Author: Amanda Todisco

There used to be a birch tree in the backyard. I peeled its skin and pretended the white curls of bark were movie tickets printed for me by an invisible teller, for an invisible movie I would watch with my invisible friends.

The toe of my sneaker knocks against its stump, a small reminder that the tree hadn’t been invisible, too.

Somebody is watching me from the window of my old room.

The new owners removed the PRINCESS CROSSING sticker that I’d pasted on the glass in fourth grade. I kept the blinds closed so my sister wouldn’t recognize it as the one she’d lost. She searched for a week before my parents bought her another.

For the first time ever, we had something in common.

Everyone I loved here is gone now, dead in ways that can’t be buried.

They know I’m here, the owners. I knocked on their door and said, “I’m writing a book.” They wouldn’t let me inside, but they said I could walk around the yard.

(I’m not really writing a book.)

I only wanted to hear their voices in the walls one last time.

The stump looks taller than it did a moment ago. Only a centimeter, maybe. I step back.

Beneath my sneaker, something shifts. I point at the stump and raise my finger.

The ground holds firm as I draw my finger higher, the weight of the past resisting the present.

The front door opens behind me.

Dirt crackles and splits as the roots flex beneath the ground. Its body wakes up, alive with the idea of a second chance. Branches fork upward like lightning and reach toward me, slipping down my throat and into my chest, detaching my heart and feeding it through the hollow trunk.

I can’t see who opened the door, but they see me.

They can tell you that I exist.