Faber Academy extension task

This section’s last task was to write from the perspective of an inanimate object. I had no idea how on earth I was going to tackle this until yesterday when I found myself visiting the Victoria & Albert’s Marie Antoinette Style exhibition full of its empty, sad dresses. At the end of this beautifully curated story, there hangs the guillotine’s blade which possibly was used at her death. I was struck by its awfulness, hanging there, and it prompted me to imagine its life……

Testimony of an oak

I spent my formative century in Fontainebleau’s forests as a silent witness to the parade of kings and princelings that hunted black creatures beneath my straight, strong branches. They all looked the same to me on their armoured steeds, bedecked in weaves and jewels, ostrich feathers perfuming arrogance through the frosty air.  As my own golden finery drifted to the ground below and the mycorrhizal maps thrust manes, caps and jelly ears through a mossy carpet, I’d know crazed hounds would soon be marking the killing season.  My roots were fed with blood spilt from their terrible slaughter.

But one Autumn, the horses did not return.  Instead came a noisy procession of artisans and farmers bearing saws, ropes and wine, gathering in glades bullseye-marked with bonfires stoked night and day with limbs of timbered comrades.  Being the straightest, strongest forest elder, I knew they would reach me in due course, as my pointing branches promised glories for the baying mob waiting within the city walls.

Clamped with white-hot metal, a heavy blade was thrust deep into my core, painfully splitting my tight grain.  The blacksmith’s horror-hammer, windmilling down onto my split trunk, forced me to clamp down on an unfamiliar weight, a new prosthetic limb.  Executioner embroiderers threaded ropes and pulleys, and my mechanical crown was hoisted aloft trumpeting the dawn of madness.

I lost count of the number of mortal cuts I made, the endless blood nourishing the tumour of terror, whilst tattooing me with its sticky black sap.  And as fast as the thud of steel drove me down, the crowd’s cry would send me back sky-ward, driving me on a dizzying endless dance.

Now I hang in another city, but in a silent, glass cabinet.  Faces of another horde loom towards me brandishing blinding white flashes to record my captivity.  I’m no longer touched by worms, blood or panicked prayers, instead pins anchor me on an upright bed of red velvet, suspended in liminal time.

A sign says that Marie-Antoinette once lay down her tiny head in my lap.  How can an old oak know these things?  All I now yearn for is the familiar rustle of a west wind in my leaves, perhaps a touch of a morning sunbeam, or songs of the firecrests that once wove their songs through my canopy of time.