Bottle O' Goodness

The woods sat bleak in the winter, the cedarwood camouflaging itself in the dreary, gray skies. The leaves, fresh from autumn, crunched dryly under the feet of a lumberjack, making his scheduled trek through the forested area behind his quaint hut that he lived in with his family. 
As he walked, he noticed the near aquatic pattern of light poking through the desolate limbs of the woods, all intermingling above his head. They cast faded, jagged shadows on the leaves and branches that lie below the man’s feet. 
He whistled to himself as he continued to jauntily stomp against the leaves, forming his own homemade rhythm to override the quiet in the air. There wasn’t a bird that sang before he started, and none joined to accompany him with their own quiet renditions of nature’s hymn.
On his back, there was a large backpack. He always carried it with him on all of his trips out into the area.
There was his trusty pistol in the pocket, sat near his large splintered ax that hung slightly down past the bottom of the pack.
As he whistled, rain began to come. It sprinkled lightly on his face.
The rain was a disrespect to his schedule, no doubt, but he kept walking. He was too far out to turn around, to have his journey be all for nothing. No, he was looking for it. The most perfect tree there was, a supposedly beautiful tree that gave man his heart’s desires. He didn’t know what it specifically looked like, but he knew how to get to it and he knew he wanted a piece of it.
He continued onward until there was a split path in front of him, with a large wooden post dividing the two, and then he stopped. He ceased to whistle, he scarcely breathed. He waited, he looked around for a sign to direct him to his treasures, maybe a person to come out and meet him, but there was nobody there. The rain picked up, and it continued to pour down on him. His jacket was getting drenched.
Just then, the sound of a siren poked through the woods. It was light, and reverberated through the bowels of the forest. It almost sang. The man found it odd, how it formed a slight melody- it was the melody of a childhood song he used to sing with his father.
They would sit happily on the porch of his house and sing, but he had forgotten all of the lyrics.
A burst of shame shot through his mind. How could he forget such a pivotal moment of his childhood? He needed to nourish the memory longer, there must be something he could do to regain it. Then he remembered the tree. He could ask the tree for the eternal memories of his father, every second they spent together, so he could flash back on them all at any point and feel the joy of his innocence again.
His pace picked up as the showers quickly poured down on him. The patterns in the trees were less lucid in his mind than the trail ahead. As he ran through the passage, the melody increased in its stridency, but he didn’t care- he’d chosen the right one, he must’ve, and that was all that mattered to him. He hurried down the beatdown dirty byway, dodging any branches that might hit his face, watching for anything on the path that might trip him.
Roots began to extend from the soil, giving him increasingly rough terrain to run on, and the rain got more intense than ever. It felt sharp, like every drop was giving him nicks on his skin, but he kept running. He had to. It felt so far away, but he needed to hurry to it.
But there it was, at long last. He had finished his journey.
A clearing sat in front of him, easing his pain. His nerves calmed back down, the tension in his mind crept back to its corner. The treeline almost curled into a grandiose arch above him, like he was being welcomed to some sort of kingdom, like he was walking into a luxurious palace fit for a king. 
He walked through the archlike shape and the leaves quickly vanished, no longer forming a thick, sticky carpet on the ground below him. It was still raining with vivid intensity, but it was much more bearable to him now that he knew his efforts were not in vain. 
In the clearing, it looked almost like a hot spring. It reminded him of Yellowstone almost, how it was littered with filled up, steaming holes in the ground. Yes, there was steam it seemed. It drifted up and faded into the clouds above. 
He walked up to one of the craters. The water inside was farther below the lip of the pit, but it sat and it bubbled and steamed, its surface lustrous. When the rain hit the surface, it sounded almost like it was being shocked like a pan. It hissed angrily at the intrusion of cold, like an angry housecat.
He turned away to face the center of the vast clearance. It was almost fully defoliated, save for one thing. The tree.
Quickly, he sprinted up to it. It was wrapped in a thick curtain of steam, so much so that he could barely even see the roots, the stump, or any of it - the only part visible to him was the thick gray branch that stuck out of the faux fog.
He peered through the ring, and it stung his face and neck with the heat. It was borderline unbearable. He felt like a baker trying to stick their head into an oven just to see what their labor led up to, but he knew bakers didn’t do that.
Bakers had sense.
The condensation built up on his beard, the hairs beginning to develop newer water droplets, and it was uncomfortable, but he didn’t mind. He was in absolute awe about what he was seeing. 
The tree sat idly in the center of a shimmering white pond. The color was thick, yet the stump of the tree was visible down to the very root - speaking of which, it wasn’t planted. It simply floated, as if it were hollow. Each of the roots formed disturbingly twisted and disarrayed patterns of cords, flowing freely through the water as the tree itself bobbed up and down. The movement was hypnotizing to him, the pure bewilderment he felt at that moment pulled him into a daze.
“Woah.”
