Short Story: Tree of Shadows by Roopa De Choudhury

In this short story, Roopa De Choudhury shares the stories and secrets held between the swaying leaves of a tree.

It felt like a millennium had passed and it felt like yesterday. The truth fell somewhere in between. You would laugh, I think dear reader if you knew the dark frightened me. Why would a ghost be frightened of the dark you think, but dusk till dawn had always evoked fear in me, so I decide to approach the tree in the morning. Ghosts have their ghosts as well. I chuckle at my joke. Sometimes being a ghost is lonely. There is no one around to laugh at my joke.

The tree was even more solid than I remembered, but a hundred years can make one’s memory hazy, or was it twenty years ago? Death does have a way of making memories hazy. The leaves flew gently in the breeze and the leaves were a shade of vivid green. It was a beautiful summer afternoon, and the tree had a majestic beauty all its own. It had haunted me for so long, can a dead man be haunted you say, well now you know they can.