Day 52 - Biodegradable Story

Biodegradable Story

 Matthew Ryan Fischer

 The tree had been there for years.  It was an elm, young but strong.  It would grow.  The park was open to the public, but it was privately owned.

The tree had grown from a biodegradable urn.  The ashes inside the urn acted as an excellent fertilizer.  The fertilizer had once been known as a man named Richard.  Richard had a son named Liam and Liam was the man who had fulfilled his father’s wishes and placed his remains in the ground to become a tree in this privately owned park.  Liam was forty-two.  His father would have been seventy-seven that year, if only he had made it to August.

Liam and his sister had discussed their father’s estate and what to do with his things.  Melanie was not pleased by her father’s desire on how to become one with the earth.  She had hopes of establishing a family plot together, possibly on their father’s estate.  She wanted headstones and a memorial site.  She thought people needed a place to gather to mourn.  She didn’t care for cremation or for a tiny little park.

“I don’t understand why he wants to be buried in a park.”

“I don’t know.  But he does.”

“Why not bury him with mom?”

“This is what dad wanted.  I’m going to do what he wanted.”

Richard had been sixty-nine when he bought a block of land in an area full of trendy restaurants and specialty shops.  There was a coffee shop where someday an elm tree would grow.  Richard’s financial advisors did not recommend this purchase.  The area was inflated and due for a price readjustment.  Richard felt old and wasn’t worried about making money off this particular piece of land.  He had no intention of keeping any of the stores or adding any new ones.  One by one as the leases expired, he planned on tearing down every building on this block and converting it into a park.

Richard had been sixty-eight when his wife died.  Maria had an irregular heartbeat, did not pay particularly good attention to her heath and suffered a sudden cardiac death.

Richard had made a living buying and selling real-estate.  He had made a lot of money doing this.  Richard had a wife, Maria, and two children, Liam and Melanie.  He had very few complaints and was mostly happy.

Years before, Richard was thirty-three and Maria was thirty-one.  They had gone out to dinner and discussed the list of groceries they needed to buy.  Richard had drunk too much and they were going to take a taxi home, when they decided it would be a nice night for a walk.

They were halfway home when Richard noticed the parking lot.

“They paved it.”

“What?”

He looked at it with disgust.  She turned to see what he was looking at, but did not share his emotion.

“The paved over it.  It’s gone.”

“Maybe they’ll build something nice.”

“What’s nicer than a park?  Who needs more concrete?”

“Says the man who owns three rental properties.”

“And I’ll own more.  But those are homes and people need homes.  This is just concrete.  What happened to people needing a place to relax?”

“I promise you, whatever goes in there, you will…” she paused for dramatic effect, “…complain.”

“Ha.”

“Well I knew better than to say you’d love it.”

“You know me too well.”

“Maybe they’ll put in a daycare.”

She let it hang there, no emphasis added.  Richard turned to her and his mood softened.

“Not as good as a park…”

“It would work.”

“Yeah.  That might work.”

Richard was an old seventeen and Maria was just turning sixteen.  They were nearly two years apart.  He was still so young and she… well, she wasn’t.  She had chased him.  She had asked him out.  It was intimidating, but fairly flattering.

“Why are we here?” she asked, even though she had been the one to suggest they come to the park.

Richard had played here when he was a child.  He wondered why he thought of that when he should have been thinking about her.

“Are you ever going to—?”

He leaned in and kissed her.

That was when Richard knew she was the one.

Liam set the urn in the ground.

“Good-bye dad.”

He just stared at the urn for awhile.  He didn’t want to let go.  He still wasn’t used to a world without his mother.  He wasn’t ready for a world without his father.

Slowly he began to fill the dirt back in the hole.

“I’ll never understand why he made that park,” Melanie had told Liam years before.

Richard hadn’t given any reasons.  Liam wasn’t sure either, but he trusted his father and had never been one to challenge him out in the open.

Richard had been twenty-seven in that park.  He had been down on one knee and she had said yes.

One warm summer night they lay together.  They were far too old for lewd acts in public, but they had done it anyway.  They lay beneath a tall elm tree.

“What are you thinking about?”

“You.  Us.  Our family.”

“Family?”

“Yeah.”