Prior to my mother's passing, most who follow this blog knew I was up for having April's Story of the Month. I had just started writing this story: Felled Oak, designed to be a fantasy-driven drama. It was to be slightly like a horror story, and in many ways, horror has become a sad shadow of what it once was, and few masters still cling on today. So I was a great deal into it before my hiatus, and I've done my best to write it as intended.
I'm not making excuses for whether or not this story is "good"; the point is that although I'm not picking up from where I left off, I will have the scheduling prior to when my world had personally gone to shit, I will do my best to get back on track, but I couldn't leave this story unfinished. Not that it's special, in-fact it had no real significance but to just be a story...but now, it has taken on a life in-itself, and I felt it would've been wrong to just toss it aside like some unfinished dowry of begotten memories. I hope everyone enjoys Felled Oak, which is a bit of The Secret Garden, a bit of Bradbury, and just a hint of loss. Thank you for your ever-amicable patience, it does not go unappreciated.
Just outside the daffodil's petal, a bee buzzed in with an onslaught of black and yellow pollen-soaked bristles. The air, it was cleaner than anything young Jillian had ever smelt, as though it was fully of fabric softened winds that cooled down the heat of the growing sunshine. Jillian had never seen a bee so full of pollen, nor smelt the pollution-free sort that the mountains spewed forth like mouths of wisdom spattering the Earth with puritanical cleanliness.
The world was so large in the finite perspective of the tiniest organisms, crawling, flying and swooshing about with magnetized misdirection. Her parents figured it was time for the young girl to witness the other side of living, the rustic, rural outdoors when her great grand mother had left her parents a shaded little cottage house that looked like one of those fancy gingerbread houses she and her mother Mary had built for the Christimas raffle at the local church last December. She was fascinated like a babe looking off to the world again with refreshed eyes not weary of knowledge, but ripe for sponging up the knowledge of the supple brim to the chalice of the universe itself, and she drank it all in until her eyelids squished closed full of joyous tears.
The suburban vehicle that father had recently purchased for the long haul trip, and to replace the family minivan that Jillian had been raised in with toys, and other play things while her favorite show had played over and over again as she went from toddler to the knowledge-thirsted child she had become the past three years. She was practically six years old, her birthday just hours away! She had been so excited as six was the year she would start big girl school: first grade, where the knowledge that simmered behind all the fabric-laced folds of both the mind, the leaves at her brow, itching he forehead, and the birds serenading with grand composition.
Yet, her story wasn't about great-grandma's cottage, or how she was merely a month away from the August heat to fry September leaves a bronze-like ember of glistening sparks in the tree line. No, she had so long, so many long years to ruminate on all of those feelings. Instead she had ran out into the feed with the endless energy a child has at such a tender age, where attention spans fail before intense exhaustion, and yet, that little bright ball of questioning energy that was Jillian had stepped across the ravine, the ice-cold water and slippery, algae-covered rocks were smooth on her feet, a welcome relief that summer embraces on the soles of both the weary and the rugged.
The cumbersome giants loomed like hair follicles over the grassy mountainsides, hoping to stay whole for the next winter's frost. Jillian was like s wild flower sprouting legs and spreading joy throughout the forestry teeming with the sounds and scents that lit her nostrils in a fury. She had a majestic sapling spew forth natural sucrose with w splendid candied flavor flowing about the bark. There were frogs mimicking her, as they leaped from lily pad to rock, their sustenance and equally squishing slipperiness as they bounded about with refreshing attitudes.
She made sure not to venture too far from the sight of the tree line, as to keep the miniscuke cottage at a sprint's distance. She had noticed her father smoking his pipe on the porch, but he had then retired to unpack their week's worth of luggage from inside the house, into the vanity in their grandmother's room. She too had passed away prior too,mane she too had settled about the house with the dust of sealed doors. Jillian swore she felt her grandmother's presence bounding about the old cottage as the scent of raisin cookies had come out of cold stoves.
Still, she out that aside, and frolicked with rabbits, toads, and the occasional field mouse with the beauty of Eden about her gaze. Her purity was as natural and free flowing as the windswept trees had shivers,mane the rocks heat up with the shun's help. Feeling the courage that only comes with a misunderstanding of imminent danger, Jillian cent deeper into the woods, occasionally looking back to see the house growing just a smidgen smaller,mane a smidgen closer to being covered up by dark green leaves at their prime.
