“Boring Tree”
The narrator observes a woman who seems to be following them while they look at a tree. As more people gather, the atmosphere shifts from curiosity to frustration, leading the narrator to entertain the crowd by mimicking the tree. This act brings joy to the woman and the onlookers, creating a moment of shared laughter.
- ▪The narrator feels followed by a woman with a distinct gait.
- ▪As the narrator looks at a tree, more people gather, initially curious.
- ▪The narrator mimics the tree to entertain the crowd, resulting in laughter.
Literary Hub (LitHub) files mainly under books. We currently carry 79 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Literary Hub |
| Canonical URL | https://lithub.com/boring-tree/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 27 May 2026 08:18:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-27T08:37:56.893Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-27T08:37:56.893Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
I feel like I’m being followed by a woman. She has the kind of gait where her feet point a bit outwards, and she kicks them with a little huff to get more from every step, only to land heavy on the heels. She usually lumbers and shifts her weight radically, but tonight she floats behind me.Article continues after advertisement She’s eating something idly, as if it’s secondary to whatever she’s really up to. One-hand food. It’s not a knife, but she holds it like one. And then I feel like when I stop to look at this tree she looks at it too. She looks at me, and then back at the tree, and then at me again, because she’s trying to make sense of why I’m looking at the tree. It’s not so interesting to her because it’s not about her.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Literary Hub.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Literary Hub
