The woods had always been Willow's favorite place. She always felt calm there.
She had been taking a leisurely hike through the woods when she stopped to examine an oddly shaped tree that she hadn't noticed before. Its trunk appeared to be split in two, almost like two separate legs.
After getting a good enough look at the marvel of nature, Willow stepped away, but her boot snagged an exposed root and she fell. She had scraped her left knee. Having taken many hikes throughout her life, she knew it wasn't her first scrape and suspected it wouldn't be her last. She got up and brushed the dirt off her clothes before reaching into her backpack for a water bottle to clean the shallow wound. The cool water stung for a moment, but it washed the blood away and she continued on her journey home.
A few moments later, the injury started to itch. She reached down to touch it, and it felt like it had already started to scab. She kept walking until her knee buckled, almost as if it had lost its ability to function properly. She looked down at her leg, and the raised dark brown patch had expanded beyond the original injury. She touched the area once again. It didn't feel like any scab she could remember. There were definite ridges and channels in the rough surface... almost like tree bark.
In a matter of seconds, it spread down her leg into her boot and up her thighs underneath her shorts. Whatever was happening to her, she knew she needed medical attention quickly.
She broke into a run as best she could, but her left leg dragged behind. She dropped her backpack, shedding the only extra weight she had, hoping she could move faster.
Her left foot felt cramped inside her hiking boot, and then she heard the boot burst apart. Her toes had grown into tendrils, and they started burrowing into the ground. With her left leg firmly planted in the ground, she could no longer move forward.
Hoping she could pull her leg free, she tried to grasp it with both hands, but her left arm wouldn't cooperate. It behaved as if with a mind of its own and rose upward. She winced in pain as she could feel the limb elongating, and she watched in horror as leaves sprouted from her branch-like fingers.
She screamed for help, but she could feel the bark growing over her mouth. She cried, and while she felt tears trickle down her right cheek, there was a sticky liquid--tree sap, she assumed--oozing from her left eye as she lost vision from it.
The odd shape of that other tree finally made sense to her. What was happening to her had happened to at least one other person. Before long, she'd be a brand new tree in the woods, spending the rest of her life--whether she liked it or not--in her calming place.
Tags: transformation, plant transformation, inanimate transformation
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Story by Scidram |
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Artwork by Jieun |
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