He invited his people toward his own glorious heart, beckoning them with his finest, ugliest words, handpicked from his forests. And the people came.
They were all placed on a conveyor belt and run through a rampant machine that gave them a lifetime in ten minutes. Words were fed into them. Time disappeared and they now Knew everything they needed to know. They were hypnotized.
Next, they were fitted with their symbols, and everyone was happy.
Soon, the demand for the lovely ugly words and Symbols increased to such a point that as the forests grew, many people were needed to maintain them. Some were employed to climb the trees and throw the words down to those below. They were then fed directly into the remainder of the Führer’s people, not to mention those who came back for more.
The people who climbed the trees were called word shakers.
THE BEST word shakers were the ones who understood the true power of words. They were the ones who could climb the highest. One such word shaker was a small, skinny girl. She was renowned as the best word shaker of her region because she knew how powerless a person could be WITHOUT words.
That’s why she could climb higher than anyone else. She had desire. She was hungry for them.
One day, however, she met a man who was despised by her homeland, even though he was born in it. They became good friends, and when the man was sick, the word shaker allowed a single teardrop to fall on his face. The tear was made of friendship—a single word—and it dried and became a seed, and when next the girl was in the forest, she planted that seed among the other trees. She watered it every day.
At first, there was nothing, but one afternoon, when she checked it after a day of word-shaking, a small sprout had shot up. She stared at it for a long time.
The tree grew every day, faster than everything else, till it was the tallest tree in the forest. Everyone
came to look at it. They all whispered about it, and they waited… for the Führer.
Incensed, he immediately ordered the tree to be cut down. That was when the word shaker made her way through the crowd. She fell to her hands and knees. “Please,” she cried, “you can’t cut it down”
The Führer, however, was unmoved. He could not afford to make exceptions. As the word shaker was dragged away, he turned to his right-hand man and made a request. “Ax, please”
AT THAT moment, the word shaker twisted free. She ran. She boarded the tree, and even as the Führer hammered at the trunk with his ax, she climbed until she reached the highest of the branches. The voices and ax beats continued faintly on. Clouds walked by—like white monsters with gray hearts. Afraid but stubborn, the word shaker remained. She waited for the tree to fall.
But the tree would not move.
Many hours passed, and still, the Führer’s ax could not take a single bite out of the trunk. In a state nearing collapse, he ordered another man to continue.
Days passed.
Weeks took over.
A hundred and ninety-six soldiers could not make any impact on the word shaker’s tree.
“But how does she eat?” the people asked. “How does she sleep?”
What they didn’t know was that other word shakers threw supplies across, and the girl climbed down to the lower branches to collect them.
IT SNOWED. It rained. Seasons came and went. The word shaker remained.
When the last axman gave up, he called up to her. “Word shaker! You can come down now! There is no one who can defeat this tree!”
The word shaker, who could only just make out the man’s sentences, replied with a whisper. She handed it down through the branches. “NO thank you,” she said, for she knew that it was only herself who was holding the tree upright.
NO ONE knew how long it had taken, but one afternoon, a new axman walked into town. His bag looked too heavy for him. His eyes dragged. His feet drooped with exhaustion. “The tree,” he asked the people. “Where is the tree?”
An audience followed him, and when he arrived, clouds had covered the highest regions of the branches. The word shaker could hear the people calling out that a new axman had come to put an end to her vigil.
“She will not come down,” the people said, “for anyone.”
They did not know who the axman was, and they did not know that he was undeterred.
He opened his bag and pulled out something much smaller than an ax.
The people laughed. They said, “You can’t chop a tree down with an old hammer!”