Musemuggers
Title: Beneath the Baobab
Author: keppiehed
Word Count: 825
Prompt: what is lost
A/N: Written for musemuggers. Challenge #522, Option #1.
I buried your bones beneath the baobab tree. It wasn’t really a baobab, we both knew that, but you’d read a book once about one and after that had dreamed about their spreading branches that held up the sky. They won’t take in our climate, I’d said. They’ll die here. But you’d just smiled and cupped the seeds close to your cheek, as if you were breathing life into them. The next thing I’d known there was a patch of bare earth where you’d interred them with your hope.
The bit of green that twined upwards was not a native of that African soil, but I played along and you never minded the thorns of what turned out to be a rather recalcitrant acacia. We would walk by, in the honeyed dusk of summer and in the star-scattered desolation of winter, and I never blinked, not even when their sharp sting brought fresh blood rushing. I just steered you around that bend where the baobab sat sentinel while I removed yet another errant thorn from some new tender spot. We couldn’t be enemies-even I was not that whimsical-but I wouldn’t say I ever learned to enjoy the shape of its shadow. Only for your sake did I quell my axe and leave it to its own spreading peace in the back forty like some topiary toad.
Before those dark days, we would walk farther afield than the privacy our little plot afforded. The road would open before our feet and show us the shaved earth of autumn or the vast patchwork greens that the road ran through. We weren’t confined to our fenced-in view.
Those were the days of vivid dreams. With the caul of sleep still hanging over you, you sometimes spilled your visions before you came to clarity. Mostly they were morphine dreams with candy seams, licked clean of meaning or reason while you blinked awake to hear your own voice speaking. But sometimes you clung to the cobwebs and spun floss as if it was more than the usual dross. Once, in the light of unusual fervor, you told me that you had dreamt of a body buried deep under the soil, far down below the roots of a tree, and over time that tree sucked the shape of a man unto itself. It pulled the secret shadow of the skeleton into its branches and held aloft the calcified remains way up high, a banner snapping in every leaf.
No tree could drink a man’s blood through the taproot, I said. No tree would assume the guise of his long limbs. None would harbor our shape. I promised under the premise that it would never come to pass. Never would a course of action be necessary. I held you close and lulled you back to sleep. I didn’t dare count the vertebra that poked through your skin each day more sharply than the last. I watched your chest rise and fall until I knew you were safe in sleep again, and only then did I fall too. Only I didn’t dream of trees.
You wanted to fly high in the arms of the largest, you insisted. You never let that vision rise back into the ether. Even then you must have known your fate, but never one to spoil a good story, you didn’t let on. You let me think that we’d walk again down ribbon roads and see the stubble fields beyond our gate once more, but the seeds were already on their way to you in a packet that smelled of cardamom and clove, a delicate deception. You sneezed when you opened the envelope and the baobab was a possibility in your palm, held together with your dreams and my promise to see it done.
Enough time has elapsed to know that you will not come back to me, not in the early morning mists nor in the paths we used to tread. I search the sky for some sign of you, but there is only a wide open juncture of pain in the visage of the stars reflected back at me. What is lost is more than I can bear in this waking world, and I find myself watching that old thorn tree to see if it might be true. Has the bitter bark absorbed your skin? Are you in the essence of that husk? There is no sign, no sign, no sign save your name on the wind that is little more than my hope. It doesn’t stop me from searching for you.
The ever-present danger of thorns does not bar my passage. I spend more and more time under those spreading branches, close to where you rest. I shutter my eyes and remember your face and how you used to look when you slept. In my mind, you are still there with me. Behind the sheltering membrane, your dreams slumber on.
Author: keppiehed
Word Count: 825
Prompt: what is lost
A/N: Written for musemuggers. Challenge #522, Option #1.
I buried your bones beneath the baobab tree. It wasn’t really a baobab, we both knew that, but you’d read a book once about one and after that had dreamed about their spreading branches that held up the sky. They won’t take in our climate, I’d said. They’ll die here. But you’d just smiled and cupped the seeds close to your cheek, as if you were breathing life into them. The next thing I’d known there was a patch of bare earth where you’d interred them with your hope.
The bit of green that twined upwards was not a native of that African soil, but I played along and you never minded the thorns of what turned out to be a rather recalcitrant acacia. We would walk by, in the honeyed dusk of summer and in the star-scattered desolation of winter, and I never blinked, not even when their sharp sting brought fresh blood rushing. I just steered you around that bend where the baobab sat sentinel while I removed yet another errant thorn from some new tender spot. We couldn’t be enemies-even I was not that whimsical-but I wouldn’t say I ever learned to enjoy the shape of its shadow. Only for your sake did I quell my axe and leave it to its own spreading peace in the back forty like some topiary toad.
Before those dark days, we would walk farther afield than the privacy our little plot afforded. The road would open before our feet and show us the shaved earth of autumn or the vast patchwork greens that the road ran through. We weren’t confined to our fenced-in view.
Those were the days of vivid dreams. With the caul of sleep still hanging over you, you sometimes spilled your visions before you came to clarity. Mostly they were morphine dreams with candy seams, licked clean of meaning or reason while you blinked awake to hear your own voice speaking. But sometimes you clung to the cobwebs and spun floss as if it was more than the usual dross. Once, in the light of unusual fervor, you told me that you had dreamt of a body buried deep under the soil, far down below the roots of a tree, and over time that tree sucked the shape of a man unto itself. It pulled the secret shadow of the skeleton into its branches and held aloft the calcified remains way up high, a banner snapping in every leaf.
No tree could drink a man’s blood through the taproot, I said. No tree would assume the guise of his long limbs. None would harbor our shape. I promised under the premise that it would never come to pass. Never would a course of action be necessary. I held you close and lulled you back to sleep. I didn’t dare count the vertebra that poked through your skin each day more sharply than the last. I watched your chest rise and fall until I knew you were safe in sleep again, and only then did I fall too. Only I didn’t dream of trees.
You wanted to fly high in the arms of the largest, you insisted. You never let that vision rise back into the ether. Even then you must have known your fate, but never one to spoil a good story, you didn’t let on. You let me think that we’d walk again down ribbon roads and see the stubble fields beyond our gate once more, but the seeds were already on their way to you in a packet that smelled of cardamom and clove, a delicate deception. You sneezed when you opened the envelope and the baobab was a possibility in your palm, held together with your dreams and my promise to see it done.
Enough time has elapsed to know that you will not come back to me, not in the early morning mists nor in the paths we used to tread. I search the sky for some sign of you, but there is only a wide open juncture of pain in the visage of the stars reflected back at me. What is lost is more than I can bear in this waking world, and I find myself watching that old thorn tree to see if it might be true. Has the bitter bark absorbed your skin? Are you in the essence of that husk? There is no sign, no sign, no sign save your name on the wind that is little more than my hope. It doesn’t stop me from searching for you.
The ever-present danger of thorns does not bar my passage. I spend more and more time under those spreading branches, close to where you rest. I shutter my eyes and remember your face and how you used to look when you slept. In my mind, you are still there with me. Behind the sheltering membrane, your dreams slumber on.