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If walls could talk, I would plead with the Dwellers to take fire to our skin, burn us to soot and scatter us to the winds in the grove where we grew. The grove where they hunted my sisters by axe, branch by branch, their bodies shaved and stacked to sky.

I crave the open sky. I crave the breeze that breathed through our leaves while we danced arm to arm. Legs rooted through soil, stretching as far and wide as the earth allowed. Freedom in mud and air.

The Dweller's slice was sharp and swift and my fall was loud and unrestrained atop the bristled grass, killing it wherever I lay. They dismembered my highest limbs, the arms that had once nearly grazed the stars, and I yearned to know why they’d left so much of me behind. Did they know how closely I'd kissed the sun? How far I’d grown below the earth? Did they care? If walls could talk, I would ask.

They stacked me above my sisters. “Walls” we were called. A “cabin” the Dwellers said. A home. I wanted nothing more than to weep for the home we became, our own, lost.

With all my might I fought to grow. Pushing from each fibre, urging new branches to sprout, new roots to bloom. But as I was, I stayed.

A Dweller with golden wheat sprouting from its head released a seed with horrible screams, howls I longed to parody. The seedling blossomed and my disdain grew; I despised and envied its extension. Its movement. By now my roots were likely shriveled and gnawed. Yet I marveled at the seedling's branches, unrooted, carrying itself from wall to wall, from Dweller to Dweller, their dances and rituals reminding me of home.

I dreamed the seedling would reach the sky as I once had. I dreamed it would grow too tall, its head shooting through the ceiling; our bodies released, no longer helpful, no longer needed. But at his tallest (hardly half a wall's height) the seedling left through the hole between us and never returned.

The Dwellers’ wails stilled in time, but by then their trunks had rotted and shrunk, hunched and shriveled with age.

And one day, the cabin no longer lived. The Dwellers gone, the room unlit and cold, unstirred. Wind eventually whistled its way through our bodies, thinned and gapped. But it brought little comfort, this wind. I still craved the soil; yearned to return to the earth.

If walls could talk, I would have called to the Dweller who appeared through the hole in our wall all those moons after. Perhaps I would have laughed; invited him to dance about the room as the seedling it resembled once had. Instead, as quickly as he came, alone we were left. Four walls overrun by moss and vine, fated to eternal stillness as the world grew around us.

But fate is restless; and by starlight, this night, we fall.

I relive the axe; the rush, my body hitting the forest floor with a horrible thud. Birds take to sky, woken and fearful of the thunderous crash. We are collapsed, caved to center, our bodies giving way to the hollows of our beetle infested chests. My body pops and cracks; half of me rolls to the ground, to the grass. I lie motionless. The crickets sing beneath me, welcoming.

If walls could talk, we would not say anything in this moment. We will sleep and decay; rotting to soil, birthing new life to the forest floor. A new home.