Transformation
Alyssa was walking through the woods. Even though she had come down this path before, she noticed a basswood tree with low branches for the first time. It seemed to offer itself to her, and she couldn’t resist. Swinging her arms and legs around the lowest branch she pulled herself up. Slowly she made her way into the tree until she reached a branch at least twenty feet from the ground. There she rested and looked around. The path was now far below and she felt herself embraced by leaves. A whispering sound reached her ear.
“Alyssa, Alyssa.” How did the tree know her name, she wondered.
“Come stay with me,” he continued. “I know you better than you know yourself. Let go of the world. I will catch you in a bed of soft moss that I have prepared for you between my roots.”
The leaves were rustling in the breeze, and a blue jay was calling nearby. Alyssa felt the rough bark of the tree underneath her fingertips. It seemed easy to loosen her grip on its trunk, slide off the branch, and let herself fall into the soft leaves.
When another hiker came across her lifeless body beneath the tree, he found her hands clutching small branches with leaves, as if they were sprouting from her arms.
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About Me
- Bob
- I write short stories and essays. I have published well over one hundred stories, essays, and flash fictions or nonfictions in magazines or anthologies, as well as a novel, Jack's Universe, three collections of stories, Private Acts, Killers & Others, and Not a Jot or a Tittle, and two chapbooks of flash fiction, Shutterbug and Dragon Box. I grew up in a military family, so I'm not from anywhere in particular except probably Akron, where I've lived for forty years. Before I came here, I never lived anywhere longer than three years.
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