The Vagina Tree by Simon A. Thalmann

Darren hadn’t thought of the vagina tree for nearly 20 years, but now, driving back to his hometown with a car full of belongings and a half a fifth of vodka tucked between his legs, the image was burned into his brain like a brand into a horse’s ass.

It was Mikey who found the tree, set apart in a clearing in the woods a quarter mile or so behind his house. He brought Darren there—then just 10 years old—conspiratorially on a cool Friday afternoon after school, and Darren, to say the least, had been disappointed at the initial revelation.

“A tree?” Darren asked from the edge of the clearing, hands clenched tight around his backpack straps. “You brought me all the way out here to look at a stupid tree?” Mikey just smiled and motioned Darren to come closer, and after a frustrated sigh he made his way across the thick, high grass and did so.

The tree was average height, with broad, full leaves like a maple, but it had smooth, unbroken bark, and being early fall, had large, bulbous green nuts hanging from its branches like the black walnuts dotting the concrete at the edges of the school parking lot. In other words, the tree was unremarkable.

Except, of course, for the vagina.

Mikey stepped aside so Darren could see it, like a magician revealing the appearance of his assistant after evaporating her inside a box before a stunned audience. Poof! There it was.

“See,” Mikey said. “Worth the wait, no?” Darren stepped forward in stunned amazement. He’d seen a vagina before, in his dad’s hidden stash of pornos, of course, but this was different, this was real. This was in the side of a tree.

“Is it real?” Darren asked.

“Of course it’s real.”

“Have you . . .”

Mikey punched him in the arm. “What do you think?” he said. “You think I’m gonna stick my thing in a tree?” But he was blushing, and Darren knew Mikey well enough to know the answer. He knew himself enough not to judge him, either.

It’s possible, likely even that Darren would have succumbed to the lure of the vagina tree himself later, in his younger teen years if not sooner, when the urges and the curiosity spawned by the blossoming chests of the opposite sex burned even more intensely than they did just then, but when Mikey disappeared in the woods that weekend and never came home, all the kids in the neighborhood were put on lockdown by their parents. Shortly after that Darren’s dad was transferred north for work and the family moved across the state.

All this came back as Darren drove from the apartment he had shared with his fiancé—now ex-fiance—for the last six months. It was his own fault, he conceded, as it usually was. He’d had a string of bad relationships since that day when he was 10, two failed marriages, and a number of regrets related to the fairer sex. In fact, each of his relationships, one after the other, began and ended with sex.

This one had been different, he thought, this girl was the one. Sarah. When he had cheated on his last wife with Sarah it wasn’t like the first time he had cheated, a one-night-stand with some no-name whore he’d known in college. With Sarah he had felt it was right, like it was okay to cheat because he actually cared about her.

And yet he did it again, like he always did it again. There was the familiar scene when he returned from work that afternoon—the woman carelessly tossing his things out of the open apartment window, the determined, steady, purposeful stride she had when flowing in, then out of the bedroom inside, and the shouting when she saw his car pull up the drive.

“What’s your fucking problem?!” Sarah shouted. “Am I not fucking good enough? Did I not fucking fuck you enough? You had to go and fuck some whore?!”

Darren had been resigned, picking up his things and slowly moving them into his car.

“So what? You have nothing to say? Well here’s what you can do, Darren, here’s what you can do,” she shouted, passersby staring from their cars, residents from their balconies. “You can go and fuck yourself!”

He stared at her then, and with nothing to say, knowing there was nothing to say because he knew that she knew he would only do it again, he said, “I’m sorry.”

“Agh!” Sarah threw up her hands and turned into the apartment. “Go fuck a tree.”

And now, after drinking and driving for more than an hour south and walking in random, drunken circles for close to another hour, Darren found himself in the dark at the edge of the clearing where he last saw his best friend from childhood, and where he had seen the vagina tree for the first and last time.

He took a swig from his second fifth of vodka and realized it was empty, dropping it in the grass at the edge of the clearing, and approached the vagina tree. Everything was the same, even the time of year. Aside from a dozen or so younger trees which had sprouted and grown over the last two decades, it was as if nothing had changed.

Stumbling in the dark, Darren felt around the cold, hard smoothness of the tree, and for a few minutes thought they must have been mistaken about the vagina. Maybe it had dried up, he thought. Maybe it was just us kids and our horny imaginations.

Then he found it.

He stopped his hand over the soft, warm smoothness of the vagina. While he could barely see it by the clouded-over moonlight, he was amazed by the realistic feel of it. I know a vagina when I feel one, he thought, and this is the real deal. Go fuck a tree, he thought, picturing Sarah fuming through the window. Okay, Sarah, fuck you.

He fumbled with his belt buckle, then with the zipper of his jeans, then dropped his pants and pulled himself through the opening at the front of his boxers. For a moment he stood in the darkness before the tree, swaying in a drunken stupor, reflecting on Sarah, his first and second wives, and all the other women he had wanted so badly who had only let him down. All the women he had let down. And then he thrust himself into the tree.

Darren woke up cold, covered in goose bumps and heavy dew. He sat up stiffly, hung-over, and looked around in the early morning fog. It took a long time to realize where he was, and when he finally, vaguely remembered the events of the night before he sighed and collapsed back onto the shimmering grass.

“Shit.”

