This is an entry for the 'How far can you reach?' contest, which involved picture prompts. Said prompts can be found here; I used the fourth one.
All reviews greatly appreciated. Like my last piece, this has no real plot or character development - it's more descriptive than anything. Title is possibly a working one, since it was titled before it was finished and now I'm not sure if it fits.
EDIT: Thanks to all who have given me a review. I've edited this a little.
-x-
Sometimes the trees called his name on the wind.
Their voices echoed a dying soldier, camouflaged within an identical army, lamenting the beauty of a world he cannot see through blood. The soldier leaves a world behind, but trees are trapped within their own concrete biology, doomed to live and die in the same spot. Like the sluggish caterpillars, trees are ever waiting to shed their cocoon and emerge as vibrant butterflies.
So when they sense a human child, new to life and learning and lore, their younger leaves rustle with impatience and jealousy. They cry out to the child who’s fool enough to pass their way, and rasp a few hoarse words. Some call it a song:
“Tell us, tell us!”
“Show us, show us!”
“Let us see...”
“We’ve never seen it...”
The forest holds its rattling breath when footsteps are suddenly silenced, murdered in broad daylight. The trees can feel fear, and they beckon it closer. It never comes.
“Found the ball, Janice!”
And footsteps are resurrected, carrying the child back to the village at the edge of the forest. Here, stories are told of ghosts that play like woodland creatures, mutilated or with missing eyeballs, so that pus leaks out of the sockets. Children are warned away from the darkness beneath the trees, for that is where the enchanting siren of curiosity composes her most beautiful melodies.
But sometimes, when the trees called his name on the wind, he had no choice but obedience.
He always wondered how they knew his name. It was not uncommon in the village, and neither was his scruffy blond hair, shorn close to his scalp, or his muddy tan mottled with sunburn. Maybe it was the weeds of the undergrowth, promiscuous as they were, who in their grief for loved ones killed underfoot searched for the name of their vengeance. And when he ran, blinded by tears and reddened by anger, into the deepest forbidden realm of the forest, it was the weeds who sealed his doom.
What was he was crying about: an argument dissolved into anxiety within moments of his disappearance? As he lifted a hand to wipe his eyes dry, he felt the weeds draw their tricky fingers out and tighten them around his ankle, and then he fell, crushing ever more of their brethren. He paid for it with blood that ran from his nose and into his mouth, where he tasted its sharpness.
The weeds, unsatisfied, cried to the trees: “Oh, punish him! Punish one of those who dance on our graves!”
The wind blew and the rumour of knowledge wet appetites for the long sought chance to walk the world’s surface. The young trees bent their branches towards the scent of blood, straining to reach the key to escape. The elders, who had followed such trivial dreams as this to their end and woken to resignation, were silent.
A silver birch called his name.
“Come closer to me, my sweet Seeker, Searcher, Hunter. Come closer to me.”
He climbed to his feet to meet the forest’s anticipation.
“Seeker!”
“Searcher!”
“Hunter!”
“Come closer to me,” whispered the silver birch, and he could hear his own footsteps, gagged by the bed of leaves. He swore he felt a thorn at the back of his head, threatening to leech life. Pushed closer, an invisible puppeteer tugged a string on his arm, raising it in mock salute to stroke the bark of that insatiable silver birch.
A pale hand reached out to touch his; sculpted fingers tied bandages of vines around his wrists. Palms met, scars pressed against smoothness, and the forest sighed. For where once a boy stood, there was a silvery girl, shrouded in a dress of silk and as insubstantial as the winter’s snowflake. Her brow was damp with dew and her hair wispy, a newborn’s. She let it fall back against her neck and cried out in a true voice, piercing like the owl’s shrill call, and the trees fell silent. The last of the birch fell from her and she shed a single crimson tear.
For where once her spirit dwelt, a boy was sleeping: frozen in wood.
