It was maddening; at each meal, Caroline or Rocky or Sherrilyn watched him, never giving him a chance. He worried that before they grew lax enough for his plan to work, that his arm would be entwined in the hungry fingers of the tree so tight that they’d begin hand feeding him and stop setting his wrist free to allow him to feed himself. But every couple hours he shifted and jiggled it, making sure to stop the aggressive little tree arteries from slipping their mouths inside his arm. At the same time, he also tried to stretch and pull his back to loose the growing capillaries that he could feel eating into his spine. If he actually managed to get his cuffs unlocked, it would be bitterly ironic if was already too late to separate the rest of his body from the tree. Finally, one night when Rocky brought him dinner, he saw the opportunity. Ellen had sent down a nice slab of pot roast, and Rocky had to cut it for him before he could eat it. But as she talked about the trails that she and Jerry had walked that day, she began to wander around the room as she talked, trailing a hand along the bark of the tree trunk and then walking across to where the tree gave way to rough-hewn planked panels.
