This was when we lived in the house with no fence, and the yard just sort of faded into the woods. The place with the floodlights that turned on every time a fox ran past the swing set although we hardly ever saw the fox. That’s what my window looked down on.

And this has nothing to do with that. But some nights I’d wake up to the sound of plastic wheels squeaking along aluminum grooves, and I’d look up to see the closet sliding open, one mirrored door slipping behind the other. And then the tree man would come hunching out. 

My pleas for a nightlight had long ago fallen on deaf ears, and so the only break in the darkness came from the glowing orange switch on the power strip under my night stand. Still, I could make him out in the staticky darkness, the thickness of his trunk belly, the dry leaves jutting from his shoulders and hips, the forking fingers as he braced himself on the wall and straightened out his back with a snap once he’d cleared the closet doorway. 

And he would stand there for a second sort of looking around, pretending he didn’t know where he was or what to look at, a vaguely vaudeville routine. But then he would twist that stiff stalked neck and look right at me, and crack a toothless grin. There was maybe a nod, like hey, it’s you, hello. 

I never got up out of bed, never ran. I could have. Instead I burrowed deeper into my covers, heart thumping.

With loping, long-legged strides he’d cross the room, groaning in old-man pain. It took him an eternity to get from the closet to the bed. I’d scooch my legs under the covers as he got nearer because I knew he was about to sit down without really looking. His knees bent with splintering creaks and his weight made a crater in the mattress that pulled everything toward him. I would scramble to escape his gravity as he got settled, little twigs bending and snapping somewhere I couldn’t see.

The worst part was the sound of him clearing his throat, like a beaver dam knocked away by wind. Then he’d speak with a croaking voice and whistling nostrils: “Little child.”

“I know,” I’d say quickly, weakly, my mouth barely clearing the edge of the comforter. 

“Little child,” he’d say again, looking at the wall or maybe at nothing. His eyes had no whites, just dark notches beneath a heavy, barked brow only hinted at in the pale orange light.

“I know not to play with matches,” I’d say.

“You must never play with matches.”

“I know,” I said.

“Fire is not a toy.”

“I know,” I said.

Long ago he’d been a mascot for fire safety. You might remember the commercials. In one, he lifted children up to climb in his limbs and reminded viewers to build stone circles around their dry kindling, and to spread sand on the ashes, no matter what. In another, he leaned over to scold a red-headed teenager who’d stolen her father’s lighter and cigarettes. In yet another, he pursued a toddler through the woods then roughly removed a box of matches from the child’s pink, grubby fingers. 

That was me. I was the toddler. My parents played the tape at pretty much every family gathering back in the day. The older I got, the more people laughed, but if you look close I’m bawling my eyes out in that commercial. Even when I’m supposedly saying “Thanks, tree man.” Clearly dubbed over, almost certainly not my voice, my lips quivering, face twisted.

It might just be a coincidence that he and I came to live in the same place for a while, years later. Once we moved to the Buffalo apartment I never saw him again. And of course they don’t play the commercials anymore. The bear in the hat owns the cause and always has. 

“Fire is not a toy,” the tree man would say again to me. 

I was 11 or 12 or 13 years old when we lived in the swing set house. I knew not to play with fire. I’d never played with fire in my life, and never thought of it except during these terrible nighttime visits. 

Eventually I would accept the pointlessness of answering him, and merely let him sit there muttering for a long while, breathing out, dragging a thumb across his big flat forehead. I’d pretend to have fallen suddenly into a deep, impossible sleep. And he’d say “welp” or “alrighty” and heave himself to his rooty feet. I’d sneak one-eyed peeks as he staggered across the room and stooped over to step back into the closet, grunting, breathing hard. I’d lose him in the dark for a second before those driftwood fingers came curling around the edge of the door to slide it shut, and I could barely make out the lump of me in the mirrored doors.