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Into the Undergrowth

Sly, playful and a little jealous – the undergrowth twirled and twisted – edged, unfurled, grew, reached – toward them

By Beth SarahPublished 3 years ago 4 min read
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Between them had been established an understanding – instinctive and unspoken – shared perceptions and nuances of consciousness so aligned that it could have been seen to be very peculiar indeed. Thus they came again to be – inevitably – as though they themselves had grown up from the ground – within the secret world of the branches of the willow tree at the end of the common.

It was a magnificent tree. In the right sunlight, the shadows creeping through the leaves –endless leaves – falling down the multitudinous branches (for there were ample to conceal their presence entirely) like the trickle of a stream, seemed to glint with flecks of gold. When the sun was at its highest, it became a cavern lit with the dim hue of green summer-light. The trunk bore a thousand wrinkles like the face of a wise, ancient sage.

It was sheltered and secret and fresh and alive and this – this – is where they would choose to meet. To kiss and to conspire.

These meetings, which took place with increasing regularity, are a difficult thing to describe. Two people met in the shadowy secret world of the willow – yes, yes – of course that’s what happened – but it doesn’t explain what happened at all.

They spoke, of course, about many different things. No doubt about that.

They kissed. Yes – they did kiss – they did, they kissed and kissed in fact. But kissing and talking and meeting – all these words reveal is the futility of semantics, when – when…

Something holy was happening between them. Holy? – Perhaps. Certainly important. Certainly powerful. What they failed to observe – or should I say, to see? - they indeed felt it – was the endorsement of this from the world surrounding them. Under that tree, at the end of the common.

The willow itself, of course, was paramount in their protection and concealment and it carried out the job very prudently indeed. Disturbances and distractions would not do at all and would not be tolerated. This, the lovers, recognised clearly and for it they felt profusely grateful.

What they did not see quite so clearly, however, was the infringement of the undergrowth. Sly, playful and a little jealous – the undergrowth twirled and twisted – edged, unfurled, grew, reached – toward them – very slowly and over the course of several weeks. Darker greens – real greens – a tangle of the unapologetic greens – the cocky, vital greens – they had stretched and twisted their way at last to the edge of the willow.

The lovers were there, entwined themselves in much a similar contortion – fusing and merging – irreparably entangled. When they felt the undergrowth slowly furling around them – their legs; their wrists, arms up and up and down – growing and winding above and beside and everywhere – they did not resist or even fear it. In fact, they seemed to know – the inevitability of it twisting and ravelling around them.

On this went – this growing and twisting and stretching until, if you had peeked, just slightly, between the branches of that tree, you would not have found the lovers there.

No-one missed the lovers after they had gone. They slipped away unnoticed into the ground, as though they had never been anywhere else at all.

Over the course of generations, however, their story was told between the people of the village in hushed whispers; a myth – a local legend – the details of which had been appropriately tangled like the wild bracken of the undergrowth itself. All of the fractured fragments of detail I have about this strange case I have relayed to you here, and looking at it now, it does not seem like much. But people were taken by the story in the same way the lovers had been taken. The willow tree stands there still; and the undergrowth rises and falls beneath it with the seasons.

Absorbed into a world that they had known would take them. The lovers. Floating, like in water. But it was not water. Green and twisted in the undergrowth. But it was not the undergrowth. This was the timeless place in which, they had always understood, they were and were not; they would be and would not be.

Short Story
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About the Creator

Beth Sarah

We've been scribbled in the margins of a story that is patently absurd

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