RingoJohnny had always loved the old hanging tree. He looked out from the lightning scarred branches upon the rapidly drying dessert ground. The town mocked and shunned him morbid for his fascination. Little boys should be drawn to death they would say. Johnny agreed with them. He hated the bones that surrounded the tree, left as grissly reminders of . He hated the creaking on the rotting platting, barely sturdy enough to hold itself, let alone the weight of the a man and his guilt. He could still remember the crack of wooden stairs when Fat Dominick was being escorted to swing. The 20 seconds of gurgling and thrashing brought on from a fall to short to break the neck still haunted his dreams. Stuck between the lower stairs and the top of the platform, his body didn’t even have the pendulum Johnny had become used to seeing. The gun shot that ended the big mans torment was one of most sickening and relieving sounds he had ever heard. In his dreams he kept waiting for it and it kept not coming, and the main would thrash and thrash, his head getting ever more purple as blood backed up. Johnny wondered if the head would ever explode but so far he’d always woken up before that.
A thunder crack exploded over head, but Johnny wasn’t scared. He pulled the rope up over his shoulders though so he knew he wouldn’t drop it. The climb down without the rope to assist was much harder and longer and he wanted to stay out as long as he could. The storm moved in a pattern here and he’d learned it the same time he learned to walk. An hour of torrential downpour, 15 minutes of unpredictable lighting, 3 hours of calm, then a hurricane gale with more lighting for an unknown period. The elders said the pattern would remain as long as they fed the storm a body once a cycle…though he could never seem to piece together what a cycle meant. It wasn’t a set number of days. It didn’t seem to fluctuate in relationship to how often or sparse the storms came. Cycles seems to come more frequently during traveling season when the the storm was more restful and only popped up once a month or so. As if bringing in people from out of the desert to the 5 town shelter sped them up. That must be it. Cycles were related to the number of travels. Johnny decide he would start counting travels from now on. Perhaps there was a ratio of travels to citizens that explained the cycle frequency?
Thoughts like this were why he came to the tree. Everyone else saw the hanging. Johnny saw the tree. More importantly the tree allowed him to see other things. From the top branches he could sketch out the entire 5 town shelter, including lighting strikes. While they were clearly random, he had determined some paths that were safer than others after comparing 100 different drawings of strikes and seeing which areas drew more strikes. Southgate was by far the worst place to be in a storm and everyone knew that. They had a strike light a house on a fire once a storm. Johnny had realize though that the total number strikes there was actually lower than across the rest of the area, in almost 90 of the 100 sketches. It wasn’t the number of the strikes, it was that they just seemed to find buildings more often. In fact almost no one caught out in a storm in south gate had ever been hit.
Johnny was obsessed with patterns. The tree was made of patterns. Each lighting scar creating fractal burns that never seemed to catch the whole tree. Branches and leaves exploding outwards always in a consistent 2 fork, 3 fork, 2 fork repetition. The bark even seemed to have some sort of . A sudden flash lit everything. More brilliant than the sun, everything was white. His body was tingling…and moving. He couldn’t tell how but there was definitely movement. Then something jerked and he came to an abrupt stop. So did all his questions.
Johnnys body began to sway back and forth in the wind, stretched out on the rope. The last bit of embers in the upper branches died out as the wind began to pick up. Johnny had always loved the hanging tree. Fitting he should end there.