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They did not kill it while it slept, the chainsaw executioners. They didn't do this a month ago, when buds were a dream and reality was bare and frozen.

Two days now, the escalating whine of blade meeting the resistance of a living tree, just blooming into leaf. The sickening crack of branches as they give way. The shouts and ecstatic whoops of men enjoying the sweaty labor of destruction.

They perch precarious, stories up in the maple's branches and silently I urge them to fall. I wish them dead and then pull back the wish. Curses are dangerous. Perhaps a broken bone or a missing finger would do. Limb for a limb.

A red maple three stories high. As tall as the building I live in. How old was it?

Branch by branch, they dismember it. In a neighbourhood, I think, where beauty is not the hallmark, what we really need is another squat, treeless bungalow surrounded by nothing but patchy grass and decorated with a prefab shed.

I plug my ears with silicone stoppers. I turn the music up. But now and then, sickened and anxious, I check.

There is a hole in the landscape. Through it, I see pavement, cars, bungalows. Where there was a hallelujah of red growth, there is now sky.

Do curses fall on small patches of ground? Not long ago, at the house adjacent, there lived a big yellow dog who was chained to a shed. No one ever walked him. I never saw anyone pet him or talk to him. My landlady asked the owners to have him put down if they wouldn't care for him. The man snorted, "It's her dog and I don't live here anymore." Neighbors fed him and brought water, but many days, ( he was sick and cold as well as forgotten) he keened and mourned aloud - a sound that stabbed my heart. One day the owners sold the cursed place and I can only suppose, grudgingly paid the money to have him killed. I was thankful to think he might be dead, might be free.

Now, right next door to where the yellow dog mourned, this.

And I keep thinking, just a finger, even a fingertip...just so you know how it feels.

I am a corporation.

You're not the boss of me.

Here in Chez Spryfield, the problem is that no one is the boss of me, which leaves me as my own supervisor. Around the time of the divorce, I used to imagine that when I became supervisor, executive director and president of myself and my free time, I would write the Great Canadian Literary Non-fiction masterpiece or at least publish a few magazine articles or perhaps Do Good Works. I imagined that I would cook healthy meals without wads of dead flesh in them and go to the gym regularly. Things, things would always be exactly where I left them. No one would cut electrical wire with my good sewing scissors. I would keep a journal in which I wrote brilliant insights (as opposed to perpetually whining.)

I have approximately seven years of proof that none of this is will ever happen.

First of all (although this is very old news now) I cried for three months. I did (on the up side, if you can call it that) lose about 25 pounds, 10 of which were necessary to actually sustain life. I began to talk to plants. I lived on a diet of coffee, wine and cigarettes. I wrote volumes - of email to a long-suffering friend, who did his best, from a couple thousand miles away, to keep the sinking ship of my sanity from going to the bottom and me from walking off into a snowstorm and having a sleepover in the woods with a bottle of wine for company. Other than that, I developed a writer's block the size of the western hemisphere. But I looked great in my jeans.

Because no one is the boss of me, I've developed the different voices that exist in everyones heads (do NOT tell me you don't have them) and I've made sock puppets out of them. It's a regular puppet festival at my house. One of the puppets is my supervisor and is in charge of phrases like "you should," "you have to," and "when are you going to..." get off eBay, stop watching your bid on a Pietersite cabochon, start drinking water instead of coffee, get the laundry done, catch up on correspondence, do some writing, develop some for-gawd-sake ambition, wash the floor and so forth.

Another one, The Hanging Judge, comments on my life. It inquires as to when I'm getting one. It remarks that it is Saturday night and I am not on a date. It ruminates about the notion that everyone on the entire planet has a close and loving family and/or a mate, except me. It sighs and expresses the thought that I might have had talent but I'm too lazy and addled to use it and besides, it's too late now. It advises me, unnecessarily, that my place of employ is in the financial toilet and that morale is already on its way to the sewage treatment plant. It opines that my ankle will probably never heal and I will have to wear sensible lace-up shoes until I die. And support hose.

There's the child, who wishes everyone would shut up and let her watch the sky in peace and eat cake for breakfast.

The Piss-ant I picture as a belligerent 11 year old with scabby knees, curses and swears and leaves flies in the drinks of grownups, is in charge of answering the above characters. Her favorite lines are:
"Am not," "Fuck you," "Bullshit," and "You can't make me."

Lately, another voice has joined the crowd. This one is an actual adult, calmer, quieter. She listens a little to the Supervisor and gets some of the work done. She lets the kid watch the sky for a while. And she mostly dismisses the Hanging Judge.

She's saying, right now, that it doesn't matter that some rat-bastard just outbid us for a world-class piece of Pietersite for a lousy two buck difference. The rest of us are just plain pissed off about it. Except for the kid, who wants to watch a movie.

If you feel that you could coordinate in any kind of helpful way, kindly leave a resume. We are in dire need of a corporate takeover.