He pulled on his jeans and stood, checking himself inside his boxers to make sure he hadn’t damaged himself, and walked slowly to the tree. It was unbelievable how real the vagina looked in the daylight, and while he inspected the area around it on the tree, he couldn’t seem to get past that feeling of reality. While he felt sick with himself for the events that had transpired just hours before, he couldn’t deny how good he had felt at the time, and somehow that made him feel even sicker. A sudden wave of disgust swept over him, and he stepped away from the tree, spat, backed swiftly out of the clearing, and made his way past the younger trees, each one, he now saw in the light, gnarled with grotesque knots. Finding his way back to his car, he headed home.

Sarah was gone when he arrived back at the apartment, as he knew she would be. He’d been through half a dozen women since he had moved in to that apartment, and it always went the same. They find out about his affair, or affairs, throw all his stuff out the window, or break it or steal it, they make a scene for the neighbors, and the next day they’re gone.

Over the coming days, though, Darren’s feelings about Sarah refused to dissipate. It was like a sick game of tug of war, where the longer he tried to pull away from his feelings for her the more they pulled him back from the other side of her departure, and the harder it was for him to sustain his stoicism. Despite his actions, he really had cared for Sarah, and he still did. In the silence of his empty apartment, he began to realize that the familiar, aching pain he had felt so many times over the years was a pain that he caused himself, pain that he had caused so many women, pain he had caused Sarah, all because of sex.

I can’t do this anymore, he thought, staring at the disaster that his apartment had become in the last few days, realizing that his life was in a similar cycle of disarray which, if he didn’t do something to stop it, and soon, would spiral out of control, consuming him whole. He rose determined, grabbing his keys, and exited his apartment.

Little more than an hour later, Darren stood at the edge of the clearing in the woods, staring across the grass at the vagina tree, an axe on his shoulder. He stood for a long time, just staring, thinking about his life since he had first visited the tree, thinking of Sarah, and he began moving slowly with determined steps toward the tree. When he was within arm’s reach, he raised the axe high above his head.

“No, Mikey,” he said. “It wasn’t worth the wait.”

With all his strength, Darren sought to bring the axe down hard into the flesh of the tree, but as he swung he found it stuck swift in the air just above him. Looking up he saw the head of the axe lodge tightly in the crotch of two thick branches, and struggling to pull it free he fell, letting go of the handle and crashing hard onto the ground in front of the vagina tree.

Darren gasped as he slammed into the ground, wincing, and as he looked back into the tree he paused as he saw the vagina, pulsing softly, then harder, then harder still and swelling out from the tree like a slick balloon of flesh, bubbling larger and larger until it opened into an impossibly large pink mouth opening into the black depths of the tree.

He let out a low moan and scrambled backwards, stopping short as he bumped into something cold and hard behind him. Turning quickly he looked to see one of the younger trees, now transposed into the center of the clearing, towering above him. His head rolling madly side to side he saw another, and another, and another of the younger trees, closing in around him, forcing him toward the vagina tree and its pulsating black vagina.

“No!” Darren screamed, staring in horror at the trees, their branches reaching out to him, twigs scratching at his face and eyes. As they moved closer he could see the grotesque knots of the trees in detail, their gnarled features outlining the rough shape of a familiar face, and as they closed in on him small slits opened at the top of the knots, revealing sickly yellow eyes.

“No!” he cried, scrambling away from the trees toward the dark mouth of the vagina, his arms flailing out in front of him. “Mikey!” he wailed. “It can’t be!”

He backed away until he felt the cold hardness of the wood of the vagina tree on his back, until he could feel the damp, musty air of the opening above him, and unable to face the cruel depths of the vagina, the despair and horror of his own fate, he clenched his eyes tight and covered them with his fists, shaking his head violently from side to side, denying it until the tree descended, and he was consumed.

* * *

“Race you!”

Two young boys bolted into the clearing, each one grasping tightly the straps of their wildly swinging backpacks, sprinting through the thick, high grass, until one slipped and tumbled down. “Hey!” he said, rising slowly. “Hey wait up!”

“Slow poke!” the other called, exiting back into the trees with a flutter of branches and a scatter of leaves. “Rotten egg!”

“Jerk,” the second boy said, brushing the grass off his jeans. He looked around the ground at his feet, finally spying what had tripped him up, and picked up the bulbous green nut that had fallen from a tree just behind him and had caused him to stumble. Surveying the clearing he noticed there were dozens more spread out along the ground.

He looked at the tree, noticing with interest the axe hanging high up in its branches, the head lodged in the crotch between two thick branches. He looked back down at the base of the tree, feeling strangely drawn to it, and moved slowly toward its trunk.

“Hey!” the first boy called from the woods. “Hey, what are you doing?! Come on!” The second boy looked toward his friend, then back at the tree, then turned and jogged toward the woods, joining his companion. As he exited the clearing he dropped the bulbous nut, its odd, knobby features outlining the rough shape of a face.

Simon A. Thalmann is a professional freelance writer and editor based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. His work has appeared in a number of print and online publications, including Weird Tales, Suspense Magazine, and FATE, among others. He has work forthcoming in Spillway, Gargoyle, Scifaikuest and Mythic Delirium. When he has the time he does his best to blog consistently on his blogs Genre Whore (www.genrewhore.blogspot.com) and Poetic Desperation (www.poeticdesperation.blogspot.com).