The Meadow 15 A Tooth is a Tree Matthew Burnside Boy is burying a tooth in the earth. “A tooth is not a tree,” mother has tried her best to teach him. Boy is insistent though, all gunked up with dreaming. Every night his parents bicker, shaking their pillows. Help is needed. Professional help I mean, father decides, as Boy watches tooth slumbering in a hole in the backyard. Definitely not natural, mother agrees. It is agreed then. Boy will receive help. Years of sessions go by and Boy is still gunked up with dreaming. Mind full of dreamy cobwebs. Sleek nets to catch all the ghosts haunting his dreamy heart with ghostsinging. It is futile, reports the professional one day. Boy is beyond help. A tooth is not a tree! mother yells in a fit of desperation, shaking him like a pillow. If only they looked outside they’d see skeletal branches tickled by the sun—beautiful white boughs holding up the entire weight of the sky. Boy feels tooth in his heart blooming its big roots out into the wide world. One day, an orchard of teeth. Boy forgives, because Boy sees. It’s not their fault some people never learn to see beyond the windows.
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