Fruit Tree

Fruit Tree

By Corey W Harland

A single, metallic click—mimicking the sharp strike of flint on steel—tears through the silence like a razor blade slicing through heavy velvet.

The sound that follows doesn't just hit the ears; it vibrates directly against the teeth, carrying with it the sudden, bitter taste of burnt copper and dry sulfur that coats the back of the throat.

"I don't recall this being a fruit bearing tree," he thought momentarily.

Instantly, the air turns heavy. The area around him fills with the stale, suffocating smell of ozone mixed with the sharp, vinegar tang of cold sweat breaking across the skin. Then comes the light. Not a soft glow, but a sudden, violent spark that punches through the dark, branding a neon-white streak across the back of the retinas.

Consciousness slips sideways. For a fraction of a second, the dark night dissolves into a warm, blinding void where his own breathing sounds like distant waves crashing against a shore of broken glass. The pain follows the fade, an anchor dragging him backward by his raw nerve endings. It is a dull, rhythmic ache at first, throbbing behind his temples before spiking into a brilliant, agonizing heat that maps the precise geometry of his skull. The agony possesses a texture—rough, jagged, and entirely unyielding.

Inside the chest, a rising panic starts to rattle. It isn't an emotion anymore; it’s a physical, living weight. It mimics the deep, erratic thump of a bass speaker, thudding so hard against the ribs that the vision blurs rhythmically with every heartbeat. The air in the lungs turns to liquid glass—cold, sharp, and impossible to swallow.

A single drop of warm, condensed human excrement rolls down the side of his face. One millimeter closer to the edge of his lip, and the boundaries between the senses completely dissolve and the brain misfires entirely.

The mind drifts under again, plunging into an ink-black silence where the passage of time warps out of recognition. Moments stretch into hours, then snap back violently as his physical body flinches against the hard packed dirt. The pain acts as the only remaining compass, a searing current flowing through his spine, reminding him that he is still anchored to the flesh. He is awake, then he is nowhere, then he is back, caught in a sickening loop of biological static.

The sound of the splash like a ripple of gray static fuzzes the mind. The freezing touch of the damp air tastes like ancient, bitter salt. The choking smell of the old, mud walls feels like a rough, phantom hand scraping down the raw marrow of his spine. Everything expands. Every nerve ending is raw, screaming, and firing all at once. The universe narrows down to the terrifying, beautiful frequency of pure, unfiltered survival.

He didn't move for a moment. He just swallowed, tasting the dust particles as they settled, listening to the color of the dark, and waiting in sizzling silence.

The darkness begins to hum, a high-pitched ring that tastes like zinc on the tip of the tongue. The smell of the dirt morphs into the heavy aroma of overripe orchard floor, a deceptive sweetness masking the rot underneath. He slips once more, his perspective lifting away from his chest, viewing the crumpled outline of his own frame through a veil of smoke and shadow. Pain pulls him back down, a jagged blade twisting inside his ear canal, demanding total focus.

The countdown continues in the silence, hidden in the spaces between his shallow, ragged breaths. He exists only in the friction between the cold earth and the burning heat behind his eyes, a ghost waiting for the sky to fall. The world spins, tilting on an invisible axis as the cold earth presses back against his cheek. He listens closely, expecting a secondary blast, before trying to move and regroup.