Tom had been wandering around the woods for at least an hour with no luck. He had been looking for an oddly shaped tree that resembled a man with one muscled arm and one withered one. He'd had a clever name for it in his youth and he'd been trying to think of it all last night as he lay in bed in his parents house, also with no luck.
It wasn't the bed he'd slept in as a child, or even the room. His dad had turned his old bedroom into a sewing workshop at his mother's insistence, and it was now a horrid pink and yellow shell of its former glory with piles of flowered fabric as far as the eye could see.
He felt free at last to get out of the house, which was about to be packed with older brothers and sisters and grandchildren. He relished the short walk he'd taken to the top of the hill above his parents house. Though the hill was steep, and dogs barked loudly from their side yard prisons, the smell and cool air of November was just what he needed. This sensation lasted just until he could see the old fence, and he remembered why he had climbed this hill in the first place.
The barbed wire fence held together by hundred year old posts was just as he remembered it, separating the street from the entrance to the woods a good 100 feet away. Right before he'd pushed down the old strands of rusted wire to step on the wild green grass, he turned his back to the forest. He looked at the valley and remembered the years he'd spent from birth to high school driving the streets, swimming in pools, clowning with his friends, kissing girls, and suffering in classrooms. Tom had spent a mostly happy childhood there. None of it however for better or much worse, held the magnitude of his time in those woods.
Now he was looking for a tree, and hoping that the item buried beneath it was still there.
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