Spoiled fruit

For dverse, the line of poetry to use in the piece of prose (144 words) is from Michael Donaghy’s ‘Liverpool’

“she’d had it sliced away leaving a scar”

Spoiled fruit

The cherry tree grew in the middle of the tiny kind of garden that makes proper trees look like caged bears. Her mother planted it for the blossom and let it grow tall and broad for the fruit. When she was a child she had climbed into the lower branches to pick the under-ripe fruit, and later, when she inherited the house, learned to love the flocks of blackbird that ate the cherries as soon as they ripened.
Her neighbour complained that the branches overhung his lawn, the fruit dropped, the birds made a mess. When she closed her ears, he took a chainsaw to the main branch, tearing a hole in her childhood memories, the only children she’d had. It sliced away leaving a scar that wept amber tears until winter sealed the wound tight shut. The wound in her heart never healed.