“Oh, pull over, pull over, this one is perfect!” Trish reached into the back seat of their volvo and dragged her camera bag onto her lap. Cody sighed and turned on his hazard lights, drifting to a stop on the old country highway.

“Haven’t you run out of film yet? This is the fifteenth farm you’ve said is perfect in the last two days.” He slumped in his seat, arms crossed as the traffic whisking by made the car rock.

“Nope! I’ve been rationing myself.”

“I’m almost afraid to ask.”

“I’ve made it through 30 rolls of film so far and have another 15 still in the trunk. I’ll be right back!” She leaped out of the car and hurried to the broken fence surrounding a farm house that was boarded up and falling in.

“You should try going digital!” Cody shouted from the open window, but Trish ignored him. “I had to date an artist. Photography’s not art, it’s record keeping.” He pulled out the latest graphic novel from Darkhorse and prepared for a long wait. She could take upwards of an hour trying to get just the right angle and light on these stupid buildings. One of these days she was going to get herself shot for trespassing and all he was going to do was laugh.

“Cody!”

For a second he thought she had been caught and felt briefly bad about laughing at the mental image of Trish with buckshot in her ass. But when he looked up at her bustling through the field, she was laughing.

“You’ve got to see this, come on!”

He sighed, turned the car off and waited for a break in traffic before getting out. Maybe if he humored her they would actually get to their friend’s cabin before dark.

When he reached the fence, she had already disappeared behind the house again, so he made his way through the waist high grass, praying there were no ticks. When he made it around, inspecting his legs all the while for ticks, he sighed. “What is it?”

“Look.” She was just in front of him, pointing towards a small silo that had been obscured from the road. It took him a moment for his brain to make sense of the scene, but he finally figured that the tree he saw had to be growing out the top of the silo and not behind it.

“Is that tree actually in the silo?”

“Yes, I’ve heard of this but never seen it before. A seed blows in, grows straight up for years with hardly any sun and then, bam, it hits the clear sky and just explodes. They call them Silo Trees. How imaginative. Let’s see if we can climb in!” She ran off towards the silo, camera jouncing against her breast.

Cody followed more slowly, still finding it hard to get his mind to accept the layering of the landscape as he knew it had to be. The lower hatch on the silo had rotted away ages ago and she crawled in, Cody right behind her. They were barely in before she was angling around with her camera, hunting for just the right lighting.

The snapping of the shutter annoyed him and he reached around her and took the camera out of her hands just as the shutter snapped at an odd angle. “Hey! You ruined the shot!”

“Shhh.” He pulled her close to him, so they were both facing the tree. “Just take a moment and see this, don’t just look at it. How long do you think it took this tree to do this?”

She squirmed a little, but gave in when he refused to loosen his hold. “I dunno, a long time.” She made a grab for her camera which he held out of her reach for a moment more, hoping she’d quiet down. She didn’t

He finally gave her back her camera and she started rolling around on the ground looking for just the right angle. He shook his head and walked over to the trunk of the tree. “I wish I had the kind of patience this tree had.” It had the straightest trunk he’d ever seen. He made for the hatch, calling back, “Make sure you brush off before getting back in my car.”

She ignored him.