A certain man of business harbored a secret—he only did his best thinking and strategizing while lying under a pile of leaves. This had been true since he was a boy, when he would hide from Catholic Mass underneath a heap of fall leaves on the orphanage lawn. He owed many of his successes to the practice. For this reason, he carried a large briefcase full of dried leaves with him everywhere he went—home to the office to the gym to the library to the museum to the cathedral lawn to the neighborhood tavern and back home. 

The man had been dating a woman for some time. He had grown close enough to her to share his secret. She was the first person he had ever told. One day, the woman suggested in passing that the two of them get married. Without saying a word the man took the woman by the hand and led her into the yard. He laid on the ground at her feet and covered himself entirely in leaves. The woman waited. And waited. After what seemed to her like a very long while, she became dismayed.

“You and your leaves,” she announced, just as a breeze came along and began unsettling the pile. “Here I am trying to get close to you, but the leaves are still closer. Oh to be one of your precious leaves.” The man stood and brushed himself off, prepared to make her his bride. But the woman was nowhere to be seen. In a moment she had been transformed into one of many star-shaped golden maples blowing down the empty yard.

The young woman did not blow away entirely. One of her corners caught in the slats of the man’s fence. She flapped in the breeze until the following day, when she was raked into a pile. Owing to her unique shape and coloring, the leaf was selected to be pressed between sheets of wax paper, warmed until dry, and placed in the man’s briefcase with his other favorite leaves. The woman-turned-leaf was understandably despondent about all of this. She had no choice but to watch the man carry his sadness over her absence everywhere he went, and grapple with it each day under his blanket of leaves of which she was a part. The woman’s leaf-self came to care for the man in a way she could never have anticipated. The shape of his bright heart made her happy. Likewise, the man came to his Council of Covering each day unaware that the woman now ranked prominently among his brittle, rust-colored emissaries of healing.

 In time, the man began dating again. He took a bride. The leaf was surprised to find that not only was she able to manage her sadness over this development, but that she delighted in his pursuits, even the romantic ones. She had grown. The leaf regarded her woman-self of days past as having been so much more immature, naïve and flighty. She felt a kind of gratefulness at the rewards of insight and proximity this new life had begun to offer.

One night, the man and his new wife had an argument over muddy shoes left in the entryway. The fight grew bitter. The new wife took the man’s briefcase and dumped his leaves in the yard, and set fire to the whole thing. The burning leaves blew down the yard in a sudden screaming wind. The house next door caught fire. It was a whole thing.