SCENERY

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PREFACE: Class assignment. This is the one that taught me to be very careful with explicitly saying what a story's really about, lol.

the sky is blue. the grass is green. the clouds are white. like the many trees here, a sign post before me is brown. there are words on the sign. i can't read them. there are butterflies--flying. there are other bugs, too. the grass is soft. the ground is also soft. the dirt feels crumbly--and soft. suddenly, there is a prick that is felt among all this nature. and now the nature of nature is no longer the same. now the tingly chill of the afternoon's winds are felt as they bounce between bark and wood, ruffling up the green feathers of the earth and the hairs from my head. now the sway of the canopy of leaves overhead cannot escape notice, its beams of soft light trickling down to the welcoming earth with such immeasurable grace. the ground itself teems with an abundance of life, both encompassing creatures of few and many legs as well as those that feel content to merely sprout up from dirt. inviting all who may listen, a cacophony of yellow splotched bees glide across the meadow, themselves complemented by the shuffling of the cicadas, by the stirring of the hares, by the shambling of mine own feet. a river bubbles and sloshes not farther than thirteen clops away, as the nickering of wild horses might well suggest. but the blues do not stay blue, and the greens do not stay green--their colors and more begin to merge into a collective of reds and yellows and magentas and lavenders and indigos and salmons, leaving this world balanced carefully between sanity and fiction. indeed, the creatures that inhabit this grove begin to shudder and vibrate, growing into fantastic, yet disturbing images. once daintful and welcoming, light whips out like a squid's appendages from overhead and lashes out at the ambience, shredding the peaceful world enclosed within these trees. the colors of the forest and the sky and the grass and the earth then distort into a miasma of unpleasant dark swatches, and soon, tranquility has evaporated. the sky is grey. the grass is grey. the clouds are grey.