Short stories

Paradox

I did not know where we were going. None of us did. We just carried our bodies through the soaked lives of the dead forest. The ground was soft with mud, held together by only its suffocated skeleton of withering roots criss-crossing across themselves like a pale cobweb beneath us.

Grey and brown leaves fainted hopelessly down on our shoulders, leaving the crumbling trees naked as a stiff winter. Skinny branches reached out towards the visitors as we passed, and stroked us gently with a dreading linger, filled with despair and anxiety, shying away from the cold future ahead.

"Wait," the girl said silently, almost whispering. We stopped and looked at her. Waiting. She did not look up to face us. Her eyes had frozen and were incapable of resting their stare at anything but the devouring ground beneath her. "I don't think we should continue".

Murmur. Scattered and confused. We looked at the girl again.

"What do you mean?" the oldest one asked her.

"I don't think we should continue," she repeated. "I think we've gone far enough."

"Hey," the boy started in a tone apparently supposed to sound comforting. "Don't worry, we're nearly there!"

The girl's eyes shot up and penetrated the boy's previously confident stare.

"You said that last week as well," she argued stubbornly. "And the week before that. And the one before that again!" The elder reached out to calm her down, but she flung her arms into the air, jumping three steps backwards.

"Stop it!" she yelled, looking terrified at us. Her friends. Her family. We frowned at her. The girl. The young girl. Our youngest.

"Don't you see?" she exclaimed, opening her palms towards the surroundings. Our grey, dying surroundings. We moved our eyes round and round in their hollow sockets, but no matter how much we saw, we could not understand. What were we supposed to see?

The girl's arms fell lifelessly down from the air and hit her clammy jacket with a soft swoosh. I flinched. She shook her little head, and we could see her transforming gaze collect raindrops from nowhere. Long, dark braids clinked around her waist. We took two steps forwards, in the backward direction, towards our three-steps-behind girl, but she did not take our begging, thin arms. She continued shaking her little head, her drowning eyes gaining colour.

"What is it that we can't see?" I asked, for I was confused. "What is it?" And then the girl's face smiled, but she did not. We frowned once more and shook our confused heads.

"It's not real," she said. Louder, this time. "None of it." We did not react. "LOOK!" I flinched again, she raised her again while she shouted, and the jacket followed, swoosh!

"I don't think we should continue," she said silently and lowered her arms. Her voice was so quiet, as if she beckoned us to listen more carefully. To truly understand. But we didn't.

"What's going on?" the oldest one shouted from the front. We turned around to the soaked, grey and dying environment. "We need to keep going!" And so, we carried on.

I did not know where we were going. None of us did. But was that not a bit strange? Grasped by a sense I could not ignore, I stopped, mesmerized by the devouring mud below.

"Wait," said I silently, and everyone stopped to look at me. "I don't think we should continue."