Nylah

She greets me "Gotchyoo!" through the door
Beams and gleams her smile's a'glisten
She toddles and proddles along the floor
We make funny faces, "Hi Dad!" I listen
Out she goes with a sippy-cup in hand
Held out forth like a delicate wand
Tip-tap, flip-flap, little quick feet so merrily fond
Hoppy-pop, hair on top, shiny tiny bit o' blonde

Walk

Having heard the slight sound of the “ocean” in the small hole near the floor amidst the few rocks at the back end of the tunnel, Seth, a begrudging, defeated, animal, straightens himself for a painful walk forward. The fear starts to come. He stops after his first step with a wince, bracing his head with his left hand; his right hand pillars itself against the wall. “Out, alive, walk.” The words appear like flashes in his mind. But his whole body quivers with nervous tension, and it feels like he is going to collapse from the inside. He is unsure. Discombobulated. He feels like the buzz of a toy train stuck on the tracks: there’s power from the battery flowing into the engine, but it stands there, lifeless, humming, not going anywhere. There aren’t any thoughts in his mind other than “Out, alive, walk.” The disorientation stifles him from cognitive recipes that draw out plans of action for escape and longing. Finally, it breaks: “Where am I?” His mind is working again. He can figure this out. The tunnel stretches forward and stares back at him. It bends to the right and darkens.

He lifts up his shirt investigates his body. The sores look better. He looks askance of himself, staring at the side wall, trying to think. Words and images flash through his mind as he ponders his wounds and there apparent quick healing: bike, Klugschreiber, yellow, mom, fence, tree. Tree. Grunting with a frustrated huff, he gropes forward step by step. There is still the multitude of painful pricks and holes in his body, but as he moves along now, he becomes numb to the pain. He gropes the walls. It’s damp, hard sandy dirt. It smells like earthworms, and decay, but with a mixture of minerals, and life. The walls are made of smooth corners of stuff, with small juts here and there that deceive the eye: these are not for climbing, but crumbling. A hairy mess of roots intertwines overhead and swims with grubs, webs and creepy crawlies with a disturbing number of legs. The walls and floor however, are paved clean and good for walking, groping and resting. He approaches the bend, anticipating the dark, but the light moves with him, just as fog disappears and retreats on the road but remains thick and foreboding up ahead. He notices that light stretches in tubes from the roots overhead as if they were hollow and a conduit from the sun over the world above.

He begins to think of himself as a dweller. The loneliness of the place replaces his fear of entrapment to that of comfort. There is a perfect silence in this place that drowns out the voices and noises of the real world. There are no cars, no hospitals, no schools, no bad people, no accidents. But there are no beds, no toilets, no stores of food. The fear remains in him then, but subsides and recedes behind the apparent solace of the tunnel. Its clean walls and floor and its hairy, odd ceiling guide him forward. He turns to look back. He’s gone more than twenty yards now. He must be fully under the dune above, entering into the heart of Duncan’s Woods. The tunnel takes a slightly upward slope. He’ll get out of here! Ha. This is no magical place, he thinks, it’s just an anomaly. Just a coincidence. It is a sheer, horrific event that he fell into a sink hole. It happens all the time. He’d read stories of that happening in the desert to the World War II soldiers fleeing from the Nazis in the deserts of northern Africa. Sometimes, they would fall into great caverns and find water and shelter and respite. Other times…

Stepping along the upward slope it begins to get lighter. The roots seem like thick vines piping sunlight into the cavernous tube. Along his right hand side on the wall, there is a tangled mess of roots, although they look like two hands forming a cup, as if to hold water. Inside the hands lies a box. The box is made of old, blackish gray metal, with decorative webelos on the corners. It reminds him of the patches from his Boy Scout days. He had quit the scouts, because the leader was an old crabby woman, called a den mother. The other scouts got to build fires, shoot guns and find snakes in the swamps, but his clan raked lawns of people he never even saw. So he quit. But this box made him think of men, like soldiers who had traveled to exotic lands and seen ancients temples and had experienced the horrors of gunfire, and death. The box had no design on the cover. It’s just blackish gray, flat, and waned of a shine long since gone of ages past. It has smooth, rounded edges that retain a partial sheen, and there is a clasp on the front. Just a normal, metal box with webelos on the corners for quaint decoration. He picks it up, out of the cupped hands, and as he does so the roots retreat, spreading out like spider webs along the wall. He opens the box with a flip of the clasp, and peeks inside.

