The Cubes | Teen Ink

The Cubes

November 6, 2023
By MatthewShtilman BRONZE, Cupertino, California
MatthewShtilman BRONZE, Cupertino, California
1 article 0 photos 0 comments

In the everlasting sounds of the ceramic waterfalls, there stood a tree. With an imperfect, warm, and rough sandpaper surrounding it and sap oozing out of its cracks, it was as sticky as a bowl of honey. As the tree rose higher and higher it split into multiple branches with leaves like feathers sticking out of each branch. Every individual feather strived to get the mysterious light above. The feathers were a variety of green, yellow, red and orange colors. As each feather fell off one by one, one could sense the times growing colder. They would continue falling until they reached the pit with the tree’s foundations. Here lay a hollow cube. This cube was made of cut up and chemically compacted relatives of the tree. The cube was leaking droplets of milk, one every 2 seconds. This poison seeped into the tree’s foundations even though it never seemed to belong there. A crunchy transparent plastic wrapper lay in the soil as well, not to disintegrate for 182,500 days or so they said. As much as the community service men with the orange cylinders tried to clean up these plastics, their impact was short-lived as the plastics came back after each cycle of the mysterious light. They had long started The Replacement, where one by one each of the trees were taken out and made into hollow cubes, only to be replaced with perfect, metal, smooth, and stone cold poles. The glory of the trees were being sucked away by the minute as more and more poles came. Only to replace the trees, one by one. As more and more of these frightening substances were being sucked into the tree’s soil, the tree knew it’s end was near. It would suffer the same fate of being replaced by a pole only to be turned into a dozen cubes as its relatives.


The author's comments:

In the prompt “ The Tree Outside” I was inspired to write a story called. The Cubes. In this piece, I attempted to use the concepts of imagery, metaphors, alliteration, a little bit of symbolism, and tone. In this piece, you will find these being used in places like when the cube is being described. Here we see symbolism and imagery being used with the cube representing a carton of milk dripping with milk. An alliteration is being used in the quote “This cube was made of cut up and chemically compacted relatives of the tree.” The words chemically compacted relatives represent an alliteration. I was trying to bring out a serious and upset tone through the course of this piece. Since the problem of excessive trash on our school campus is disturbing and we seem not to do anything to solve it. A metaphor is used to describe how the tree’s sap is as sticky as honey. My favorite part of this story has to be the phrases where I expressed milk cartons as being cut up and chemically compacted poles. Looking at the surface, it seems weird how milk cartons can be made out of such things, but reality suggests that this fact is actually true. 


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