The Truth's Consequences

by Ashlee Archer

It seemed like a thousand years had passed when I opened my eyes, but it was probably only a second or two, like most of the things that go on in the brain. A sleeping brain has no concept of time as it passes outside the body. But when I opened my eyes, I thought maybe I never had. Looking around me, I knew this couldn’t have been reality, or at least none that I had ever known. All I noticed at first was sky, sky everywhere, even under my feet. It looked like the sky I had always known, but one that was changeless, and always mirrored that of the most beautiful summer day. It was that perfect cerulean blue, with just enough billowing, white clouds dispersed across it.

I must have been in that place a really long time then, and I gradually became aware of differences in my surroundings. There was a surface beneath my feet which I concluded after a time was water, but it defied all my knowledge of water. I was walking on it (I was walking on it!), but I created no ripples, and it was as smooth as plate glass. It was reflecting the sky, but there was no reflection of me. This bothered me a little, but I decided to move on and explore the rest of the glassy landscape, since I had recently discovered there were solid things sticking out of the water a certain distance away. From my position, they looked like broken and bent trees, but I couldn’t be certain. I passed over the distance between the place that I had been and the place that I wanted to be, to explore the objects, in a matter of seconds. A curious sensation washed over me, as if I knew I had somehow, once again, defied everything that I had ever known before, just like my walking on water.

Now I was just at the threshold of the objects that I had seen, and they appeared to be broken columns. A demolished and flooded ancient civilization? Is that what this was? I touched the weathered surface of one of the columns, and it crumbled like brittle ash under my fingertips. I stood, staring, at the place where the stone column had come undone and fallen into the water below, and for the first time since I had opened my eyes in this place, I became really disturbed. What was this place? And there were thousands of these columns, jutting up from the glassy water as far as I could possibly see. I was still just at the edge, too. Who knew how far they continued?

Why was I in this place?

And where was everyone else?

This time, I decided to run to the end of the columns, and I hoped I wouldn’t magically cross the distance in a matter of seconds again. My wish was granted, and it took much more time and energy to cross even a part of the distance. I paused in my running, still surrounded by columns. These columns were different, however. Some sort of vine was growing around them, an exotic ivy with little, understated, white flowers sprouting along the vines. I reached out to touch a column near me, hoping that it wouldn’t crumble under my touch again, since it could support foliage. I was wrong, but a curious thing happened. The column dissolved, as the first had, but the plants growing around it remained intact, in the shape of the column. How strange it was! I touched the little vines, too, but they didn’t dissolve or move in any way. It seemed that they were anchored securely, somehow. The fibers in those vines must have been incredibly strong. Their source was somewhere beneath the water, or it must have been, since that’s where they disappeared. I marveled at this small discovery for a few minutes, or at least that’s what it felt like, and then I wanted to explore more.

As I wondered what was beyond the columns in this vast, flat landscape, the columns faded away, as if they were nothing more than a mirage in a desert, and I turned my head to look around me. It was the same endless, glassy surface that I had seen when I first opened my eyes, but I could no longer see the broken columns in the distance. Where was I then? How far did this empty world extend? I hoped I was dreaming. That was the only explanation. I caught something out of the corner of my eye as I stood thinking, though. It looked like a tree. It was reassuring to know that I wasn’t the only life in this place, even if I was still the only sentient life. I set off on a leisurely walk in the direction of the distant tree.

I thought about how I wanted to take my time so that I wouldn’t end up standing in front of it in no time at all. It seemed to take much less time than running through the columns had, though, and it quickly grew larger in my field of vision. The tree was huge, and as I got within a few yards of it, I saw that it had long roots that raised it out of the water, like those trees you see in pictures of the jungles of India. Some of the roots snaked away from the tree, and wove in and out of the surface of the water. As I approached, the water suddenly gave way beneath my feet, and I panicked for a few seconds before I realized I hit solid ground only four or five inches below the surface. I breathed a small sigh of relief before I began to take sluggish steps toward the tree again, this time hindered slightly by the weight of the water I was trudging through.

This tree was massive. How could I not have seen it from every other part of this flat unreality? The only answer I could come up with was that it must have been curved like the surface of the earth, thus hiding parts of the horizon from the naked eye. Well, at least something was similar to the reality I was familiar with. With my feet in the water, I finally created ripples, but I noticed that the tree created ripples as well. There was no insect or animal life on the tree, but tiny ripples seemed to be emanating from around the roots as they disappeared under the surface of the water. Was the tree…vibrating? How else was it making its own ripples? I waded closer, coming to a stop between two thick roots. They must have been as big as one of my thighs, curving down and away from the tree around the height of my waist. I leaned my head against the tree, expecting to feel vibrations. I didn’t. Instead, I heard whispers of voices, broken pieces of songs, the creaking sound of the tree’s own branches. I jumped away from the tree, lost my balance, and landed on my behind in the water. I didn’t truly care that I was soaking wet, though.