He lifted his eyes further up and began to follow the majestically swirling gray bark up the tree, when he saw the first branch. The sight that greeted him was a carving of a man’s face, it was indescribably disgruntled and barely recognizable as such, but it was still legible enough in its form to be somewhat described. The eyes oozed an odd glowing cyan liquid, and the jaw was contorted into an agonized scream. A branch sat in the gaping jaws of the carving, forcing them open. 
He followed the branches up further, and on the ends of them all sat majestically carved crystalline objects. They glistened lightly in the rain, their color iridescent and reflective. 
His thought process was interrupted by a large splash in the liquid, and he looked back down at the almost pond-like pool in front of him, only to see a fruit fall down from the tree into the water. And to this, he almost dove in, sticking his arm deep enough in the waters to reach it. But when he touched the surface of the liquid, it stung his arm. It nipped at it aggressively, like he was being pricked by tiny thorns on a vine coiled tightly around his arm. Quickly, he wrapped his fingers around the fruit and pulled it out, falling over as he pulled himself away from the water quickly.
He winced, groaned, as he pulled his arm up to see small streams of blood flowing out from lacerations in his arm. They didn’t look like deep cuts, but they were deep enough to hurt, bleed, and fester - clearly.
But he got the fruit, that’s all that mattered at that moment to him. His family lost purpose to him in that moment, the world, money, it all left him for a moment as he glanced up at the berry sitting in the palm of his hand. It felt gentle, like it was looking back at him comfortingly.
It looked like a smaller apple, not even the size of the palm of his hand. 
The water on it dripped down onto the ground, becoming lost in the sea of rain marks.
“Take a bite.”
A voice suddenly cut through his focus, It sounded gruff, with a thick drawl of sorts that he just couldn’t place his finger on.
“Hm?”
He swirled around on the ground, sweeping up mud against the legs of his pants. He scanned the fence of trees surrounding him, looking for the origin of the voice, but there was nobody there.
“You know you want it."
It whispered.
He swiftly jammed the fruit in his pocket, crushing the skin of it and squeezing out a thick substance against his thigh, before pushing himself up from the muddy puddle that he sat, sprawled out in.
“I do. But how do you know?”
“I know your desires, your wants. Your nature. You’ve been wanting something, I always see it in people like you.”
The area went silent for a moment. The wind blew, and the rain poured down.
“What do I really want?”
“Memories. Feelings. You want to be alive again.”
“I am alive.”
“You say that, but you feel trapped. You made a life for yourself, thinking it a successful option, but your wife hates you. Your children hate you. You’re always gone.”
It stopped.
“You need me to help you.”
He pulled the fruit back out of his pocket slowly, gripping it even more tightly. A squint painted his face, unamused as he continued to scan the treeline.
“If I eat this, will you give me what I want?”
“No, you need a fresh one.”
A fog slowly emerged from the treeline, about knee height with the man. It slithered across the ground below and enveloped the puddles, the mud, the roots of the tree, everything low enough to the ground it consumed.
“Reach.”
He stuck his hand up and the misty air coiled around his arm, pushing a fruit into the palm of his hand.
“Now eat.”
He stared down into the fog at his feet, past the beautiful fruit sitting just in his hand. He looked down at the white void that swallowed the earth, the all consuming white, and at that moment, he saw himself. It was wrong, it was a perversion of what he wanted to be, a corruption  of who he was. But it was just a shadow, just a silhouette faintly cutting through the mist.
“Fast, before it disappears. You know what you want, take it.”
He turned and faced the entrance into the clearing. It looked darker and even bleaker than ever before with all of the fog presiding idly inside. 
“No.”
A tear rolled down from his face as he threw the fruit to the ground. Its splatter was heard yet unseen. 
“What?”
The fog began to slowly creep forward, finally making some of the ground visible. It clumped up in front of him and began to coil upward, like it was constructing itself.
“Chester, you don’t know what you want.”
A light illuminated the inside of the dense foggy lump, lighting it up like lightning would set the inside of a cloud aglow with every vicious strike.
In that moment, that was his perception.
Vicious. The cloud was vicious, the world was vicious.
He shrunk back from the smog in front of him in fear.
“I know what you really want.”
“What?”
He backed up further, reaching for his pistol. 
“I am what you really want.”
The gloom suddenly shifted from the bluish color into vibrant alternating hues, gold, green, cyan, purple, every color was present. It was entrancing, he felt the same way he felt when he set his eyes on the tree. No, this was a more intense feeling, a more intense emotion. It was so beautiful.
“Approach me.”
At the creature’s behest, he walked forward shakily, stepping onto the remains of the splattered fruit. It felt odd to him, like he was walking on rocks covered in slime, but he didn’t glance down at his feet for even a moment. He simply looked into the light sitting amidst the splashes of colored clouds.
The light moved towards him, falling out as an amalgamation of every fruit on the tree. When it exited the fog, it floated, colored a bitter purple in front of him. The fusion was disgusting in sight, like the faces of many all sewn together.
