A Day in a Mind

I love it, when the trees grow tall and dark around me, and my vision shrinks to that of a child. The path is long and twisted like a pale snake, and there are clouds like a dream in the sky. But I have not seen the world in that likeness for too long an age.

See what I shall show you, hear what I’ve to tell.

…

Here is the lonely maid, who carries two pails of grain down the road. She is tired and her eyes are purple, and her gait weary. The cold is lessoned, but still it bites through her cloak, which is far from substantial.

Lights beckon from the forest, eyes. There is a noise from underground, like the steps of a person across a stone floor. She turns a shoulder to them and carries on.

The maiden thinks of a high, white tower she visited once. It was no more stone and metal that it was light and air. Doves perched blissfully under the roofing, and echoes sounded whenever a person made a step, or clicked their teeth, and this makes one feel very grand and lofty. It is a beautiful thought.

She stumbled over the ruts in the road. The road is old, and in bad shape. The government neglects such remote village roads. They are scattered and in a murky region of the world, where howls unnerve the edgy roads-worker.

There then seems to be a whisper, and yet a strong, clear voice, that reaches her ears. She sets down her pails of grain upon the hard dirt road, and her shadow is cast long and wilted in a gloomy caricature of her likeness. The trees above are arms that stretch motionless together, hoping, maybe, to sunder the world from the airs above, to choke it.

Those old eyes she’s always seen around these lands return, and they are smiling eyes for the moment. A lover’s eyes, perhaps. A sister’s eyes, a friend’s.

And not so far away, the sea smashes down upon itself, and the sound is far too near, coming straight from the lithe trees. She is transported to the beach, where the airs from the rest of the foreign world dash upon this sheltered, dark hole of a village.

The maiden reaches her door. It is down in a gulch, hidden from the otherwise omniscient moon of the night. The moon that’s always there, it sees that entire forest village, save the lonely maid’s house, for she found that gulch out especially a long time ago.

The door is locked fast, and well, and she grasps a cold key in her hand and turns the lock, and open drifts the door.

The smells of the ashes beneath the hearth fill her senses. Still a silver tendril of smoke rises from the embers.

All is where she left it that morning, when the sun had not yet sliced the bleak pale sky, and all was cold.

But the eyes of the gloom do not shy away from the human dwellings here; this one especially, it is just as feral as any crooked grove about it.

The dream in the tossing, tumultuous sky has descended. The maiden feels it—o, she sees it!

“Where, my dream? Where are you, so lost among the woven gloom and these trees—“ she motions with both her open hands to the willows that hang their limp fingers just outside her window. “These trees that watch?”

But the trees beyond her open window are still and brooding, and do not answer her.

It is like a dream, the sky between the closing trees. It pours through a barrier of swaying people and onto the heads of maidens in dark woods.

She walks to the table. There sits a wooden bowl, full of cream. She remembers when she left her house in the morning; the cream was cold and runny, fresh. She dips a finger into it—it is clotted and warm now, and sweet.

But the door was locked fast and well.

She glances to the trees. They are still and seem to smirk without mouths.

And the eyes. Eyes of the wood, they are there as well, but more hidden now.

The maiden takes to her bed; it is a warm bed, the only thing comfortably warm besides her hearth. It is woolen lined and soft as a gentle sea.

She dreams of the sea, she dreams a valley, and a purple twilit city below white sculpted mountains that are as smooth as marble. The city’s silver lights blink and wink like stars, an eternity’s travel away, so gentle and soft. A small host of people leaves the city and marched away into the endless dusk, silently as thought.

The sea is calm after a storm. There floats a lonely dream-raft of pale wood, and upon it a man sleeps blissfully. Whatever strife was put upon his heart during the storm, it is gone now, and the maiden feels the fatigue of panic drain from him, and all there is steeped in tranquility. The surf murmurs, and far in the east, the first tint of dawn stains the sky.

She stirs. Something had moved, something has fallen. Her dreams are disrupted, and things from her daily life fade into her visions. Cream, a bowl. Vines that grow along the path, around the trees. The trees.

Suddenly, there sprouts a tiny seedling tree from the wood of the sleeping man’s raft. He sighs and turns his head upon his burlap pillow, and so does the maiden in her downy bed tucked within the dark wood.

Something cries. Something shuffles. It is enough to bring her to the edge of fright, the edge of child-like weeping.

But there comes peaceful condolence, from the glint of something, the sheen of something. It is a smiling light, and it brings the maiden to smile in her slumber as well.

Eyes, beautiful eyes, peering from beneath a rise in the road, from the under brush, at the edges of roots and through the long grass; they smile at her, and it is not a cruel smile as she half-feared.

And the steps she heard beneath the ground arise to a tumbling thunder. It is the folk within the wood that smile and the folk beneath it that walk, many sets of smiling, gleaming eyes, and many pairs of hasting feet.

And all become silent and grey, and swathed in the first veil of pale light that filters through the trees that stretch together, and the maiden drinks the first dews of waking, and there sits at her table, the being of the wood, and his eyes do gleam, and his feet are not still at all.

Something catches in his eyes, the eyes. The air around the maiden is drawn eternally inwards, and she is caught in an everlasting smile.