Miracle in the Tree
One day we came out to look at the tree and there was a miracle hanging there.
Before, this was just a tree.
When the miracle hung in the tree we woke every morning with new bodies. We zipped on our
suits of light, until the day we wondered, Is this all there is?
That’s when we went to the corner shop and asked them to remove our eyes. They did this
without question, and then filled our ears with cement. Strawberries never tasted so sweet.
We put everything in our mouths and when we were through doing that, we danced. At the
corner shop, they became good at removing tongues. Legs too. Maybe you guessed, our skin was
jealous. We had to go to another corner for this.
Nobody thought about the miracle anymore. The tree was barely a memory. Perhaps it had been
chopped down. Perhaps the miracle was still in it. Or maybe the birds pecked it clean.
The trees were all gone, so we had to build more trees, one for each of us. We took to these new
trees, bound to hang there until the sun went away forever and everything stopped tormenting us
about every little detail.
Chris Haven’s prose appears or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Jellyfish Review, No
Contact, Cincinnati Review miCRo, and Kenyon Review. One of his stories is listed in Best
American Short Stories 2020, and his debut collection of short stories, Nesting Habits of
Flightless Birds, was published by Tailwinds Press in 2020. Bone Seeker, a collection of poems,
was published by NYQ Books in March 2021. He teaches writing at Grand Valley State
University in Michigan.