The Man of My Dreams Is a Tree?!

In other news: I'm feeling a little better, all. Inspiration has once again sprung forth, and I also couldn't wait to share what I've been working on the past few days.

I realized that the reason I was feeling so yucky about blogging was that I had a set schedule that was putting way too much on my plate. Hence I have decided to throw out the whole posting schedule, and am now going to post once or twice a week.

Now that I've got my head back together, here are some things to look forward to:

• More poetry: Poems on internet love (I'm making fun of people who have asked to date me on the internet and stuff like that), fish, and my soulful aversion to prose.
• Stories: Chapter-by-chapter postings of unfinished novellas, including a story about a puddle and another about a society of maneaters.
• Short Stories: Including a seven-year-old comatose mother of two, a blank-slate-child, and today's story of my dream-boy (he's also a tree).
• More Features: As promised, EAL's feature will be posted tomorrow! Also remember that I am always looking for other poets, prosets, and artists. :)
• More Art: Including a tree-man (for today) and a tree-woman (for later), broken eyes, birds and bird-people, and watercolors.

For today, I have a piece I wrote based off a dream I had two nights ago.

Have you ever had a dream in which you meet someone of the... opposite gender... and somehow yo know that you're completely in love and you'll never find anyone else like them in real life? That's the kind of dream I had last night, except the man of my dreams was part tree.

Can I say, WUT.

But it's true, and now I find myself condemned to search my entire life for a man who's also a tree so we can get married and have little tree-babies.

Crap.

Anyways, I couldn't help but use this as a bit of inspiration leverage. I assume you'd like to see what this dreamboy looks like? Well, here he is:

He's still a bit of a work in progress. Those are the flat colors, and later on I'll add  shade and dimension and probably a background. He has bark for skin, his eyes are ice-blue, and his hair shines pale-green in the sunlight. Do I know too much about this non-existent man? Um... Yes. Yes I do.

So there he is. One big hunk of woody hotness. He was really fun to draw, especially since I almost never draw men. When I started putting bark on his face, my sister was like "Why are you giving him a freaky skin disease?" I've learned that to avoid earning snarky comments from my family, I need to draw (and write) in privacy.

So aside from the characters in my dream (him, me, and some other dude (I think he was part bird, and he might have been funny, also)), the plot went something like this: I fell in love with a tree-man, and then some army marched by and I told him to hide and pretend he was a tree.

Goodness, I'm original, telling a tree-man to pretend to be a tree. I promise the story I'm writing is a little less obvious. Here, I'll even prove it. I've only written one little bit of a scene because writing in chronological order depresses, bores, and bores me. It's boring. So here's a little excerpt from my dream-turned-novella:

Something caught my eye—a movement apart from the rhythmic motion of the tree limbs swaying overhead and the wind swirling below. It was a seedling, and I would never have picked it out from the undergrowth were it not for the alarming rate at which it was growing. Such things were normal occurrences due to the State-of-Things, but even this was a bit of an oddity. Within seconds as I watched, the tiny sprout of green became a sapling, and the sapling a tree, with innumerable branches and leaves as green as emerald. And while certainly I was surprised to see a tree do such a thing, I was not prepared for what it did then.

As the rate of its growth slowed (by then the trunk was probably too large for me to wrap my arms around), the rough bark just above my eye level shifted, swirling to form some shape, a pattern. As I stepped closer, the image came into focus: it was a face, round and soft like a baby, but hewn out of wood. I staggered backwards, startled.  As I did the face shifted again, its features becoming harder, more refined. I stared, unable to tear my eyes away from this spectacle, as the face in the tree grew quickly older, the lips becoming thinner, the cheekbones more pronounced. Its eyes remained closed through all of this, as though the being were asleep, or perhaps dead.

Despite my fear and shock, somehow I was drawn to this strange creature, as though someone had tied a string to my heart and was slowly pulling me in. Without any thought I reached out my arm and gently ran my fingers across the surface of the bark, tracing the outline of the jaw, the brow. As I passed my fingers over those closed eyes, they opened, and suddenly I was staring into ice-blue eyes as real as any human’s.

I shrieked, jerking my hand back, yet those piercing eyes never left mine. I stood frozen, waiting for the apparition to pass, or for me to wake up from whatever dream this was. When neither happened, I again cautiously reached out my hand.

Suddenly, the rushing stopped. The face closed its eyes, and I could swear I felt the tree take a single sighing breath.

“Lisbeth?” he said, as it was apparent that the voice belonged to a man. My name was spoken accompanied by whistling leaves and water, as though the entirety of nature was saying it in unison.

“Yes?” I answered, finding my tongue able to speak.

“Help us?” He made it sound like a question, but I knew it was a command more than anything else.

His eyes opened again, shining so brightly it felt as though I was staring into the sun. I staggered back, released from my paralysis, shielding my eyes. The rush of the wind again filled my ears, a shrill cacophony of rustling leaves and shrieking voices, desperate and, it seemed, in pain.

I squinted through the light, trying to discern what was happening. To my amazement, the tree was not growing as it had before; rather, it was returning to a smaller state, the immense trunk growing steadily smaller and strangely misshapen. The towering branches fell, landing on the ground around me, as though sheared off; the roots tore themselves up and shrank back. And the face… I would have expected him to be in pain, but he was… smiling.

At last the transformation was complete, and before me stood a man, his skin gnarly and wooden like the bark of a tree. Leaves sprouted from his face, parting his wind-blown hair away from those mesmerizing eyes. Like snake’s eyes, I realized. You can’t look away.

He reached out a hand for me, his fingers thin and decorated by budding leaves. Every movement was filled with grace, yet there was a sinewy power behind those bark-covered limbs. Before he could take hold of me, though, he was on the ground, his eyes rolled up in the back of his head.

All I could think was, What in I’Soul’s name just happened?

Suggestions? Confusion? Constructive criticism? Let me know. c: