Addition by Subtraction

 LINDA PETRUCELLI

The six-foot Sago Palm that’s inhabited your backyard for the last twenty years isn’t a palm at all but a coniferous beast, armed with poison seeds and rapier fronds, survivor since the Jurassic age. You approach the overgrown ornamental cautiously, remembering how you weren’t paying attention once and it stabbed you in the eye ice pick quick. Cinch the hoodie under your chin. Push the machine-shop goggles up the bridge of your nose. Your gloved hands tote a garden lopper, long-handled and heavy as a rifle.

Under the tree’s umbrella of needles, you stoop and move clockwise around the trunk, stretching open and clamping shut the shears’ monstrous jaw. With each brittle leaf hacked, a puff of piney dust mingles with your sweat and brown-tipped talons soon cover the lawn. All that’s left is one ring of leaves encircling a desiccated dome, its orange seeds like marbles encased in mud and brains. You step back, lungs heaving, dizzy with exhaustion, thankful the tree’s ancient defense system hasn’t blinded or drawn blood.

For three months you worry and cannot trust the odd mathematics of growth. Cannot calculate the paradox. The Sago’s mud-caked head withers under the Pacific sun, rots in the winter rain, its gristled fronds drooping. You make an uneasy peace, regret the lopper and its violent jaw. Stop thinking it still might survive. Until a windswept day arrives and soft green fingers fountain through the flattened head, reaching toward a morning moon aloft in the sky.