She kept on jumping and playing as she slowly begun to notice her a forest friends we're no longer around her, and the shade from the leaf-heavy maples had now shaded her more than was comfortable. Still feeling brave she slowly walked about the golden rays of the sun bursting through the forest canopy, like spotlights of gold Turing the grass a yellow star shine.
Nervousness kept her from turning around, for hopes that no monsters or beasts were afoul band begging to make eye contact so their prey would die with white fear in her eyes. Instead she continued just a bit further until there was a great opening where the trees had not connected.
In front of her was a great oak trunk, wider than their new SUV, sand etched on it was a face, something like s natural engraving caused by thousands of years of life, and the sagging of sn untimely death as the tree had looked to be downed by w lightning strike, yet how could that be? Even as a young girl, Jillian knew that sure,y a fire to erupt about such a tree would've spread outward and destroyed the very area she had walked about just now! Yet there was the half of the tree trunk toppled over, charred to the bare pulp, and still, the surrounding trees had not even a smudge of ash, or a trace of a bruise upon their bark. They stood taller, as though the tree she peered upon now as t struck down by a force of God, but assassinated and Jillian felt she had now come upon a crime scene, a dark,mane dangerous prospect that had her slowly doubling backwards from the way she came.
Baring the wrath of whatever monster that may have been stalking her, she turned around eyes closed,mane slowly opened to see she was just alone in the clearing. She was about to trot back towards the house,mane think nothing else about the scene she ad u covered, but a whisper of air had almost spin her around like firm hands about her shoulder, and slowly turning her like the wind-up of a music box....a gentle song began to play in her mind. The clandestinity of the song was in and out, as though it was moving back-and-forth throughout her head.
"Don't go child. Stay." The voice was there,Mir spoke proper English, and it wasn't imaginary, like her best friend bob the three-headed unicorn that like mocha lattes. No, this voice was as soft and gentle as a baby bird fon a breeze leaving the nest. She wasn't sure if it was going to lift her up to the heavens, or drag her down to the rocky hell of broken wings and shattered spines. However, the voice was real.
She wasn't as scared as she figured she should become, but instead she prepay for another statement to carry on the wind, and so she closed her eyes, and turned back to the dead tree stump. For a good minute, she stood looking at the strange face that leered from the stump, and could almost hear the other trees laughing, tossing back their branches in great bellyaches over the prune-like wrinkled stump. There wasn't much moss on it, but climbers that seemed to come out of the center of the hallow stump, this gave the face a more diet gunning feature of a full-fledged face like acting out the part of hair. Jillian just could not believe what she was seeing, but the face, frozen by sheer reality, had slowly begun to move. She tried her best to look away, she tried to submit her imagination to the far reaches of her deepest subconscious, but there it was, still muscling out a word.
"Good."
Now she was certain it came out of the barked lips of the tree stump. The oak had spoken to her, and Jillian now as very nervous to muster up the courage to turn about and run back home, leaving the tree to babble on without her ears to listen. But she could not turn, her fear was too great. It was rooting her feet into the soft peat moss, and she had caught her heart from fluttering out her throat when she swore that there was a sensation of her slipping down into the earth. She wasn't, thankfully, it was merely her feet being crawled upon by a regiment of ants, and she gently shooed them away with a hearty, but nurturing shake.
"Dearest child, I have felled but a century ago. For generations....I've grown, to the greatest of heights, I saw the world around me for miles in all directions. If I were to have grown taller than my piqué, I would've seen the ends of the universe, and thus the beginning of everything!"
"Oh my!"
"So now my child, there is an offer on the table, and if you hesitate, the moment shall pass, and the opportunity will vanish like a tulip's hue in the talons of the first frost. Do you wish to hear of your destiny, or turn away as so many others have done?"
"I'm just a little girl, I...I don't understand what destiny is...is it bad?" Jillian crossed her legs, and with a child's embarrassment blushed at her own fragile, innocent ignorance. She knew a tree shouldn't talk, but so many miracles were said to have happened, was this not one...or perhaps it was an omen, a terrible festering of evil in that tree's discordant demeanor.
"Destiny, my child, can be a foreboding peril, but life itself is a game of surviving the day, waking up to the first magical breath of the morning. So yes, it is bad, but unabashedly wonderful, magical, and tales are written of those whose destinies entwine with magnimity! You child! You will become a primer for all of tall tales and folklore! So will you leave the dour life of some pestilential mortality, and join the others who have sought the fantastic splendor of the forest?"
