Embrace Your Inner Ginger

Meanwhile, David was lost. He had been wandering in the forest for the past three hours, and, while approaching the situation with his usual flippancy, he was beginning to feel hungry.

“Hrnngh.”

He stopped. Close behind him, someone or something had just said ‘Hrnngh.’

“Hello?” He spun around, to see a scruffy-looking man vaguely lit by a dim torch pointing to his face. He had a beard, fingerless gloves, and was standing completely still. “Did you just cough?”

“No. I said ‘hrrngh.’”

“Oh.” The tramp stayed staring Dave in the face with his bug-like eyes for around twenty seconds. Dave found the situation rather awkward. He shrugged, flapping his arms at his side. “So, have you… got any food?”

The tramp stayed silent for a few seconds. David avoided eye contact.

“I have these mushrooms.”

“Oh.” He didn’t show any signs of movement. “Can I… have them?”

The tramp held out a large paper sweet-bag. David took it. “Thanks.”

“Hrrngh.” With that, the torch went out, and everything was dark again.

After a few moments, in which Dave’s eyes re-adjusted to the dark, he ascertained that somehow he had become rather quickly alone again. Slightly unnerved by this, he nevertheless sat down on a fallen tree to eat the mushrooms. They were dried, rather like thick mushroom-crisps, but they tasted good, so he waited until he had finished them to acknowledge the fact that a nearby tree appeared to be watching him.

“What are you looking at?”

“Nuthin’.” The tree had been leaning over towards him, and it now straightened itself back up again, closing its strange, milky eyes in pretence of being just a tree. Dave narrowed his eyes at it. In it’s embarrassment, the tree’s leaves blushed neon green.

“Whoah, that’s really cool…”, said Dave, more to the tree than himself, and it opened it’s eyes, now pink-edged and human, and grinned wide. All around him, the other trees in the forest woke up, their leaves bursting into life like fairy lights, turning the forest into a dancehall of twinkling technicolor. Even the log that Dave was sat on opened its eyes and smiled benignly up at him. Dave got to his feet, unnerved, but he was too enchanted by the beautiful colours to feel frightened.

“Whoah… teach me how to do that…”

“One does not simply learn how to twinkle!”, said the largest tree, the one that had woken up first. “One must be one of us…”

“One of us, one of us, one of us, one of us…” The other trees chanted, lights building in power with their excitement.

“Oh, okay. You’re all right, then.”

The trees looked puzzled. “…You don’t want to be one of us?”

“Nah, I’ll be fine.” Dave put his hands in his pockets and made to walk away from the head tree – he could see, far away, where the multicoloured lights stopped, and reasoned that must be the edge of the forest.

“But… you get to twinkle!” The head tree shook its spangled branches in demonstration. The others followed suit, murmuring agreement.

“No, really, it’s fine. I’d rather not be a tree.”

The trees made various affronted noises. One crossed its branches in front of it. The head tree narrowed its eyes. “Why ever would one not want to be a tree, eh?”

“Well… you’re, kind of… I dunno, a tree.” Dave did not mean it to sound so impolite – he meant it to come out like it was something he was finding difficult to explain – but the head tree took it rather the wrong way. Its lights turned immediately red, and the other trees followed suit, and in a wave lasting only a few seconds the entire forest was bathed in crimson. This made Dave’s eyes hurt, but he had bigger things to worry about. The forest had been forming a vague circle around him as he conversed with it, but now it was advancing on him, closing in.

“Don’t want to be a tree, eh?”

“N… no… I don’t… really…”

Fortunately, at that moment, a neon-coloured electric eel came darting through the trees, humming to itself frantically. The trees creaked back, staring at it in horror.

“David! Good! Looking for you! Come with me!”

It darted away again, beginning again its tuneless high-pitched hum which seemed itself to exist, even in its infinity, before a question mark. Dave thought best to follow.