I.

I became aware in the dark, and my first thought—if it was a thought, which I doubt, because thoughts move too fast for what I am—was that the soil tasted different here. Richer. The soil of Connecticut, where I began, had been thin and stony, full of the memory of ice. This soil was warm, and wet, and full of other things: the excretions of creatures I could not see but could taste through my roots, the dissolved sugars of things that had lived and died and fed me before I was a sapling, the slow, patient chemistry of decay becoming growth.

I pushed upward. Not quickly—pushing upward is what I do, and speed is not in my vocabulary—but steadily, through the dark, through the layers of leaf litter and humus, until I broke into light.

The light was warm. The air was wet. And above me, reaching in every direction, were others like me: oaks, pines, maples, standing in a density that told me this was not a forest but something else. Something the two-legged ones had made.

They were everywhere. The two-legged ones. Fast-walkers. Brief-warmths. Their footsteps vibrated through the soil: heavy boots, small bare feet, the thin sharp clicks of shoes that meant they were going somewhere important.

II.

I learned them slowly. I learned that some of them touched my bark with hands that were wet—not with water, but with something saltier. I learned that some of them set axes to my neighbors and did not return. I learned that some of them built structures of stone and wood around me and painted them white, and that the paint smelled wrong, chemical, and the smell seeped into my leaves and changed them.

The brief-warmths came and went. Some seasons, there were many of them. Other seasons, there were fewer. They fought each other sometimes—the ground shook with their fighting, deep vibrations that traveled through my roots like screams. One great fire, when the sky turned red and the heat was so intense that my bark cracked and I lost leaves I would not regrow for a decade.

They built darker streets. Louder streets. The soil changed taste: coal smoke, then oil smoke, then something electric that made the air taste like metal. I felt every change through every root, every mycorrhizal thread connecting me to the mycelial networks beneath, the underground web that connected me to every other living thing in this place.

We knew them. We always knew them. The two-legged ones built, destroyed, rebuilt, repeated. Their brief lives flashed and faded, and we remained, rooted, listening to the ground scream.

III.

The accelerations came faster. The brief-warmths multiplied beyond counting. Their structures grew taller, darker, louder. The soil became paved over, sealed in gray stone, and I felt my roots choking, my connection to the earth slowing, thinning.

But I survived. I always survived.

Then the sky filled with metal birds, and the ground shook with underground thunder that I felt through the bedrock, hundreds of miles away, a scream that traveled through every root for a long, long time. The air grew thick with particles I had never tasted before, sharp and foreign, and the mycorrhizal web beneath me trembled with a fear that was not fear but the closest thing to it that a network of fungi could feel.

The two-legged ones were reaching. Not building. Not destroying. Reaching. I felt it in the magnetic field, in the vibrations of the earth, in the subtle shifts in the radiation that filtered through the atmosphere. They were reaching beyond themselves, beyond their brief warmths, beyond the sky.

I did not understand it. But I felt it, and I recorded it, and every vibration traveled down through my branches to my roots to the soil, and the soil held it, and the soil remembers.

IV.

They are different now. Changed beyond recognition. Spread across the globe, across the seas, perhaps across the sky. The two-legged ones.

I remain.

I drop my seeds. They carry in their tiny, hard shells the memory of every vibration my roots have felt: the first axe, the great fire, the metal birds, the underground thunder, the reaching.

A single acorn falls through still air. It lands in dark soil. It waits.