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Sandra Carlson Khalil

Cedars of God

On the way up the mountain, he pressed the gas to the floor as we climbed higher and higher. In the sideview mirror, the road fell away behind us like ribbon candy, curving until it disappeared into the smog that pooled over Beirut. Somewhere down there, from our apartment that still smelled of paint, I had woken that morning and confused the Mediterranean, with its thin horizon and smattering of ships, for Lake Superior. Until I remembered I was no longer there. Until I burrowed back in the bedsheets, placed an open hand over my empty belly, and remembered that she was no longer here.

Now, we stand shoulder-to-shoulder looking out across what he knows of paradise: a hillside dotted with giant trees, each separated by large tracts of yellowed grass and lines of broken trunks. I tug at his hand, but he smiles and lets me go, so I walk down, the dry earth pressing like velcro beneath my feet, thinking of her — always, thinking of her.

We named her after the night — al laylu ya Layla — because we knew, without seeing her, she would have his dark hair. We were happy here, long before we knew of her, but now that she’s gone, my unhappiness presses into all the spaces she should have filled. I blame the smog. I blame the sea. I blame he who stands, arms crisscrossed, who keeps saying we can try again.

We can try again.

I know he thinks his trees can fix me, but these trees are nothing like the ones I know. My cedars grow in straight lines separated by troughs of needles so soft I used to gather them around me as a child and sit in their protective nests. These cedars stand crooked on the rocky earth. Their needles fall between the cracks that separate them.

I walk towards one. I bend beneath the boughs that dust the ground like a giant skirt. I place my palm against her bark. It is rough and grey and swirled like a fingerprint.

I know that these cedars used to cover half of this country. I know that legions of men have come, taking what they needed and leaving the rest behind. First the Phoenicians for their boats, then King Solomon for his temple. Then the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians.

No one has written about my trees in scripture. No one used their lengths to build ancient boats or towering temples. I know nothing of armies — what I know are trees — but I hold a grudge, too, against the weight of that endless procession.

I reach on tiptoes for a branch as splayed as a paintbrush and pull it towards me. Pinecones as large as chalices are perched on the top of her branch, their spiraled skin closed tightly, waiting for the moment to open, and let go. I want to lean in and whisper that the treeline has marched north of here. That the ground is now too warm for her seeds. That if she opens the soft spirals of her cone, her seeds will not survive. That her own survival, after all this time, has been for naught.

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About the writer:
Sandra Carlson Khalil grew up in Minnesota but has called the Middle East her home for over a decade. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Contrary Magazine, The Stonecoast Review, and SmokeLong Quarterly, where she was a finalist for the SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction 2024. She studied literature at Middlebury College and received her MBA from Northwestern University.

Image: Pilgrimage to the Cedars of Lebanon by Tivadar Csontvary Kosztka (1853- 1919). Oil on canvas. 78.7 x 75.5 inches. 1907. Public domain.

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