Pat Watson

When I wake up in the morning, The forest looks wet with fresh rain. The rock faces across from me have the sheen of moisture draped across them. Where I sit is dry but my back and shoulders are really sore. The fire still burns, just like last night. It’s not sunny. Dark, broken clouds move quickly overhead. I put my hands down to stand up and notice something very odd. Next to me is a roughly shaped plate of sanded wood. On it are what appear to be fruits and nuts but nothing I recognize. Each of them has a small bite out of it, perhaps as a hint that it’s not toxic. Caught between anxiety, acceptance and disbelief, I wonder all sorts of things. At this point, I’m desperately hungry and I take a hesitant bite of what might be a fig. It doesn’t quite taste like what I expect but it seems sweet and agreeable. Though I’m tempted to swallow the whole offering in one gulp, I wait between bites. I wait a while. I eat slowly, studying each piece carefully and, if it doesn’t kill me, maybe I’ll find more in the forest below.

I take maybe two hours to eat it all and none of it seems disagreeable. When finished, I look around carefully, looking for any trace of who might have brought this plate and its generous offering. I venture up to the cave where the stranger came from the day before. Nothing there. No blanket. No trace. I think I hear the call of a bird in the distance. I begin the descent down the rocks to the forest floor.

I make my way down the slope cautiously, knowing that a broken leg is certain doom, climbing down a fair distance from where I started, the day before. Opening up before me is a  hint of a  trail through the brush, into the forest. It’s not well defined but there does seem to be an irregular gap in the bushes that might have enough space for me to walk it. Everywhere, it seems, there are branches, brambles and thorns so thick that make wading through the waist high bushes a very unpleasant idea. The invitation of a less hazardous path looks inviting. It’s not totally benign and I collect a few cuts and scrapes along the way.

Eventually the path, such as it is, reaches the forest and the canopy of tall trees and fallen leaves suppresses the bushes and shrubs and making walking quite easy. It almost seems like a trail. I still don’t see any footprints but I suspect the presence of mysterious residents like up the slope the day before. Eventually, I reach the shoreline of the lake and looking clockwise along the shore, I recognize where I’d been the day before. I kneel down, splash water on my face, then cup my hands and drink down as much water as my thirst demands.

I sit on the shore, staring across the water and wonder what to do next. This place is fascinating but unreal. As fascinating as it is, I do want to find a way out, a way home but I have no idea how to make that happen. The options seem very limited. I take off my shoes, roll up my pant legs and wiggle my toes in the water. Looking down, I notice that striding through the brush has scratched my skin in a number of places. The scratches don’t look significant but they do itch quite a bit. After a bit, the scratches start to burn. Looking carefully, I see some swelling and discoloration. I try to rinse the cuts and scratches with lake water and mildly rub them to get relief. Within the hour, the discoloration has gone from pink to red to blue and purple. I get up to wade deeper into the water, trying to cool them. Before I can take a stride, dizziness overcomes me and I hastily sit back down. Seeming vertigo, grogginess and thick headedness cloud my vision. Waves of colors make clear seeing impossible. I close my eyes to hopefully wait it out, whatever “it” might be.

I fight to know whether I’m dreaming, hallucinating or lost in some kind of visionary state. I know I’m lost in another realm. Real but not true. I know it’s related to the scratches on my legs. I reach down to feel the cuts and swelling. They’re there but they don’t itch or hurt. They feel like scars from wounds engendered years ago.

I look up and I’m not by the lake but deep in the forest, a part completely unknown, a cave of forest growth, here in the deepest part of the forest, draped in shadow. There’s a clear pathway ahead.  As before, some of the trees are strangely shaped, with serpentine branches that almost glow and distorted faces woven into their trunks. The pathway ahead rises through a series of steps, a clear indication of someone’s work. I hear hear whispering voices in the undergrowth around me.

Maybe the steps lead to somewhere and someone who’d be willing to help me with this riddle of a place, a place layered in seeming contradictions. Afraid of anymore brambles or thorns that might poison me, I look down to measure my steps in the deep shadows. I hear rustling off to the side of me. I don’t look in that direction, feeling loopy and disconnected, fearing I’ll fall over if I don’t concentrate on my steps.

When I look up, there’s someone standing in front of me, a face in the shadows and he speaks.

“You know, of course, that you can’t be here and you certainly can’t go up there..”

“You know, of course, that you can’t be here and you certainly can’t go up there.” He nods his head in the direction of the trail.

If yesterday’s encounter was weird, and it was, this one is even weirder. At a loss for words, I stare for a while before speaking to the sudden stranger and I try to make sense of him, stranger than the strangeness that pervades this place. His slightly disfigured face is covered with tattoos that resemble a chaotic roadmap in miniature. His narrowed eyes and slight sneer convey a certain aloofness and disdain.

“Well,” I speak slowly, trying to watch and learn while I chose my words carefully, “it would appear that I am here, even though you say I can’t be.”

“That’s why I’m here, to stop you from going where you really don’t want to go,” he continues. I hear this and I start thinking that being here and going up the pathway is definitely what I want to do. He goes on and on with an insistence about all the sundry reasons why going onward is a mistake but what’s really stunning about this is that, as he prattles on, his voice becomes a droning hum and small versions of his head rise from his body and whisper, rather loudly, contradictory messages. As they rise from the body, they whisper their message and then pop into shreds, like a balloon, then going silent and fading away, while another head bubble emerges to speak. Continued…