Working 1
“I’ll be back on Thursday,” Nadina said.
“Why can’t I come?” Freeway asked, again.
“You like time alone, don’t you?” Nadina explained. “When you go in your trees and no one sees hide nor hair of you for days. I don’t ask to come then, do I?”
Freeway remained silent.
“Well. Grown up people need time alone, too.”
“You’ve packed a lot of stuff,” Freeway pouted.
Friday morning arrived. Freeway felt dread buzzing around the outer edges of her thoughts. She batted it away. Not metaphorically. Physically, waving her hand backwards and forward beside her ear like a loon.
“It’s okay to be later,” she’d said out loud. The house was silent. Unconvinced.
The 40-year sleep
“Death gives way to life,” Gerald observed, in a somewhat macabre tone.
“What do you mean?” William asked.
“It’s growing out of the body,” Gerald pointed.
William studied the dark hollow where rock met trunk. A wave of squeamishness rippled through his body, thinking of a person becoming a tree. At the time, William had whipped out his Question Book and wrote:
Who buried the man who became a tree?
Assuming it was a man, of course.
Working 2
“If you don’t tell me, this pay will be your last,” Klaxon hissed. A vicious threat, and one he felt ashamed to make, but necessity necessitates.
Two and Three receded, seething towers of rage and humiliation. Powerful yet powerless. A saying of Bollo’s flashed into Klaxon’s mind – “The biggest man is money.” It still proved true.
One sighed. “As far as predators go, the red bears are the most compassionate,” he said. “They offer three warnings…what we just heard was the third.”
Klaxon frowned. “You think they’re real?”
Something heavy and red dropped out of a tree, a few degrees to his left. Turning his chin, Klaxon cut the air with his blade, hearing the wheesh of metal slicing empty space. He spun around, completing the circle, only to find more unoccupied air. No sign of the squad. Seventy people had been right behind him, not half a minute ago – now, only the trees remained.
“One!” he called. The tremolo in his voice was involuntary.
Unknown
I realize there’s a tiny boy standing there, looking at me.
“Hello,” he says. His little voice sounds like a chime. I’m so startled I jump slightly. But I say nothing.
“It’s very rude to not say hello back,” he continues.
“Can you…see me?” I ask.
“Of course,” he says. The first person to see me in hundreds, hundreds of years.
“How do I look?” I ask.
“Scared,” he observes.
“No, I mean…what am I wearing?” His little face scrunches up as he studies me.
“It’s an outfit of some sort.”
“Go on,” I prompt.
“It’s a long dress with an apron and a flopsy hat.”
Oh, God, I sigh, inwardly. I’m still in the bloody maid’s uniform.
“It’s quite ridiculous,” the little boy remarks innocently. “I should change if I were you.”
All photography and writing by Emma Cale.