A Matter of Life and Death or Something by Ben Stephenson Page B

asked.
    â€œThree generations now, roughly a hundred years.”
    My eyebrows frowned. A hundred years? They’d been sucking those poor trees dry for ten times as long as I had even been alive? I decided to ask a question.
    â€œDoes it hurt the trees, you stabbing them with taps?”
    The man-in-charge smiled and I didn’t.
    â€œNope,” he said. “It’s just like a blood test from a healthy person. Like going to the hospital and getting your blood work done. The trees’ll make more sap soon, and they’ll be fine. I’ll bet your dad’ll tell you what it’s like to get a blood test.” He looked at Uncle Max, for some reason.
    â€œActually, my uncle said blood tests hurt like crazy. One time he had to get a blood test, and it hurt so bad he got confused and fainted and had a nightmare about falling off a cliff.”
    I looked at Max and he had shocked eyes and a serious face but he gave me a very small nod.
    â€œWell anyway,” the man-in-charge said, “it doesn’t hurt the trees.”
    I wasn’t convinced. Maybe it didn’t hurt the trees, like how scraping your knee hurts, but it definitely couldn’t do them any good. It wasn’t the right thing to do, to just be pouring the trees’ blood out like that. It didn’t matter that they were just trees, I mean, they didn’t even ask them. You can’t ask a tree if it wants to give a blood donation or not, so you can’t just go around taking it from them. This guy was a tree vampire, sucking the blood and then drinking it later on, and he pretended like he really loved the trees but he didn’t. He just wanted the sap. What about how big and how old the trees were? What about everything that had happened to them? And what about all the maple syrup I had eaten for my whole life because I didn’t know?
    Everyone turned around to walk back towards the buildings, but I stayed behind, looking at all the buckets hanging, trying to hear the song again. I stood there listening forever and making a sad list in my head.
    I Realized:
    â€“that the hundreds of silver buckets reflecting the sunlight looked really pretty, hanging there in rows, polka-dotting the woods.
    â€“that it was even worse that the buckets had to look so pretty, because of the thing that they were doing.
    â€“that what I should do was run through the place ripping all the taps out and then come back another day with band-aids and maybe an invention I’d have to invent that could inject the sap back into the trees so that they would all be OK.
    â€“that what I should do was ten times bigger than what I could do.
    Simon put his hands on my shoulders and said, “You alright, chief?”
    How could I expect him to understand? And plus had he been standing there the whole time?
    â€œYeah,” I said, looking at my boots. “I’m fine.”
    â€œLet’s get going,” he said, and we walked out of the woods and into the second cabin and he tried to wrap his arm around my shoulders but I didn’t let him because I had to make him believe I was fine.
    Inside, the murderer-in-charge was showing everyone this big square metal machine called the evaporator that he used to boil the tree blood and get the water out so he could sell it to people to put on their pancakes. All the people, even Simon and Maxine and Max, were listening very closely.
    What if trees had souls just like animals and humans? I mean, I didn’t know if they did or not, but what if they did? If they drained the trees long enough, would their souls seep out too, and would their bark get lighter and lighter every day until one day they were transparent so you couldn’t even see them anymore, and there would be no forest, just a big space filled with nothing? Where did all the broken parts of their souls go once the sap got evaporated into syrup? Did they stay in the syrup, or did they maybe float in the steam up