“Take a bite, one is all you need.”
He reached out and placed his hand under the fruit, and it dropped into his palm with a clammy wetness. Reluctantly, he raised it up to his face. It smelled bittersweet, like a more citric form of coffee, but it was ultimately indescribable. 
Appalling, yet beautiful smell aside, he took a large bite out of the side of the clump, exposing the dark pink flesh behind the harshly purple skin. 
As he chewed it, his mind felt overwhelmed - it was like nothing he had ever felt before. It was so odd, it almost distracted him from his wish- his hope for the memories of his long since passed father. It snuffed out his thoughts with its grainy, soft- mushy texture. It felt like he was eating a soaked piece of chalk from a schoolhouse, it was disgusting. But the taste was sublime - it tasted almost like a pastry. 
And at that, he finished his bite and gulped down the chunk of fruit. 
His nerves flared up again, his mind began to race, his vision shook and warped to images from his childhood, images of his current house, all horribly distorted. They were caricatures of what he wanted, hollow husks. His mind continued to scramble through dozens upon dozens of scenarios, when the fog parted. 
As the fog parted, he saw his father standing behind the curtain.
“Pa?”
He sniffled, his eyes watered and his heart swelled with bittersweet joy.	
“Dad, you don’t know how much I’ve missed you.”
“Come now.” His father told him.
“Be with your old man at last.”
.		.		.
“Chester, we’re home!” Claudia shouted. The rain beat down on the earth just outside of the overshadowed area on the porch that they stood on. 
No response.
“Chester?”
She pressed her ear against the front door, expecting to hear something, but there was mere silence accompanied by the creaking of the hardwood floor.
“Chester, I know you’re there.”
She rattled the doorknob and grunted.
“Open the door.”
Silence.
“Fine, we’ll do this the hard way.”
She picked up her dress and walked off of the porch into the rain.
“Mommy? Where are you going?”
“I’m gonna open the door sweetie, you just wait here.”
She began walking around the house, past the chicken coop and piles of wood, when she got to the window around the side.
It was open.
Confusion flooded her mind. Why would he leave the window open? Didn’t he hate rainy weather?
“Chester?”
She hoisted herself up to the windowsill, straining to climb into it. Eventually she managed to, sliding her way in. Splinters lodged themselves in her leg as she crossed the threshold into the house.
“Wow.”
The walls were covered in crude stick figure drawings. They depicted two characters doing normal everyday activities. Hiking a trail, eating dinner, talking. There were so many of them - so much so that they messily overlapped one another.
“Chester! Get out here now!”
No response aside from the downpour of rain and the acridly sounding floor. 
Claudia walked through the kitchen into the living room. The sofas were unmoved and the walls were untouched, nothing was changed in here as far as she knew.
She crept over to the door, and opened it. It squealed on its hinges as the children pushed it open impatiently.
“I’m cold.” Maria remarked, her teeth chattering.
“Me too.” Johnny replied.
“Where’s Daddy?” Maria asked.
“I don’t know honey.”
She turned around and walked through the living room back into the kitchen, littered with drawings. 
“You kids stay in there and keep yourselves warm, I’m gonna make soup.”
“Alright Mommy!”
The cupboards were still empty from when they had tried to reorganize their ingredients, so she grabbed the soup off of the counter and opened it up.
When she turned, she noticed something. The cupboard doors were cracked agape, ever so slightly. It was odd to her, considering there shouldn’t be anything in there to keep it propped open.
Her heart began to race, her mind began to pace, and she walked over to the cupboard and opened it. 
A body fell stiffly out of the compartment, knocking Claudia over and landing directly on top of her. His eyes were rolled far into his head and his mouth was full of a white froth, much like a rabid animal. His body shook subtly, yet it sat cold. 
Claudia couldn’t wrench a word out of her mouth, she couldn’t move - she just sat under her husband’s body and began to weep silently. 
“Chester.” She whimpered, her voice shaky and choked. “Oh, Chester.”
He didn’t respond in an endearing fashion, nor an animated one. His humorous demeanor was no more. She wrapped her arms around his sporadically twitching body and didn’t move, she only wept. She bit her lip, trying to keep from wailing from the sorrow. And as she sat in the solemn silence that forced itself upon her home, she pondered.
The house was no longer the same. There would be no more swing dances, no more witty jokes. Her kids would no longer go outside to play with their father, who loved them more than they could imagine. There would be no more father to give them piggyback rides, to count their jump rope records, to push them on the swing. There would be no more father.
The world ceased moving for her at that moment - her mind had broken from the shock, the sadness, the unparalleled intensity of emotion that flooded her very being. Her very body shook from the magnitude of her feelings, yet she did not get up, nor did she tell Maria and Johnny. She simply lay there with her husband’s corpse.
Chester was no more, and neither was she.
Category:Beings
Category:Nature
Category:Mental Illness
Category:Places