(after Laura Adamczyk’s “Gun Control”)

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Does it scream in agony in a language no human can understand as it teeters and crashes to the ground?  

If a tree falls in a forest and you believe no one is around to hear it, you might need to rethink your definition of “no one.” Birds have been pissed off about this for a while. Squirrels, too.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, who does it fall for? It might have fallen for the sky, endless and limbless and stretched round the world, farther than a tree’s roots could ever go. Or maybe it’s fallen for the ground itself, its roots no longer providing enough contact, every inch of its bark and each leaf blade yearning to feel the richness of soil and granules of sand, moist after it rains or hard-packed and rough like stubble after a long dry summer. Maybe the tree falls for the forest itself, like a small child who wakes up one morning and wants to hug everything, everything, by which she really means the way all that she sees reflects the glory that is herself.

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it” is actually a paradox. If a tree is in a forest, a tree is surrounded by trees. Thus, if a tree falls, other trees hear it. If a tree falls and no one hears it, there cannot be other trees around. Therefore, if a tree falls and no one hears it, there is no forest. Either there is no falling tree, or there is no forest, but there cannot be tree, forest, and no one to hear all at the same time.

If you know a tree is going to fall, throw a viewing party. You’ve likely never seen anything like it before, and probably won’t again, so make it special. Bring lawn chairs and streamers. Bring coolers full of beer and bowls for potato chips and dip and nuts and fruit. Bring bananas. Also, plenty of garbage bags, and make sure to clean up after you’re done. Bring your children and your uncle and your hospice-bound grandmother. If you are a hearing person, make sure everyone is completely silent when the tree starts to fall. Hold your breath as it creaks, hear each rustle and scratch as it does violence to other trees on the way down. Listen to birds squall as they lose their nests. If you are d/Deaf or hard of hearing, and even if you are not, kneel on the ground and place your hands on the earth and wait. Feel it vibrating underneath your palms, rippling with sadness as the tree’s live body rips itself away. Beware: you might weep with contact grief.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, who did it stand for before it fell? Did the tree vote? Or did it abstain, knowing it had been purged from the rolls already, or never been listed there in the first place? Maybe the tree didn’t stand for a candidate. Maybe it stood for an idea, or a cause, or a hope it could not sustain. Maybe it was felled by a broken heart whose shorn edges were sharper than any ax. 

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, then what or who made it fall, and how did they get away so fast? What technology did they use that allowed them to, one, fell the tree and, two, move fast enough to get out of the range of sound between the tree beginning to fall and its crash landing? How will you find them now that they’ve disappeared from the area? How will you get them to sell you their precisely lethal weapon and speedy vehicle’s proprietary information? How will you make more of them? Who will you sell them to? Can’t you just see it now, a theme park full of people light-sabering or lasering at trees, then zooming away so fast their own squeals of delight are lost behind them? You’d make millions.

Say a tree doesn’t fall in a forest because of an axe or a broken heart or an illness. Say it falls because it is on fire, flames licking its limbs ablaze. Its fall would have a completely different sound. Did you know that forest fires are very loud? 

If a tree falls at the edge of a forest and onto a house, you probably won’t care about whether or not anyone hears it. You will only think of the damage it is causing. You will consider the tree your enemy. You will think of the tree as angry, menacing. The tree is too big, and too violent. It shouldn’t have been in your neighborhood anyway. You will call 911 and tell them there’s a burning tree that’s fallen on a house, and that they need to deal with it. How dare the tree do that, you’ll shout. Doesn’t it know children live in this neighborhood?

If you move into a neighborhood near a forest, you might wonder why it’s there. The neighborhood, that is. Not the forest. The forest was there first. You might consider why you’re moving there. Maybe you’re hoping for your children to play in the forest, in which case, you might want to find some of the original versions of those fairytales you always loved as a child. You might remember that children playing alone in forests have a relatively high mortality rate, if folklore is anything to go by. Then again, you might not trust ancient oral storytelling. Anything that isn’t nailed down in black and white writing or red- and blue-framed talking heads on your TV might just be a little too wishy-washy for you.

Do not be surprised if, after moving into a neighborhood near a forest, your house is destroyed by a fire that began by raging across many trees. You might blame cigarette smokers, or artists making careless kilns to heat their hippie pottery into hardening. You might be envious of the famous people hiring private firefighting firms to protect their own properties. You might get angry at your local firefighters for not putting the blaze out fast enough, and enraged at the inmates brought in to help because surely they don’t care about saving you and your children and your things. You might even sleep on a thin green mat in the school gym with your children cuddled close, and your ex might call you seven times over the course of the next few days, caring more about you now than in years, so worried that you and the kids have lost everything, everything. You might think about how you’re basically in prison yourself in this dank drafty room that smells of your worst high school nightmares, dirty diapers, sweat, and the smoky edges of people’s singed hair and clothes. You might be ashamed of these thoughts, and of your ex who calls but doesn’t come to get you and your children, but you also might not.

If you can’t see the forest for the trees, or the trees for the forest, it’s probably because it’s hard to tell the difference when everything is on fire for days at a time. 

If the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, it’s not because the apple really wants to be sitting there, so close to the parental branch. It’s just that the apple doesn’t have legs to take it away. Imagine the apple’s joy when you pick it up and put it in your pocket and take it all the way back to your car, where you leave it sitting on the seat for two days because you’ve been trying to rideshare more, because it’s the new green thing. Imagine how much the apple’s rot will scare you when you come back to the car and find it there, no longer looking like a magical present from nature but like a betrayal. 

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, is it a cry for attention? Is a tree falling the equivalent of you slitting your wrists in the bathroom when you were fifteen? And sixteen? And the pills at seventeen before you finally started talking to a therapist who understood that you weren’t really sad so much as angry? If a tree falls in a forest, does it want to be heard? Does it regret falling when no one comes to help it get back up, put its roots back in the ground? What if it was heard, just that once, and lifted up, tenderly, its roots replanted, its base watered by a clear cool rain? What if it had the chance to heal? And what if, having grown some more, it begins to twine its branches with another tree, until that one dies, or falls, or rips itself away because there’s a newer, younger tree somewhere else, with better access to sunlight and fewer apples falling all over the place like withered breasts? Maybe then the original tree, its roots shaky, will fall again, or want to, or maybe it’ll just stand there and burn when the fires come, the impossible heat a relief, a quieting. Maybe it will let every part of itself crisp away, and not save a single seed.

Don’t think about that. You’re barking up the wrong tree, anyway. A tree is no human, asking to be noticed. It just is. Besides, who said it has to fall in the first place? Maybe it can just stand there, creaking sometimes in the wind, only partially burned from the fire put out by men who won’t be allowed to work when they’re released from their shackles. Maybe the dead bark will slough off and new leaves will start to sprout. Maybe the tree will feel lucky for surviving. Maybe it will stand until a new neighborhood gets built there that requires it to be chopped away. Or maybe, just maybe, you will go stand with the tree after your kids have grown up and left, and the men have been released, and maybe you will tell it you are sorry. Maybe you will hug it. For all the sorries you never said, and all the people you never hugged, and all the ways you failed in the world. No one will hear you crying. Except for the tree itself, and all the living wildness around it.  

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Ilana Masad is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and book criticism, holds a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and is the author of the novel All My Mother’s Lovers.