Tunnel

Opening his eyes, he barely squints, as into the sun. He tries to brush the dirt away from them but it only sinks in deeper into his sockets. He groans with the pain, and wriggles and wiggles his way loose from the branches. They no longer invade his body, no longer probe. But they hadn’t probed, had they? No, they gave life into him. He feels more alert, more aware, and mentally…clear.

He lays on his side and struggles against the strangling tangle of thin, long, but strong wooden fingers—live fingers that hold him there. It is almost womb-like, the hold of the tree’s appendages. They release, and recede up and out of the ceiling above him, ascending to the living world of sky, grass, and rain (some of the rain dripped down from the ceiling like they syrup on a Saturday morning bottle). With a grunt, Seth pushes himself up off his side and stands up on both his feet. Bloody holes oozed small, coagulating bubbles of red from his body. There are more than fifty of these, all over his chest and back, in his neck, and reaching to the top of his buttocks. Nothing on the legs though. Odd, he thought.

But there was pain. Sharp, searing pain that stings with every movement. He hisses, but moves forward. There is a tunnel before him. The tunnel is a chopped tube meandering under ground for maybe twenty yards before it disappears behind rocks and a bend. The ceiling is high above him, almost fifteen feet. He can climb up, he thinks, and dig his way back into the…the…the world. The walls are not entirely smooth, but are made of hardened brown, golden and orange dirt that has the appearance of hard rock, but alas, it breaks away when he reaches with his hands and puts weight on his foot. Besides, the pain is unbearable. Behind him is a crumbled wall of loose dirt that narrows down into a small corner. He steps toward it, just to make sure. It’s too dark, and he can barely make out a small hole, but it’s on the floor, against the wall—if indeed it is a wall. Who knows whither the hole leads, if it even is a hole?

Not content in submitting himself to moving forward in the obvious direction, he crouches down and puts his face right into the small hole. The position of his body is so tight, and the myriad of puncture wounds in him so painful, that he holds his breath, trying in deepest earnest to catch a glimpse of immediate escape by some other route. Straining his lungs, body and ears, he looks and listens into the tiny black hole for a smidgen of hope. A void answers back to him. It is a void—probably nothing but more earth, more wall behind this. Probably just an anomaly. Probably just nothing. He breathed into the small hole. Though faint, it sounds like when you listen to a shell’s echo. “It’s the ocean,” Kim used to say. Seth drifts for a moment, thinking of her. She moved away—just as they had become good friends. “There’s nothing down there,” he mutters to himself. He pushes himself up with a leap, determined to go the other way. He looks down the tunnel and remembers that he forgot one thing: to be afraid.

Sink

The sand bellowed out from the hole like a froth. Seth startled with fright, then delight—his eyes and mouth opening wide with glee. The hole opened like a yawning mouth and kept growing. The ground below him started to sink, and he with it. His head was now level with the top of the sandy slope as he sunk into the ever growing, gaping hole. He yelled for help, but it was too late. He was under the ground. The last thing he saw was the hole, staring back at him like an impartial judge about to pronounce a death sentence.

Suffocating, Seth struggled and wrestled amidst the arms of sand gripping him with a wrestler’s stranglehold. “I’m going to die,” he thought. The thought came to him as a matter-of-fact. This is not how he thought it would be. As an old man, he lay dying on his bed, happy and content—a peaceful life lived, now all alone, his wife gone before him, but only by six lonely months of anticipating the reunion. The sand kept boiling over him, forcing its way into his mouth and ears, and lungs. He choked. He imagined the deep, blue water of Lake Michigan, but this—this was painful. A mean hand gripped his ribcage and dragged him below the surface. Up above, the black hole stared out at the expansive field, closed its eyes, and disappeared as the sand and the ground resumed its appearance as before.

