Areeba and the Time Eating Tree
Sep 10, 2025
Some trees are just trees.
But not the one at the edge of Bramble Hill.
That one... was hungry.
Areeba had passed it every day on her walk to school. It was taller than the others, darker too, with bark that peeled like old paper and roots that cracked the pavement.
Her sidekick, Puddle—a tiny green frog with golden toes and an odd talent for predicting rain—refused to go near it. Every time they walked past, Puddle would croak once, hop behind her hood, and shiver.
One Monday, the tree was gone.
Not vanished—but changed. Its trunk had split open, wide enough to step through. And at its base sat an old brass pocket watch, ticking backwards.
Immediately, her school rucksack felt heavier. Not with books—but with moments. She could feel them pressing in: laughter from last week’s art lesson, the sting of last month’s scraped knee, the fizzing excitement of a birthday from three years ago. She looked around. The world had slowed. Leaves hung in mid-air, frozen mid-fall. Puddle croaked twice. Something was terribly wrong.
The watch ticked louder.
The tree, now hollowed, revealed a stairway spiralling downwards.
Areeba knew she shouldn’t. But she did. Inside, the roots twisted like tunnels, and time dripped from the walls—memories in liquid form, leaking from the cracks. She passed floating images of her town: the park before it was built, her street before there were houses, the school as a muddy field.
In the centre of the roots sat the tree’s heart. Not wood. Not stone.
A clock.
Its hands spun wildly. Around it, branches reached in from every direction, covered in the trinkets of lost time: old shoes, faded toys, notebooks, keychains—things that had disappeared from pockets, never to be found again.
The tree wasn’t just alive. It was feeding.
A voice slithered from the bark. “All trees remember. But I... I consume.”
Puddle leapt forward, landing squarely on the tree’s roots. He let out a long, low croak that echoed like thunder.
The tree recoiled. It had been feeding for too long. And Areeba was the first to make it blink.
She held up the backwards-ticking watch.
“This doesn’t belong to you,” she whispered.
The voice replied, “Then give it back.”
But Areeba didn’t. Instead, she wound it forward. The roots shook. The floor buckled. The clock in the centre cracked down the middle. Time screamed.
A whirlwind of memories flew out from the tree, dancing through the tunnels, rushing back to the world above. Laughter. Goodbyes. Names. Stories.
Puddle hopped onto her shoulder just as the stairway began to crumble. Together, they ran, chased by seconds and minutes and hours, until they burst out into daylight.
The tree sealed itself shut.
The next day, the bark was smooth. No doorway. No roots. Nothing but a tree once more.
But the pocket watch still ticked—now at the correct pace—and Puddle’s golden toes sparkled more brightly than ever.
