A Sunday Stroll

She always preferred to gather flowers early. In the beauty of dawn, there was a chill to the air that clung to her skin and raised the hairs on her arms and legs. Dew on the tall stalks of grass dampened her shoes as she stepped carefully along an overgrown path through the large meadow near her home. You couldn't see the path through the grass, but she knew it was there. In the distance was a wall of trees, maple in the prime of summer, their leaves dancing and stretching for the brightening sky above. The shadows beneath, between thick trunks that she suspected were many hundreds of years older than herself, called to her, inviting her into the coolness. She could smell the moss that made a patchwork quilt on the earth. The meadow hummed with grasshoppers that made death-defying leaps from branch to branch, careless if they reached their destination, and larks dipped toward her in the sky before pealing away with calls to their companions. They danced around her in a wide halo, straying to the trees but always returning. She would have thought it was deliberate, if such a thing were possible. If she let her eyes lose focus, it seemed she was part of the meadow, swaying in the breeze and soaking in the rising sun. She bent to cup a small flower in her hand. How had primrose managed to take over the whole area? Her hand travelled down the stem, with a mind to pluck some flowers and weave them into her hair. She could make a small crown, something to wear as she worked on her garden later.

She pulled her hand back with a sharp gasp as pain shot through her fingers. She looked down to see three beads of blood surfacing, perfect circles leaking through her broken skin, before dripping onto the flower she had been about to pick.

"Of course, primrose have thorns", she thought, shaking her head, then stopped.

The admonishment had come unbidden to her mind, but she’d spent her entire life around flowers. Primrose was the most innocuous. She bent to examine the stem of the plant and saw small thorns, glinting with moisture, some stained a rusty hue. It was strange, but flowers could be hybridized with other species; perhaps this happened here, and it had made this sinister crossbreed. She reached for her dress pocket to grab her sturdy work gloves, but they weren't there. How forgetful of her. Maybe she left them at the edge of the forest? She turned to look where she had entered the grove and noticed it seemed much further away than what she had walked. At least twice as far as the meadow was wide. That didn't seem right. The early morning was playing tricks on her eyes. It must be, for the primroses around her, which every good gardener knew was supposed to be a delicate and soft flower, now seemed harsher, their thorns longer than before, longer than the flower itself, and twisted in unnatural angles. The path back was near impossible to see, a thin snake where the thorns seemed less daunting. Had she just walked through that? She took a step towards the thorns and decided against it. She would walk the rest of the way across the meadow and loop around in the forest where there was no undergrowth to retrieve her gloves.

The path forward shimmered, leaves dewy in the hot morning sun of what was sure to be a scorching day, damp to the touch, each petal the size of her hand.

"The size of my hand?" she thought, frowning, "that doesn't seem right..."

The cobblestone of the path shone, inlaid with silver foil, each square fitting as if grown, rather than built, in a straight road to her destination. With each step, she watched the path grow larger; what was two feet across for her first few steps was as large as a country road after a few minutes. The primroses were forced further to the side as the path expanded, until she had to strain her eyes to see the giant, human-sized petals of these great plants. She hadn't realized, upon first inspection, that the entire last quarter of the meadow was silver veined cobblestone, equal to any palace square. A light flashed above her as she reached the meadows edge - could she really call it a meadow at this point? she wondered – and as she looked up for its' source, her foot caught a root that tore from the ground and through a stone, and she fell, hard. She screamed as she did, barely catching herself with her hands before her head hit the pavement. "I could have really hurt myself," she thought with alarm, "and no one would know."

She rolled to her back and looked to the tree line, seeking the source of the light. Two enormous brown eyes were focused on her. A barn owl, but larger than she’d ever seen. Its substantial claws dug deep into the branches of the maple on which it rested, and its head twitched from side to side as it regarded her. She had heard stories of generations long dead who lived alongside great carnivorous birds: Terror Birds, she remembered. Owls were never counted among them, but as she stared at this great beast and it stared back, liquid ice filled her veins and she was overtaken by the urge to run, her instincts screaming that she was in grave danger. It called at her, a short, thundering hoot that echoed across the meadow and reverberated into her soul, and fell quiet, watching.

The meadow was now silent.

"Maybe it had always been silent," she thought, but knew that was wrong, too. The kind of wrong you can't put your finger on, but that twists your stomach. The grasshoppers, the larks, the rustling of leaves; gone. The absence of these sounds deafened her. The silence was oppressive, a force that squeezed her, tried to choke her, to steal the sound of her beating heart. She stood quickly and brushed her clothes off, breathing hard and stomping to break the quiet. Her injuries were worse than she'd originally thought from the fall. Both knees and elbows were bloodied, and her hands gleamed in the setting sun with shards of silver and that had come free from the stone. What's more, her dress was torn above the knee completely around, as though shredded with great force, and her legs dripped from countless tiny perforations, her legs embedded with thorns.

"When did I walk through thorns?" she wondered; "I specifically went this way to avoid them. Didn't I?" She hesitated, and slowly turned with horror to face the way she'd come. The clear-cut cobblestone plaza she'd travelled on was completely gone. In its place was a tall hedge of vines and thorns which towered far above her, each barb longer than her arm, each red-tipped, each seeming to lean toward her.

She realized something was terribly, terribly wrong, and swiveled to look at the owl, but she was alone in the meadow. The bird’s call, burrowed deep within her and plucking her heartstrings, was the only proof it had ever been there. It echoed the warning; a drum beat of horror.

Where am I?

She examined the hedge for a moment for any path through, any indication that she had just come this way, and found none. So rationally, she must not have come that way, and she clearly couldn't forge her way through.

"I should just move forward to the forest," she thought. She congratulated herself on her calm thinking in the face of this grim scenery. She wasn't quite sure how she got her injuries now but was hell-bent on getting out of the meadow and back home to clean up. Maybe have a nice cup of tea. Maybe it was all a dream, and she’d awaken with the gentle sunrise playing over her face.

She spun and took a determined step into the forest, and gasped as she felt a barb pierce her arm. The thorn wall had snuck around her where the forest had been moments before. She was surrounded. She stepped back involuntarily and screamed when this time a thorn tore through her leg with more force than she'd stepped with. The thorns stretched towards her from every direction, blocking out the sun, tips dripping with a deep red liquid. She knew instinctively that she did not want this liquid to touch her and knew just as well that she could not stop it.

The vines dove at her from every direction.

She fought, trying to push through the bramble as the vines wrapped around her, spear-like barbs puncturing into one leg, then an arm, then through her hip, her skin boiling where they dripped, her shrieks echoing as the thorns skewered her, raising her above the ground. She was a bloody marionette, held fast by living strings. Above her, a sliver of sky remained visible, calling to her amidst the snaky writhing of her prison. A deep blue sliver with a lazy cloud that drifted with the breeze was her last vision as a spike pierced through her chin and erupted through the back of her skull.

The screams stopped. The vines stopped. And after a time, a single call from a barn owl sounded, and the grasshoppers and larks began again.