Saturday's Storyteller: "Billy the Leaf watched his neighbors fall."

by Belinda Roddie

Billy the Leaf watched his neighbors fall. The Johnson Leaves, one by one, exhaled in crackles as their skin turned to orange, drifting from their branches with a beautiful synchronicity before settling onto the cracked asphalt. The Smith Leaves, sporting a more diverse set of reds, browns, and yellows across their faces, snapped from their holdings separately, as they had always been a dysfunctional family near the top of their tree. And old Gary the Leaf, who Billy could have sworn was wheezing a laugh the whole time, got to ride the autumn breeze a bit before dropping into a roof gutter and waiting for the next rainfall.

Billy the Leaf usually did not mind seeing his neighbors depart, only to be replaced by new neighbors the next spring. While it made the winter somewhat lonely, he still had his family to talk to, despite his uncle being somewhat frosty to him and his mother more attentive to his two younger sisters, who clung to the lowest part of their fleshy branch. After all, Billy the Leaf lived on an oleander tree, which, despite losing its flowers for the cold season, never was any other color but green and never shed its leaves.

Of course, that meant Billy could never fall away, forced to stay in the same spot until someone came at their foliage with the shears. That was how he had lost his grandfather. He would have preferred to see the old leaf die of natural causes - breaking away like a dry, dying husk and floating into the foggy ether. Instead, he had been cut up into tiny pieces. None of the humans could hear him scream.

Yes, Billy was quite unsatisfied with being paralyzed on the oleander tree, and he was especially miffed that no one, especially not the children, wouldn't go near his residence. Obviously, it was because the flowers were toxic, and it was just as well - they were assholes, and Billy was always sadistically happy to see them wilt. Too often, he witnessed deer bounding away from the taunting and laughing petals, never daring to taste the poisonous nectar. The smell emitting from the flowers, though subtle to other animals, was putrid to Billy and his family, certainly offsetting lovely evening moods at times.

"Sometimes, I wish I were an oak leaf," Billy said to his mother, ignoring the raunchy jokes and crude words of the newest oleander blossoms above his head. "Then I could get out of here."

"Oh, honey," his mother moaned from her place below him. "Don't ever wish for death like that."

But it was easy to wish to disappear. Somehow, the wind, more and more these days, was appealing to Billy the Leaf. If he only had the strength to move, he could rip away from the tree himself, to soar across the zephyrs before landing in the nearest yard to be raked into a pile, swept into a garbage bag, and thrown out to sea. At least it was a more dignified end than a pruning tool.

***

Jennifer was unhappy.

She was walking home from school, a ball of paper scrunched up in her fist, her eyes averted to the pavement and her lips pressed together hard. Once she got home, she would toss the wad of loose leaf into the garbage, never attempting to write poetry about the fall again.

Stupid Frankie. Thinking he could make fun of her for a haiku about colored leaves. What kind of fourth grader thought a haiku about leaves would be worth teasing a girl about?

She stopped walking when she heard the scraping of a rake against a gutter, turning to see her neighbor, the sixty-something Stuart, dragging crispy leaves into a stack near his backyard. His equally aged black lab, Howie, slept with one paw under his furry chin, his tail slightly wagging due to a somewhat exciting dream.

"Mind saving me some to step on?" she called out. "I sure love stepping on crunchy leaves."

Stuart looked up, tilted back his sun hat, smiled, and winked. Then, with a swift jerking motion, he cut the rake across the pile of leaves, so that a handful of them broke away from the pack and scattered to the sidewalk. Finally smiling, the nine-year-old girl leapt onto a particularly large and brown leaf, her sneaker stomping its face and cracking it open so the concrete was exposed under its split smile. The crunching sound was satisfying enough for her to do it again and again, before sliding her foot away from the fragments of leaves behind in broken mounds and nodding to Stuart.

"Thanks!" she cried, before shuffling a close distance away from the oleander tree. It was then that she heard a little voice.

"Hey, kid," it whispered. "I can be crunchy, too. Can you try stepping on me?"

This week's prompt was provided by Daniel Bulone.