New Fiction: Beauty in Falling Leaves by Michael Bettendorf

Beauty in Falling Leaves

Michael Bettendorf

Audrey found the old man in the arboretum where he was talking to the trees, slumped at the base of a mature cottonwood. Noel wept, clutching its trunk so tight that his gnarled fingers turned pale. Tears dripped from his face onto the damp soil beneath. The arboretum smelled like it always smelled this time of year. Like musty geosmin, like dirt.

“Noel, are you okay?” Audrey asked.

“How can I be okay?” Noel asked. “Can’t you see my best friend is dead?”

Audrey stared at the cottonwood, easily ninety feet in height from her vantage point. The tree’s catkins were robust and reddish pink. Perfectly healthy and normal for a cottonwood in April. She stepped carefully around Noel and inspected the tree for discolored or cracked bark indicative of any number of fungal diseases. There were no signs of aphids or scale insects either. To her experience as a groundskeeper, it was a textbook example of a healthy cottonwood.

Audrey knew this, but she also knew Noel. He’d stay out there all afternoon, dehydrated and risking heat-stroke to talk to the tree.

“Want to take a seat?” she asked. “You look tired.”

Noel turned to her and rose in slow, mechanical motions. He didn’t bother to wipe the damp dirt from his knees. He never did. Audrey loved Noel’s willingness to be dirty, to experience nature. A gesture of coexistence, not dominance.

“You don’t know anything,” Noel said, but he leaned in as she extended a hand to him.

“Come on, Noel,” she said. “Let’s go sit and you can tell me about your friend.”

#

“I was the first child to participate in the exchange program.” Noel sat next to Audrey on the cramped park bench, surrounded by ant-covered peonies. “Because I could understand them.”

Noel stared at nothing, eyes vacant, but misty, soaking in the mid-morning sun as he always did on his visits to the arboretum. He let his story hang in the air, no urgency to continue. He’d finish the story whenever he pleased, time was no concern. It would take root and bloom when it was supposed to, organically, like every time he told it to Audrey.

“Their language is not like ours. It’s unspoken, carried on the breeze and felt on our skin. It’s slow. Ancient. Requires a different kind of listening.”

Audrey nodded along, speaking with her silence.

“Language and listening are a process,” Noel said. “You’re young, but you’ll understand some day.”

Her cheeks felt warm, but she told herself it was from the sun. Noel possessed a connection to trees beyond anything she had been taught. She considered the implication, that Noel knew something that couldn’t be taught. It had to be experienced.

“I met him, my friend, on the first day I arrived on their planet,” Noel said. “Do you remember his name?”

Noel held Audrey’s hand and though his skin had grown soft with age, the pattern he traced in methodical motions on her palm was the same as the time he introduced Audrey to the cottonwood on her first day at the arboretum.

“His homeland was in ruins when I arrived, the atmosphere choking on rich oxygen. Humans were needed. Our lungs provided for them. Replenished and rebalanced the oxygen and carbon dioxide levels. Day by day, one home at a time. My breath delivered their salvation.”

Audrey squeezed his hand as Noel choked up.

“And he came here to do the same. Even in death, our species belong together. We benefit one another. Though he doesn’t speak to me any longer, his aged spirit gone, his body lives on and continues to provide. Is there a greater love than that?” Noel took a deep, silent breath and exhaled slowly. “I think that’s all I want to say for today.”

Small flecks of dirt fell from his knees as Noel stood and walked away.

#

The next morning, she found Noel in the arboretum where he talked to the trees, slumped at the base of the mature cottonwood tree. His wrinkled face bore a similar pattern to bark. His form was wrapped around the trunk and although it was only April, the ground was covered in leaves where the tree had wept for its oldest friend.

Michael Bettendorf is a multi-genre writer from the Midwest. He’s the author of experimental black metal gamebook TRVE CVLT (2024), cyber-noir collection Midwestern Chrome (2026), and literary bizarro novella Help! I Can’t Stop Shitting Snakes (2027). His short fiction has appeared/forthcoming at Cosmic Horror Monthly, Mythaxis, and elsewhere. He works in a high school library in Lincoln, NE – a place he believes is too strange to be a flyover state. Find him on Bluesky @BeardedBetts and www.michaelbettendorfwrites.com

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