Treemendous Trouble

Trevor the Tree

In the quiet village of Thistlewick, where the most exciting thing was the annual Cabbage Rolling Championship, something profoundly ridiculous happened on a Tuesday.

It all started with Old Man Tiddle planting a suspiciously shiny acorn in his backyard, which he won from a traveling gnome in a poker game. ("Don’t ask," he'd say, "I thought it was a very small man with a beard, turned out he was a magical horticulturist.")

The next morning, a tree had sprouted. Not just sprouted, grown. It was thirty feet tall, leafy, and somehow smelled faintly of cinnamon buns.

"That’s... not normal," said Mrs. Penelope Crumb, watching through binoculars from her third-floor bathroom window, as one does.

Then it sneezed, "AH-CHOO!"

Leaves exploded into the air, scaring a passing goose into a dramatic spiral. The tree wiggled its branches, cracked what appeared to be a knotted wooden neck, and looked around.

"Well, bugger me," it said in a deep baritone. "That was a long nap."

Old Man Tiddle dropped his gardening fork.

"Trees... don’t talk," he mumbled.

"I didn’t think old men wore pink bunny slippers, but here we are," the tree replied, shaking off a squirrel like dandruff.

Soon, the whole village came to see what they began calling "Trevor." The mayor tried to make Trevor a tourist attraction.

"He’s the tallest sentient being in Thistlewick!" he cried.

"I’m also the only one, Dave," Trevor replied. "And I don’t do photos unless I get a muffin."

Trevor developed a fondness for muffins. Specifically banana-nut. He became slightly grumpy when given blueberry and threw acorns at tourists who mispronounced "deciduous."

Things escalated when Trevor tried to join the pub quiz team. "You’ve got a hundred years of useless trivia up here!" he bellowed, tapping his barky head. Unfortunately, he broke the pub roof trying to sit down.

That’s when the mayor had to gently suggest Trevor "find some hobbies that didn’t involve causing structural damage or mildly terrifying pensioners."

Trevor sulked for three days, dropping passive-aggressive leaves on the mayor’s car.

But then he discovered something wonderful: interpretive dance.

To this day, every Thursday at 4 p.m., Trevor performs a wobbly but heartfelt dance in the village square to the sound of a cassette tape titled Greatest Hits of the 80s (Volume 2). People bring muffins. Pigeons sit on his shoulders. And the villagers of Thistlewick agree:

It’s still better than the cabbage rolling.

Treemendous Trouble is the property of the Author and must not be plagiarised. Legal action will be taken against those who copy, download and/or use for monetization purposes.