The Last Maple Leaf

As another year closed, another brilliant autumn faded into a barren winter. The leaves of the trees changed from their cool spring green to every shade of red, orange, and yellow imaginable, and for a moment, their fire was beautiful. Until they crumbled, and their trees released them into heaps in the dying grass. To be raked. Or ignored. It didn’t matter. Their lives were over.

But the maple tree at the heart of Cornelia Cemetery was different. Most of its leaves would turn and fall, but there was always one that remained. The same leaf on the same branch for far too long to be a coincidence. Through winter’s snowstorms and the violent thunderstorms of spring, it stayed there. Red and striking. Refusing to die.

It was just a maple leaf, nothing of note, but it didn’t go unnoticed by the groundskeeper. Every year, he waited for it to fall, and every year, it held on. There had to be a reason.

He watched it linger there, dancing in the wind, moonlight reflecting off its glassy surface. How did nobody else see how strange it was?

It whispered. Sometimes. He swore it did. Like something was trying to tell him something. Or maybe it was someone.

It was so impossibly perfect, its crisp edges so beautifully constructed, so symmetrically aligned, that it could have come straight from a textbook. There wasn’t a hole or a tear in it, not that he could find. Someone had sketched it out, cut it from their paper, and fused it to the tree. 

Maybe someone came around each day, while the groundskeeper was asleep, and replaced it. Just to mess with his head. Or maybe it wasn’t there at all. There was no other life capable of captivating him the way the maple leaf did.

He had never been one to think about the world beyond his physical experience. The ideas of death and afterlife had always been abstract to him, even as he watched bodies be buried beneath the earth day after day. Even if he had all the answers, what could he do with them but wait?

But when he looked at the tree and its single remaining leaf, he had to admit there was a possibility of something more. If this wasn’t evidence in support of a connection between life and death, he didn’t know what was. 

Even when everything around it died, the maple leaf held on. It didn’t just survive; it thrived, and it sang to him. A hymn, a ballad, a lullaby. It called out his name and begged for his attention, his acceptance.

Within it, there was a soul clinging to the land of the living. He knew there was.

Around him, the seasons changed, but he stopped noticing. Snow fell and melted. The rain came, and brought with it lush green life. More leaves grew around the maple leaf, providing it with company. The harsh heat of summer swept through and sucked the life from it all. 

Then, autumn returned, and the leaves began to turn and fall once again. Except for his leaf. His leaf stood strong, and it was the only thing that mattered.

If it was going to fall, it would have to be a choice.

His tunnel of focus was impenetrable, even as his patience began to wear thin. He didn’t remember the last time he had been home any better than he remembered the last time he had spoken to someone. 

Was it before he had noticed the leaf? Surely not.

Still, nobody else seemed to see it. They came and went, visiting graves or holding funerals. The groundskeeper was always there, day and night. It didn’t matter if other groundskeepers were there, fixing up the overgrown mess created by his neglect. He stayed.

Why wouldn’t the leaf just drop? Did it need more attention? Did it need someone else to acknowledge it? Slowly but surely, it was consuming him.

One morning, his focus wavered enough to notice a child, a little boy with his mother, there to visit someone—the groundskeeper neither knew nor cared who. Bright-eyed, the child pointed up at the tree, and for the first time, the groundskeeper thought somebody else saw what he did. But then:

“Look, Mommy,” the boy said. “The tree is empty. All the leaves fell.”

Taking his hand, his mother managed a smile and said, “Yes, yes they did.”

The groundskeeper watched them go, astonished. The tree was not empty. There was still a leaf there, begging to be seen. Yet, nobody noticed it any more than they noticed him. Not even an innocent child.

He looked down at himself, at his pale hands, and only then did he realize that he couldn’t feel the cold.

The leaf’s connection to the world was superficial. No one saw it because it wasn’t real. The soul inside it was holding on to a world that had already let it go.

Maybe, just maybe, there was something he had missed. He was right that the leaf was the embodiment of a soul, sending him a message. But the soul wasn’t calling out for him because he could save it. It was calling out to him to tell him to stop. Stop clinging to the tree of life. Let go.

The soul was his.

Death had claimed him, and he hadn’t even noticed.

He thought of the years he’d spent sweeping paths that led nowhere, trimming grass for people who no longer noticed. Perhaps he’d been one of them all along. The thought should have frightened him, but instead, he felt light.

He looked down at the roots of the maple tree, and for the first time, he truly saw them. They snaked into the soil, hiding themselves away, but they were the support for what the world saw on the surface. They were its backbone, its veins. Without them, there was no life.

That was why the leaf had held on.

It hadn’t been ready to acknowledge that the roots could only hold it for so long. The physical world was finite, but the cycle it represented was not. Letting go of it meant accepting that a fall was necessary to open the door to true actualization.

When the groundskeeper finally drew his eyes away from the tree, his body relaxed. The wind whistled, carrying with it the song of the leaf, and he turned his back. The leaf didn’t need him to stay. It needed him to go. So, he walked away.

Warmth filled his body, spreading from his chest to his toes as the roots of the tree burrowed deeper. The stars in the night sky shone brighter than ever before, the light of the world closing in. 

He closed his eyes and faded into it, and at last, the last maple leaf fell.