//------------------------------//
// Chapter 18 
// Story: The Only Tree in the Forest 
// by Hap 
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She did come back. She brought new tools. New to me, at least. Some device with a spiral blade that spins. She presses it against my trunk and it cuts away a tiny hole in my wood. This is followed with a little saw that fits into the hole, and cuts a wide circle that lets a shaft of sunlight inside.

Windows. She is cutting windows into me. I have floors and stairs and shelves and a doorway and now holes for windows. I am to be a house, I think.

I’ve not seen the inside of a house, but I watched a few being built. There is a house for the ponies who grow apples. There is a house for the things other ponies sell. Houses have flat places for ponies to walk on, and to put their things on. Houses have windows and doors and a roof to keep off the rain. Just like the squirrels and the birds build houses to stay warm and keep the rain off their heads, ponies build their houses from the trees they chop down.

I will make a poor house, I think. I am still growing, slow though it may be. Ponies do not make houses from living wood. My floors will not stay level, my walls will move, and without a layer of bark, my insides will begin to rot again or dry out and crack.

So why does she carve a living tree? I cannot imagine any reason. Why does she press her hooves against my tender wood and feel my pain when she could easily fly, or shod herself against the hurt? And why does she not kill me first and dry the wood and then build a house to suit her, rather than try to shape her house to my gnarled, twisted trunk?

I don’t know. I cannot feel her pain. I first saw her long ago, that night when ash stained the sky, and I knew that she was like me. Burned and dead on the inside. And, as she works to carve me into a house, shaping and preparing my inside, I wonder if she, like me, is unable to see inside herself.

Ponies see in a very different way, I am sure. Their wide eyes take in the world with impatience and wonder. As quickly as they live and die, they must do everything quickly: grow and laugh and love and think and plan. Their farms feed them after only a single season, their houses are built in mere days. They look only a few winters ahead, if at all. 

But not her.

She has seen the inside of me, just as I have seen the inside of her. And I feel that she sees my future, just as I saw hers on that night I first met her. When I saw that she was like me, when I was first burned.

I don’t know what future she has planned for me, but I know that it hurts.