Jillian may not have understood all that the felled oak had said, but her tiny wisdom was enough to catch the gist of what the tree wanted, and it wanted all of her. Her youth, her life, her family, and most importantly her very existence. Why would she give up everything? Why would leave her parents? Yes, a tree spoke to her, and didn't she learn in Sunday school that the prophets spoke to burning bushes, doves, and even the forests from which they had wandered searching for divine guidance?
Yes, but hadn't damnation came from off the forked tongue of a snake to toss Adam and Eve from eternal Paradise? Jillian began to wonder if destiny by definition changes, and if someone, or something else bestows it upon you, is it now not destiny, but consequence?
"You're trying to tempt me...'lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil' is not just poetry, but a decree! Sister Margaret says so! I will not be tempted by some promise that is just a dream! You are trying to offer me something shadowy, sunny words for fiery curses!"
"Insolent child! I offer you what I offer anyone that beheld my corpse! Plantations stem from my roots,map reading throughout the world! I can offer you only glad tidings! Joyous fulfillment that this mortal world only gives to the select few with nepotistic ties, and ghastly amounts of resources. You will suffer and struggle in the world of man, I've seen it! From my highest heights, I've seen Caligula masticate the heart of Rome, following behind him the destructor of Rome! I've seen kings slaughtered thn fiefdom in droves! Tell me: what will humanity off you as a mortal female? Will it not offer you up to indentured iTunes, always hold you as second-class, will it not stifle your very voice if you ever dare speak out of turn? These question, my dear; are rhetorical."
Jillian understood most of what the tee was saying, in her short time on Earth she had learned a great deal of the atrocities of the animalistic nature of man, but she had also learned Beethoveen's Fifth Symphony, asserted her will in mock senates, and was read from storybooks that had transposed most of the horrors that the felled oak spoke of, and knew that humanity changes.
"You're wrong, Felled Oak! You have been on the forest floor for too long. Humanity changes, rights past wrongdoings. Man may be manipulative, it may be greedy, but I will learn a great deal of man's greed, and it may grow to sicken me entirely, but you too have what I've heard described as a hidden agenda as well!"
"I cannot deny your young, passionate logic, but even so, your still ignorant of so much. Yes, life is never black-and-white, but to whom you speak now is not offering you a date with destiny for personal gain. I'm stuck here, on this mossy carpet of lichen and algae, bugs are my eternal itch from which I may never scratch. You have little to fear from a dying oak, where not even a sprout can recuperate out of that hallowed-out stump. So pick your path, young Jillian: go into the forest, and meet your fate, or go home and live the mediocrity that women of your culture will be forced into, and become a maid, where you could've been a great warrior, or an enchantress. You are only but a child for so long, the depth, the core of your life from henceforth will be determined by this very moment...good luck with the burden to which your future shall carry!"
A mist rolled in, and the skies darkened. Ahead of her there was a dismal path, just like the one she first entry to reach this opening in the canopies. A bright red light shined, a lavender purple tint surrounding the nearly-tempting passage www a crystal ball. Into the depths of the foliage, she could see a strong, powerful woman riding the back of a monstrous stag. It reared up on its hind legs, as the woman charged forth with an army of forest life following behind into an evergreen hell. Wolves, bears, and giant cats clawed and scratched against demonic black forces that seemed to shimmer out of time with the rest of the natural world. Jillian saw the presumable future version of herself holding tight reins of swampy vines, a sword fashioned of slate, and s shield of oak and tree pulp binding it all into s mesmerizing sequence.
She knew everything in that purplish mist seen was to be taken as truth, for the forest does many things, it plays tricks, even coerces the eyes to have the mind follow the archaic magic of the wild and make the most irrational, and primal of decisions. Jillian turned her eyes away, squeezing tight the shutters so not even a peep could be seen of the growing, glowing gloss of that shrouded passage into the heart of the marshes.
She turned and saw a golden glisten of the natural sunlight, and there was the image of her life in the mechanical facade of man: she saw her parents, smiling, hugging her, and suddenly flashes twelve years later where she is over the coffin of her father, dead so young. Her mother a widow wrecked by the tragedy, her grandmother in tears trying to comfort them both with salty wet kisses that spewed from her pupils, the secret origin of the primal life ascending from ocean depths.
