mirage, a simulacrum of heat that brings nothing but pale light. They wag their fingers as they cry out, they rage at the darkened heavens as they scream. Their trunks are rugged and cracked, bleeding sap. Every new branch nothing but a tumorous growth from a gaping wound, but they take all they can get. They brandish their swords and they stab with their spears.

A blowing priest into a howling general. It screams like they scream, it cries like they cry, and it howls as they creak.

The very stars cower, tiny in the sky.

The moon hides behind the clouds.

The trees never sleep; they never forget. Still, in the morning, they will pray to the sun, with smiles carved into their bodies.