Progress

The tree had stood there for at least a century. Gnarled, battered by the elements, and inscribed upon by countless hormone-driven youths of the locale, it had maintained a vigil over the town from atop its perch. A scant three feet in front of it was a cast iron fence, rusted with age and overgrown with climbing roses. Anyone foolish enough to hop over the fence, perhaps pricking their hands on rose thorns, would find the edge of the escarpment — over a hundred-foot sheer drop onto the street below.

Miraculously enough, there had been no accidental deaths here in many years — none that were publicized anyway. The morbid tranquility, felt perhaps most fully while resting against the tree’s great trunk, staring out over the flowered fence to the city shrouded in night below, demanded otherwise of more purposeful endings.

To date, the tree had witnessed more than 12 suicides and half as many murders at the fumbling hands of the escarpment ledge. There must have been something romantic not only about dying here, but about holding onto one last moment of peace before plummeting away to the great beyond, below.

Tonight was the last night of such peace, and the tree must have known. Its ancient limbs twisted and gibbered in the wind, slapping its trunk like a screaming man swatting at bees beneath his clothing. We were no bees, though, just terrified city workers who had the misfortune of working this shift.

And when the chainsaw howled its last, the great sentinel toppled. That was when it set in, and we realized that this had been a terrible act — something unforgivable — but it was our job and it had to be done. We could not, however, bring ourselves to hold the tree from its last rite, as it crashed through the fence and joined those that had preceded it.

- Matt Baker