"Where The Pine Trees Grow"

You look outside your window. All you see are skyscrapers, billboards, and roads that lead to nowhere important. Your grandma once said that that trees used to stand tall and proud where the candy store now sits. Instead of cracked asphalt and blisters your feet on a hot summer evening, the ground was covered in cool dirt and pine needles.

“How absurd, ” you think. How could there have been a forest where a concrete jungle thrives. Flowers and trees? Merely a fairy tale. After all, it’s been almost a century since the last apple tree was cut down. It’s hard to believe there even was one.

Still, your grandma continues to prattle on about the river that once flowed through the town, instead of the heap of garbage and filth that now lay in the empty riverbed.

Wildlife? The first thing you think of are the stray cats and the giant rats that roam the streets. No such things as bears and deer in this metropolis. Except in the city zoo. Pay thirty bucks to walk around and stare at smelly animals all day. You’d rather play your video games and shoot them down with your rifle.

But grandma insists, “There is proof deary! You just need to look hard enough!” You leave home and head to the arcade, scoffing at her daydreams. She’s senile. Crazy. Has one screw loose.

Yet…you can’t help but wonder if maybe she is right. You can’t stop imagining a world where nature thrives. You can picture a great red oak sprouting up through the middle of the candy store. The scorching pavement on your bare feet suddenly feels cooler. A garbage truck rolls by, and it’s suddenly a wave crashing into the riverbed instead of a rank metal monster swallowing filth before purging into the dump.

You turn the corner and see with your own two eyes, the proof your grandma was so adamant about. A single pine tree in the center of the plaza. Although it’s made of synthetic pine needles, a metal skeleton, and is usually dressed in Christmas lights and tinsel, you understand what she meant. Without it’s holiday garb, you see how beautiful it is. Now if only…if only it were real. Authentic. Living.

Now you understand.

You see the ghost of a once beautiful world that society had cut down, paved over, and left behind. A mere memory of a thriving natural world that has long been replaced by industry and progress. But what progress is this? Is this truly how it was meant to be?

As you keep trudging forward, your destination in sight. Killing zombies is only a few feet away. Yet your mind can’t stop thinking, “Is there still a place where the pine trees grow?”