Nina Miller

Listen to Nina read her story

Matteus loved me once. That was no excuse to turn him into a sycamore tree, but we were fifteen, and I was getting into my magic. 

People thought he’d been kidnapped or joined the circus. Only I knew the truth of that Halloween twenty years ago. 

I’d just finished reading the story about Apollo and Daphne when Matteus mentioned he was taking Sandee to the dance. We’d always gone together. How could he forget that we were pretend-married at age ten and BFFs? That we’d sworn love oaths over Ouija boards to otherworldly denizens of my attic? That he’d been my first kiss?

I’d thrown my book at him, said, “Make like a tree and leave!”

My prepubescent unrequited-love angst shot out at him. He doubled over, his fingers and toes elongating. His feet planted into the soil. His arms became fixed branches waving in the air. He screamed as he stretched, and stretched. Wood splintered and cracked as he grew. Bark formed over his bare flesh. All that remained of his human appearance was a five foot high knotty knob that looked like a frightened eye.

Matteus immediately started pelting me with twigs and seed balls. I ran away.

Over the next few months, I tried incantations and minor demon summonings. I watered Matteus’s roots with elixirs and potions. I prayed to every god and demigod I knew to help return him to me. I only ever managed to turn his leaves purple. 

I left home to study magic, visiting him yearly. I watched the passage of time through the carved initials on his trunk. I could teleport, heal minor wounds, and visit shadow realms, but my efforts at transfiguration fell flat. Matteus no longer flicked a branch in my direction.

It was as if all my transformative magic had been exhausted from that one event. 

Penelope Circe Burroughs, they’d said, you couldn’t turn a crystalis into a butterfly. I couldn’t turn friendship into love either, which is how I landed in this mess.

If only he had love-loved me, then none of this would have happened. This lie kept me going over the years – a lie and a toxic love that I needed to let go of. 

*

Halloween once more, I crunched through dead leaves and hugged Matteus’s  brittle trunk. 

“I’m sorry, my friend. I should have let you love who you wanted to love.”

The tree burst apart before me, and within its dried trunk was the mummified corpse of my Matteus. He should have lived six hundred years, but survived only twenty. My tears fell on his parched skin as I drew him into an embrace. Begged for forgiveness as I clung to him. Watched as he dissolved into sawdust.

My feet became rooted. My body screamed with grief as it stretched and stretched. My limbs grew skyward. 

A stubborn oak now stands where there once was a flowering sycamore tree. 

The only part of me that remains is Matteus’s name carved deep into my heartwood.

Nina’s prompts were: All Hallows Eve, a Childhood Sweetheart, and a Dead Plant or Tree

She said of the challenge: “Childhood sweethearts on Halloween lent itself to a dark story due to the fact that most of my crushes were unrequited. I only started dating in college. So there is bitterness and forgiveness in these words that helped me overcome the trauma of those rejections.”

Nina Miller is an Indian-American physician, epee fencer, and creative who made the 2024 Wigleaf Top 50. An incurable romantic, she wears her heart on her sleeve but tells herself it’s so phlebotomists can draw her blood easily. She likes to explore writing multiple genres and finds herself equally at home with sci-fi, horror, or comedy. She loves mashing several genres into one story and is thankful to her beta readers who humor her. Find her thoughts on writing within Flash Fusion, an anthology by Dahlia Books. Find her clamoring for attention @NinaMD1 and her published pieces at ninamillerwrites.com.