About the Trees

by GalaxyLei

On the morning of one particularly boring Thursday, Ford Prefect came running towards Arthur Dent’s house. He ran up the steps and right into the door, and was lying sprawled on the porch wondering why he had suddenly stopped moving when Arthur, having heard the noise, opened the door. "Ford, what are you doing?"

Ford scrambled past him into the house and slammed the door shut. "The trees!" he gasped.

"Yes, they’re quite nice, aren’t they? I had never thought much about them before, but they’re actually really useful. I heard about this one tree that..."

"No," Ford interrupted, shaking his head. "The trees!" He pointed at some out the window for a second and then jerked the curtains closed.

"What about the trees?"

"They’re out to get us!"

"What?" Arthur stared at Ford with a puzzled look on his face. Ford had always struck him as being a bit strange, but this was ridiculous. "How can the trees possibly do anything to us?"

"They can hear us, they listen to what we say, and then they tell the others!"

"Oh, come on, even if they were planning something, a full scale attack would consist of leaves being dropped on our heads."

"No, you don’t understand, the trees are dangerous! They’ll do anything to get what they want, they’ll even fall over on purpose, right when we’re walking underneath them!"

"What, kamikaze trees?" Arthur pulled the curtains open again and glanced at the elms at the corner of the yard. They did not look back, as trees are not the liveliest of creatures, but they gave the impression that if they had looked at Arthur, it would be a friendly sort of look. But, as Ford would say, they were probably undercover.

"Yeah, and those little ones in pots, they’re just waiting to stretch out and trip us."

"Oh honestly...look, I’m going down to the pub."

Ford shook his head again, more emphatically this time. "Don’t."

"What do you mean, don’t?"

"I’ve been there already-"

"I’m not surprised."

"-And it’s too dangerous. Trees everywhere."

"Look, sod the bloody trees, I’m going!"

With that, Arthur left. Ford watched him through the window, shaking his head. He just did not appreciate the danger that trees presented. Oh sure, they seemed innocent, but who knew what dastardly schemes boiled within their bark? Ford got up, closed the front door, and locked it. Then after a moment’s thought he grabbed a roll of tape off of the table and began sealing the edges of the door. Halfway through doing this, it dawned on him that this would not be an effective barrier. For a really good, secure shield, he would need staples. Ford grinned. No tree would be coming through this way.

Meanwhile, Arthur was well on his way up the road, and beginning to feel a little silly. He should never have even listened to Ford and his ramblings on evil foliage. Plants did not have minds of their own, they did not listen in on conversations, and they were not planning anything! Arthur made a face at a row of birches on the side of the road. "You can’t see me, can you?" He shouted as he continued walking. "No, of course not, because you’re trees! Mindless, stupid-"

Then suddenly he found that he was much closer to the ground than he remembered being a second ago. He peered up at the large tree that had suddenly manifested itself in front of him. "Stupid Ford," he thought bitterly, brushing leaves off of his clothes. That nonsense about trees had gotten him so distracted that he had stopped looking where he was going.

Hadn’t he? Arthur looked back up at the tree, and just for a moment, though much to his disbelief, he could swear he saw it look back.