Below the surface, his body lay limp. The roots of the tree plunged into his body. Roots suck the life out of the ground in order to sustain the life of the tree. Still alive, Seth could feel the roots prick themselves and stab his body, searching for life. He lay limp and listless. His tomb again began to empty itself. The hard, wet sand underneath him crumbled slowly like the crumbs of stale bread. The roots, embedded into his abdomen, ribs and back, lifted him slowly down like a gentle yet malevolent hand. He felt fluid going into him. He felt alive, and aware.

Tree

Seth saunters slowly out the door and down the short, green hallway and takes a right, but not before a quick pull at the water fountain. He stops in a sudden skid, his left leg kicking out like a mechanical arm, his right leg a thin pillar of support. Grabbing the rusting metal handle with his right hand, he applies all of his weight upon this one fulcrum, balancing himself on the integrity of the sink’s fastened body. The white porcelain fractures slightly away from the wall, revealing a dark, line of empty space between the pale green paint and the dry, cracked caulk at the edge of the pale watering bowl. The five-pointed handle gives way to the forceful twist of Seth’s clenched fist, slamming its way to the full throttle of its point of resistance. Cold, smelly water slowly dollops over the spout, lightly flowing out and down with baneful impotence.

“Suck,” Seth says in disdain, his face crinkled in disgust. He curses in his mind. “Stupid…fountain.” Angry, he nevertheless perforates the water with a cautious slurping, his lips only micrometers away from the tainted, defiled spout, no-doubt caressed by unclean lips of many. Satisfied, but furled, he walks boldly out the door, stiff-arming it open like a ramrod. The expletives echo in his brain, but quiet down with a new idea.

Hopping onto his brown, banana seat, Seth meanders slowly like a drunken sailor, his front wheel swinging this way, then that. Heading west, he races down Taylor Street, with the wind slamming his hair behind—almost off—his head. “I’ll head there,” he thinks to himself, glaring ahead. Taylor Street is the biggest hill ever. It has two, yellow lines in the middle of it, and a red, eight-sided sign with white letters in it at the bottom. It’s the kind of street you don’t see the bottom of, and it slowly unfolds before you as you set off. In nothing flat, he’s at the bottom, heedless of any oil burners freezing with grinding halts in order to spare his life. He flies through, his wheels not touching the ground. Then, a rolling coast, the whine and whip of the wind in his ears cowers away like a satiated banshee retreating to her abysmal den. With a hop over the city curb, he enters into earthen terrain, where a wide field lays open before him, welcoming him like any field would: with a silent, green yawn.

The field backs itself into a corner, surrounded by benevolent sandy slopes covered with pines, elms, tall oaks, and maples. The boney fingers of these deciduous friends bear the stripping of winter’s wear, slumbering awake in the clamor of long, cold, rest, turning toward the glowing Spring orb set higher in the late morning sky, whispering in quiet praise. The apex of this corner houses a naked dune, a stretch of sand inhabited by only one tree.

Seth’s bike slows to a motionless rest. He stares at the ground, his eyelids lowered to half slits. His hands rest on the plastic, grooved, handlebar grips, moving in half circles back, and forth, back and forth with white, tense knuckles. The color of the grooves matches the long seat. He starts to murmur. The sand entrenches the rims of his bike, dragging them down into a soft blanket. Raising his head, he looks at the tree. It stands alone like a beacon, with the perfect roundness of a rainbow, its green buds ahead of the other trees in this vicinity. Below its massive trunk, a thousand tentacles and snakes stretch out as the exposed root system. In the middle of this tangled system sits a black hole at the back of a short tunnel.