I stared up at the talking tree, for the first time noticing that it bore fruit. Large, red fruit hung from its branches – apples, it seemed. Seeing them immediately made my stomach growl, and I realized I hadn’t eaten anything since I had awoken, and I had no idea how long I had been there. This was the only food source I had seen, and I thought some other source was miraculously going to appear as I said this in my head. That didn’t happen, to my slight surprise, so I endeavored to climb the tree and get the apples. I couldn’t reach any of the branches from the ground, so I climbed out of the water and onto the large roots that protruded from the trunk of the tree. This brought me at least three or four feet above the ground, and there were a few smaller branches that I could reach now. I hoisted myself up with my arms, dragging my sopping pant legs with me, and swung one leg over the little branch. It protested under my weight, but otherwise held me as I brought myself to straddle the branch. The next few branches were, thankfully, spaced closely together, and I had no trouble reaching the higher branches where the fruit grew. I grasped a large, shining apple in my right hand and plucked it from its branch. It seemed a hissing wind had blown through the tree’s leaves as I did this, though I felt no wind. I paid it no mind, and took the first, most anticipated bite from the apple.

It was not as sweet as I had expected it to be. In fact, it had a very bitter taste just behind the succulent flavor of the apple that nearly made me toss it into the water below me then and there. What stopped me was that I was now aware that I was ravenously hungry, and not even the apple’s bitter warning was going to stop me from eating it greedily. I devoured one apple, dropped the core into the water, and grabbed another one from the branch above my head. This one tasted no different than the first apple, but I ate it more slowly, partly sated from the first apple. I didn’t want to eat too many of the fruits. In the case that I would be stuck here for a very long time, I would need food, and I doubted the presence of other food sources. I clutched the apple’s stem in my teeth, and made my way back down to the water.

I was entirely unprepared to plunge below the surface of the grey water that had formerly been only a few inches deep. Where had the ground gone? The bubbles of my escaping breath rose upward without me, and I began to panic, kicking violently in what I hoped was some semblance of swimming. My arms felt like lead, and they refused to save me. I was so busy struggling that I hardly noticed that there were faces, images, images of people below and around me in the water. This gave me pause, and I stopped kicking, which allowed me to sink a little further. I drifted closer to a particular image in which a woman bent her head over a bed, with someone else’s hand clasped in her own and drawn close to her face. There were shadowy people in various places in the image, but the woman and the person on the bed were the only ones of importance. They appeared in color, though their outlines and distinct features were slightly skewed by the water’s natural properties. They grew clearer as I succeeded in swimming closer, and I had a shock that caused me to gasp, even though I was still underwater. The need for oxygen was another alarmingly absent feature of this backwards place, though, and the gasp did nothing to me. The woman leaning over the bed was my wife, and in the bed was myself. A nurse in the background became clear suddenly, wheeling out a cart with some sort of medical machine on it. I didn’t understand what it was for, but it seemed to fill me with a sense of dread. She soon returned and wheeled out another cart.

The shadowy people in the rest of the image slowly became clear, and most of them I recognized as my own friends and relatives. Their expressions were solemn, and some of the women cried, hiding their faces or covering their mouths as they did so. The doctor standing on the opposite side of the bed shook his head as I watched him. He looked sad, but it was a nearly empty expression, as if this same scene had happened so many times he no longer had any extra emotion to spare. My wife dropped my hand and laid her head on my chest. The tears streaked vividly down her face as I watched. The nurse returned in the background and wheeled out another machine. The doctor exited the room. The scene began to fade as I understood.

I knew what this place was.

And I would never be able to escape it, as the apple that I had been foolish enough to eat now showed me. This desolate wasteland of flat water and near nothingness was my punishment for being a fool in life, too. I could not yet remember what it was that I had done, but the feeling in my heart told me enough for the moment.

And I would have an endless supply of time to eat those bitter apples, and learn what I could.

~FIN~

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Notes:

You may have noticed that I did not use my usual pen name here, but my real name. This is because I want to identify that this is truly my work. That is not to say that the rest of my writing is not my work also, but it is less serious. I have great intentions for this story and all the short stories I am writing for my Creating Stories class. Someday, I would like to publish my short stories together. That is a long way off, though. I would like to say that I would greatly appreciate comments and the like, and I would also greatly appreciate that anyone who reads this story does not steal it. (It needs to be said. I am not accusing anyone.) With that said, thank you all. I hope you enjoyed my story.