We went quickly to our trees. The blossom was nearly gone by now. “First cut away the old dead stuff,” she said. Some of it was so old, so sapless, it could be just snapped off. Thin boughs cut easily. They tumbled down onto the grass. We sawed off the bigger boughs. We snagged our skin on thorns. Bulbs of blood and trickles of blood appeared on our skin. We kept moving in with the cutting tools, moving back again, assessing, revising, editing, changing. We trimmed tiny single growths, snapped off single thorns. The boughs that remained reached up towards the sky to form an interleaving arch. They appeared to form an upturned nest with the sky as ground, the ground as sky. We pulled away the cuttings so that the earth under the trees was clear, just tangled grass with flowers in it. We watched for Jack Law, but there was no sign of him. We attached the wire between the trees. We attached it to branching boughs and tightened it with the tightening winch. It was almost as high as my shoulder.
What do You think about The Tightrope Walkers (2014)?