She sees her future all stemmed in that golden light, and notices she too is smiling at her graduation, tears impressed on her sunburst cheeks of hot ad still acknowledging the physical pain of the knowledge of her dead father. She tries to turn away, but not until another image is seen so brightly and clear through the yellowing rays of light.
She is older, not matronly, but surely motherly, and she turns to see an infant in the arms, suckling greatly at her breast, covered by a self-made sling. Her mother, far more matronly than she could've imagined, comes over and there are a generation of three strong women. Two standing tall, the third receiving the strength to grow into the powerhouse she has to be, for she too, may one day be tempted by the savage wild of the forest green, and the muttering so of a quasi-magical felled oak.
She turns back once more and the opening dressed in lavender has come upon her, or had she been walking backwards in disbelief the whole time? She had seen all she had to see, and without much effort of that temptation, broke free of the grips of the warrior enchantress of the forest, empowered by the natural order of bone and bite, and she flung herself towards the golden rays of sunshine.
"NO! Never will I be the matron of myth! I'll never march through mires, or ride the backs of hefty stags, but I will mother, and raise a child, and suffer a great loss. I'll be a woman in the world of oppression, and dissertation of the strength of the female gender, but I will, never, ever be a tale, I will not be some folklore and daydream for men to ponder! I will etch a true path in this life, and I will grasp it by the reigns, and charge head-first, and I will make my mother proud!"
With a lift and drag of here shoe's soles, she narrowly fell into the golden rays, and was but just on the outskirts of the forest. She saw her mother still unpacking, her father sitting on the porch, emptying a cooler to start dinner, smoking off his pipe.
Jillian ran towards them with open arms, and tear-filled eyes. Her mother, dropped the suitcase she was carrying, and ran to her little girl. The bees floated about with not one change in the magnetism of the circumstances. They embraced and the gentle palm on the back of her head had comforted Jillian, as the story spewed forth like a barrage of vocabulary.
For years afr, she would encounter the story of the felled oak, and how it tempted her to become a powerful warrior, to lead the battle against some vicious evil, but it wasn't her destiny. Perhaps the world would be destroyed because of her actions, perhaps she would never know. All she kne was she begged her father to quit smoking, but to no extent, he had died fashionably early of a contemptuous cancer that was so quickly spread, it was almost sentient in its barbaric strategy.
Jillian cried as hard as she and the day she witnessed the death, and was reminded again about the oak, she could still hear the raspy hallow voice cackling at her now, but she had chosen right, and she had felt the pain, and later the joy of motherhood, even if the father never stuck around, as few ever do. She smiled at her daughter, Millie, a beatiful girl with brazen skin as dark and beautiful as the sun-kissed calypso dancers of the Virgin Islands.
She lived a long, futilely life, and never regretted that day, though it seemed to continuously define her dreams, still hauntingly envisioning the face of the oak, a stump ripped up and split down by s lighting strike from the Gods themselves. Even up until her ninetieth birthday, she would still see that face, even when most other memories have passed on to a darkened forest made of old age and settling fog. Settling down on her cerebrum, such as it did all those years ago on the agonized tree. She never did forget the tree, even on her deathbed, her last words were systematic in nature, as she spit out "Felled Oak", and passed into the morning sunshine. Worlds away, a tree toppled over in the depths of a forest, but no man, nor beast were there to hear it make a sound....but if they were, they'd have heard the faint, impossible whisper of the sailing tree say: "Jillian".
Thank you so much for the long wait. I am officially going to be doing short stories monthly again, and thank you for giving me the time that I needed. I suppose I'll always still be dealing with the passing of my mother for a long time, but she'd want me to keep on writing, and I'd like to say that you may start seeing less issues with misspelling and autocorrect disasters, as I'll be getting new prescription lenses fairly soon. Who knew I was as blind as a bat? Anyhow, thank you again. Since its June, by the end of this month I will have my E3 information up and out as soon as possible. I also am planning on getting Internet, so as I promised to be posting on a nearly daily basis once I get reliable internet, you will likely see quite a bit more from the Malacast Editoiral. I also will be continuing to post until I reach the 666 post limits I set for myself over the next few years.
The next posts will be fairly soon, likely sometime next week, but we will have to see how well everything bodes between now and then. Thank you for the support, and yes, Story of the Month is officially back, and I will have one done for July. Have a great month!
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