The Tree Remembers

By Thea van Diepen

Minerva Thiessen moved across the country after graduating high school in order to get away from her past and forget what she is. Now, eight years later, everything's changed back home and her past is pulling her right back, no matter how much she tries to escape it. When Min returns home, she will have to face the people she's hurt—including the only man she's ever loved—and finally confront her true origins once and for all.

 

Nothing will ever be the same again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thea van Diepen
• Release date: Jun 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9780995255319

Thea van Diepen

Thea van Diepen spent the first ten years of her life on a tree-wrapped acreage where an inquisitive child might believe in magic. Nowadays, she lives in a small city in Alberta, breathing life into characters and worlds and the stories they tell.  She’s been published in the Tesseracts anthology series, and her works include the White Changeling series, The Kitten Psychologist series, and the interactive short story The Tree and the Grave. Her website is theavandiepen.com, and she can be contacted via that site, in English or French. If you do contact her in French, though, please don’t ask her to count in it as she tends to skip numbers ending in six entirely by accident.

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Quote

The Tree Remembers

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About the Author

The Tree Remembers

by Thea van Diepen

Behold, the requisite legal material:

Copyright © 2016 by Thea van Diepen

All rights reserved worldwide.

This book may not be distributed in any way, shape, or form without written permission from the author (except for reviewers, who may quote short passages in their review).

Cover: Thea van Diepen

Author photo: Holli Margell

ISBN: 978-0-9952553-1-9

This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance the characters, settings, or events have to real people, places, or events is completely unintentional.

Otherwise, we’d have some crazy uncanny valley *bleep* going on here.

The axe forgets; the tree remembers.

African proverb

What’s her story, do you think?

Who?

The comment earned the biker a smack from his buddy’s girlfriend. Almost spilled his coffee, too.

God! Pay attention.

You know, the one always in that black and green getup, said the buddy, as if the exchange hadn’t happened. Only ever see her on weekdays?

I’d love to know where she’s from, said the girlfriend. She’s got this accent sometimes, and I can’t place it for the life of me.

Oh, yeah, her. The biker took a sip of his coffee. What about her?

What d’you think her story is? his buddy repeated.

As the three continued their abortive attempts to theorize my past, I had to stifle a laugh while I finished wiping the table behind them. They were all dears, really, and with good heads on their shoulders. Just not when hungover on a Saturday afternoon.

They wouldn’t have said anything about me, either, if they’d known I was present. The handy thing about a lifetime of disguising myself was that if I didn’t want to be recognized, I wouldn’t be. No matter how often they and my other biker friends came by the cafe, which was often, they’d never see me, not even if we walked right by each other.

I made it to the back in time for giggles to escape in safety.

What’s the joke? asked Cathy.

Just remembered something funny, I said with a glance to the clock. Time to go. You had to have been there.

She shrugged, and a bit of her hair escaped the hat that was a mandatory part of our uniform. Cathy had the most fabulous afro I’d ever seen. I had no idea how she kept the hat on. Probably magic.

Heh. Magic.

How’s your basil doing? I asked as I put my jacket on, partly to keep her from leaving. Her face brightened.

Back from the dead practically overnight. You’ve got a literal green thumb on you, I swear.

If only she knew. I just grew up around a lot of plants, is all. See you tomorrow!

Not if you get a man and elope first, she said.

That’s just the movies, Cathy, I called back.

With that, I left the back and ran into a guy who had just come in the cafe.

Sorry! we said to each other, but the end of mine got swallowed when I saw his face.

No, really, it was my fault, he said. Are you all right? He was all brown eyes and worn jeans, and there was nothing I wanted more than escape. I must have looked terrified.

I’m fine, I said. I need to go. My emotions came through