Note: Written as part of a timed group speed writing session.
—
The hole in the tree was apparently real, not an illusion or mirage as he had first thought. It was a large oval opening, six feet tall that he could easily step into, if he wished. The day’s light was fading and the tree hollow lay in gently darkening shadow. He ran, with all the speed he could muster, back to the house, a hammer striking in his chest with each hurrying impatient step; returned with a camping lantern, and shone it into the hole.
And reeled at what the wan light illuminated, like a magic lantern projection that was all luminous glowing and shaping shadows. The opening was an implausible tunnel of bark and soft inner wood that stretched away into the distance beyond the confines of the trunk – and in the far distance was a tinge of daylight where the tunnel ended and another landscape, another world of faint meadows and sturdy mountains seemed to begin.
He stepped forward, his chest thump thumping, not with fear but with a wild rush that was swooshing through his arteries, in his thoughts, like a waking dream. A breeze – no, not a faint stirring but a rising summer storm of adventure – a twister frenziedly spinning in his bewildered thoughts till he reached out and held the bark in a squirrel claw grip, seeking steadiness, fingernails white with foreboding and excitement. Like oil and water they churned within him: excitement and foreboding. Like water and oil they would not mix. And so, he stood on a precipice of… something – the thrall of adventure and the anguish of trepidation swirling intertwined like a maelstrom within.
Would this enthralling twister of apprehension carry him through this hollow to a land like Oz to meet the good witch, or perhaps to confront a wicked witch? Should it matter, should he care when adventure itself, like a tempting siren, lay before him. Was not the promise of adventure sufficient reason itself? This impossible tunnel, this living archway promised an odyssey away from his mundane life, towards a distant terrain that, with crooked finger, beckoned and summoned.
Behind him, a dreary dull life; before him, this invitation to escape. Perhaps, an invitation to a quixotic quest, a call of destiny?
But how did this tree grow this beckoning opening? Why was he so accepting of this impossibility? Why this yearning to blindly go forward. What inner flaw or virtue forged this – was it fancies, fantasies, aspirations, hallucinations, visions, phantasms…or simply a desire to be free of the Sisyphean encumbrances of daily life? Is that what seized his will, or was it his will itself that had called forth this inconceivable opportunity? Was there any reality, any bite of verisimilitude to what apparently lay open before him?
No matter, adventure must not be resisted – his heart sang to him even as his mind quailed, dizzy with trepidation at the wild insanity of what lay before him; the mad impossibility of it. He stepped into the great knothole opening, saw the tunnel of wood around him, smelled the soft moistness of the tree’s innards, it’s vitals and guts living and alive and inviting him to come forward. The lantern swayed and shook as if a sudden wind had risen.
His mind was in a wild spin, and like an all consuming tornado, it seemed to move him swiftly through on a cushion of buffeting air drifting and swirling within the hollow. And then, deep within the tree, he stood, blinking in confusion.
The lantern’s light was fading, dying, and darkness like a spreading vignette encroached upon his encased form. His feet were caught as if in a sticky viscous sap, his ankles wrapped in tendrils and shoots that held him securely in place. His hands reached out to the far edges of the hollow and the distant fading illusion of green meadows and white mountains. And his yearning palms were captured and held by a thousand twining threadlike sprouts that seized and pierced and penetrated his tender flesh. In their own yearning and thirst, they drank nutrients from his immobilized form even as the oval hollow sealed with slow but unrelenting patience.
If anyone had passed by at that juncture, they would ascribe to the wind in its branches, the wretched moan of anguish that was heard from the tree. And they would gaze, with idle curiosity, upon the most unusual knot, that in its raised swirls and twisted bark, seemed to resemble a visage of a most pitiful aspect.
I absolutely love it! Is it the tree that kills the man, or the man's fantasies that do him in? Or, is it mother nature taking back an unruly child? Or, does the tree need man (or a man) to become whole again? I don't know the unknowable answers, and that's why this is so beautiful. Well done, Irshaad.
Oh my! That was a rather sticky end!