From her private room at Whispering Pine Rest Home, Annie gazed out at the friendly grove of Carolina loblollies, their evergreen canopies hoisted high upon woody spindles. Her brow crinkled as she puzzled—not for the first time—at how “Whispering Pine” implied a particular tree. I wonder which one? she thought.
She had been contented with living alone after cancer took Hugh and they’d laid him to rest in a simple box, in a field of stones. After he was gone, Annie’s daughter would pop in with her businesslike clip-clopping, troubling Annie’s quiet communion. Her daughter nagged her about downsizing, about joining a garden club, about getting out more. But all Annie wanted to do was be left alone with her books, her tea, and her overstuffed chair, counting down her quiet days beneath a weighted blanket of memories.
Until that morning her feet lost their way as she toddled to the patio. Among the shards of her favorite mug, she’d curled on the mossy pavers relieved that time had run its course. Finally, there would be an end to this long season of loss.
But no. Her daughter had found her a day later, still on the ground and still very much alive. Before Annie was out of rehab, the plans were set in motion. Now here she was, stuck in this prison of malingering.
*
At first, her daughter had visited daily, then weekly, but slowly the time fogged and Annie lost track. Instead, a familiar woman kept coming to bother her. Annie could hear the busy clack of the woman’s shoes long before she turned the corner.
It was annoying to live among all the faceless people at the rest home who kept pulling her this way and that, all the urgent tomorrowing. She hated the false cheer of the echoey community room, which now reeked red and green—the happy lights, the repetitive songs, a squatty tree in the lobby gussied up like a corpse for a wake.
This morning she’d felt especially antsy; something was quickening her blood. She’d even tried to bite the nurse who came to wrench her from her perch at the window.
“Leave her alone,” another voice said. “I think she’s looking for her daughter.”
As far as Annie knew, she had no daughter, no husband—just the family of trees standing on the other side of the icy pane. She marveled at how they clumped in a stand, so closely rooted but growing separately, their ramrod trunks like ship masts. How long had it taken each ancient tree, so similar in girth and height, to lean differently into the wind?
*
Annie jolted awake from a dreamless sleep. She swore she heard a quiet utterance, like her name on the night frost. Sitting up in her bed, she searched the room. When she heard it again, she pushed herself up to follow the sound. Peeking down the empty hallway, she shuffled toward the lobby.
“Miss Annie, why are you up so late?” asked a plump, friendly woman dressed in white.
Eyes wide, Annie offered the first word she could find. “Water.”
“Oh, sure, I’ll get you some! You head back to your room, or you’ll freeze barefooted like that. Where’s your robe?”
The woman scurried off, deserting Annie at the desk. For a moment, Annie forgot where she was. A feeling of vastness overwhelmed her, like a child standing on the lip of an ocean. Then the beckoning came again, louder this time.
Outside, her heart rushed in the thrilling December air. The darkness enveloped her in the loamy scent of eons. Lifting her face to the sky, she smiled as winter’s dandelions melted upon her brow.
Annie. She searched the indigo night for the voice. Nettles pricked her soles as she wandered from tree to tree. At last, she stopped at the base of a centuries-old pine, the source of the soft calling. Pressing her cheek against the flaking trunk, Annie breathed in the cleansing smell of pitch.
Suddenly exhausted, she slipped into peaceful surrender at the foot of the towering tree. Closing her eyes, she listened to the pine whisper as it lifted her above its canopy. Annie smiled as she floated skyward, untethered at last.
Desiree Cooper is a 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, former attorney, and Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist. Her debut collection of flash fiction, Know the Mother, won numerous awards, including 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Award. Cooper’s fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Oprah Daily, MSNBC Daily, Flash Fiction America 2023, The Best Small Fictions 2018, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, River Teeth, and Best African American Fiction 2010, among other publications. Her essay, “We Have Lost Too Many Wigs,” was listed as a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2019. Cooper’s children’s picture book, Nothing Special, is a 2023 Paterson Prizewinner and included on the New York Public Library’s “10 Best Children’s Books of 2022.” Her groundbreaking anthology, Black Summers: Race, Childhood, and the Urban Outdoors, is forthcoming in 2026.