Bola

Bola's fruit hangs from his trunk like ammunition — great woody spheres, heavy as shot, dangling on vines straight from the bark — and the temple gardeners have exactly one prayer: not on anyone's head. But Bola, a thoughtful tree, has turned the hazard into music. The fallen cannonballs, hollowed by time, became the court's drums; the gardeners learned to read his dropping season the way sailors read weather, and now the Canopy Throne dances to a rhythm set by gravity and ripeness. "I do not drop them," Bola insists, with the dignity of a percussionist. "I release them. There is a difference, and the difference is timing." Young trees gather at his roots at dusk to hear the evening's performance: a slow, woody heartbeat, straight out of the trunk.