The Star Garden

She hit the ground hard and awoke on a dry brown street. The dust blew up around her face, reddening her nose and eyes. A creaking came from one side and she lifted her heavy head to see numerous old people seated on their porches, staring at her with dead eyes. On a small old wooden deckchair behind a cart of mouldy fruit an ancient woman sat alone, she wore dark glasses but her eyes beneath them were glazed and unaware. Her white hair sat like untouched snow on the top of a mountain, wrinkles folded her dark skin, creating valleys down into the confines of her clothing. The woman's withered face did not move as her eyes rolled towards her. 


"The box", a voice whispered in dry, urgent gasps. She followed its direction to the face of an old man balancing in front of her with his hands on his knees, his grey hair pulled from his reptile skull with the wind. Her eyes meet his, "Go" his horse throat desperately tried to cry, and with that she remembered what she was supposed to do. She ran. Her limbs turned to lead, her lungs filled with poison, and she run and run, she run until her legs give way under her, and she tripped and fell. 


She reached out for something to hold onto but nothing was there, she instinctively pushed her arm out to protect her face as she hit the ground, and it scraped hard across the dry mud. Skin pealed off to expose the raw flesh below. The pain stung her, its sharpness waking her from the dull ache inside. From her graze a tiny drop of dark red blood fell. It hit the ground lightly and seeped into the dust. The dust hardened into dirt and from it climbed a tall green shoot. Leaves emerged from its top and from them red petals opened up into a deeply velvet rose.


She pulled herself up and tried to think straight. What was she doing? She didn't know, she couldn't remember why she was running or where she was. Pain washed to her head as she rose and so, out of breath, she sat down again in the dust. The ground was more solid than the path she was on before. Things were growing here, it looked like the outskirts of a wood or perhaps even a forest. 'Is it still after me?', she wondered, the thing she was running from, she couldn't remember what it was now. She couldn't remember any details, it was blurry in her mind, sentences strung together that didn't make sense. Someone was chasing her perhaps, trying to hurt her. She did not know that, yet she had felt real terror as she ran and the words of the old man had made her heart shrink in a fear she didn't understand. As it dulled she forgot why she had felt so afraid. Maybe she was safe for now. Soon all of her pain dissolved away and she begun to feel well again. She stood, her legs too light to feel, and begun again to keep walking into the woods. She knew you could get lost that way, that you weren't meant to walk aimlessly into a forest, but she could hear water, if she found a river she could follow it and maybe she would find people there who could help her.


She moved onwards, the forest was sparse at first but it soon thickened and darkened. A September wind rang through the trees, flowers bloomed all around, thistles and nettles but also bluebells and pink wild roses. Large mushrooms grew from the bottom of trees, red and white like in a fairy tale, 'one side to make you grow smaller', she thought. She wondered if they were edible and put one in her pocket just in case. 'Maybe there were creatures in the woods. Maybe there are other people and they will explain this to me', she thought. 'Maybe they will hurt me'. Her stomach begun to growl and so she marched onwards towards the sound of water. 'How do you catch fish?', she wondered. She had been crabbing before as a child, but they had used bacon. She didn't have any bait. How had she got here with nothing to eat, she didn't know how she could have gotten into this situation.


The trees were denser now, taller, the floor was wetter and the sky darker. Clouds hung in heavy air, the sticky wind refused to blow and the trees became too thick for her to navigate properly. She couldn't see in front of her as easily as she could before, there was no clear path through. The ground was damp and littered with branches, vines curled around each other in elaborate patterns almost as if they had been platted together. It was too difficult to go fast, she had to be careful, the ground wasn't as solid as before and it wasn't always obvious where she should place her feet.


Strange plants grew around her, orchids wrapped around the trees and ferns grew as high as her head. Many of the plants were covered in thorns, some as thick as her arm, and others crinkled like the armour of a lizard. She placed her hands on the bark of the trees to guide her through. It was too late to go back now, she was disorientated and could see nothing but the dark silhouette of giant leaves across the horizon.


Her arm itched and she absently went to scratch it, her fingers met with something slippery and she screamed. Clenching onto her flesh was a bloated black leech, she tried manically to brush it from her skin, it rose its tail in defence but wouldn't let go. She dug her nails into its head and pulled it from her skin, blood spilt out and she threw it from her hands as it turned its head to bite onto her fingers. As she looked towards the ground she saw a black shape crawl under the tongue of one of her trainers. She ripped her shoe off and, standing on one leg, hit the sole against the tree until the leech fell flaccidly onto the floor. In a state of mania she checked all of her exposed flesh, she pulled up her trousers and saw many more sitting comfortably above her socks. She brushed them away crazily and ran as fast as she could. She wanted to be out of this forest, this jungle. She did not want to look at her skin again but she could not relax knowing they may be there, on her back where she couldn't see, on her belly or neck. She kept moving as fast as she could.


Eventually she came upon a fallen tree and she slowed to climb over it, as she begun to climb up onto the girth of bark something white flickered at the edge of her line of sight. She looked directly at it and it looked back at her. A blue human eye meshed with the bark, it grew as naturally as the bud of a branch. She gasped and jumped up over the tree, it followed her movement, watching her, and, as with the leeches, now that she noticed one suddenly she was aware of them on every tree. There were two or three coloured, lidless and unblinking, eyes on each one, some horizontal and some vertical, some more bloodshot than others, each following her as she carefully moved across the leafy floor.


She kept moving towards the sound of the water, she did not know what she should do anymore, the forest was sparser now and it still had bluebells and roses but it became more and more foreign to her as she begun to really look at it. Purple petals, making up flowers the size and shape of footballs growled like a hungry stomach, every now and again gurgling open to release clear bubbles into the air, most burst as they touched the spiky planets but some stuck to the bark of the trees, she thought of the leeches and kept moving.


She came to an abrupt stop just inches away from a hairy web of thick silk that covered her path, it rose far above her head and down to the floor. Wrapped in its sticky embrace was a small ball of fur, it turned its face to her and she saw it was a kitten. She wanted to save it, she stood still for a second contemplating what she must do but the intensity of her fear over took her and she ran away manically.


She walked for hours with her heart in her stomach and her stomach in her throat. She studied everything with the fear that it would hurt her, the sound of broken branches made her trembling body jump and a millipede, as tall as a small dog and as long as a large snake, crawled past. Dragonflies the size of seagulls flew by her head and as she looked above she saw creatures jump through the branches. At first she thought they were monkeys but as she looked closer she could see they had far too many legs for that and had scaly skin.


After a while she came across, not the river she had been searching for, but a giant puddle of water, a large pond or small lake. The water inside looked stagnant and dark and she imagined huge monsters swimming inside, giant snakes under the surface that would swallow her whole with their clamp-like mouths, drawing her into their darkness and squeezing away her breath. She suddenly noticed how thirsty she was and knew that she would have to drink soon. The river would probably be too salty to be good for her but she knew she could die eventually if she did not drink something soon. She looked at the brown water, bubbles rose and she quickly backed away. The head of a fish appeared from the stagnant surface, it looked at her, swum forward and crawled up on its fins out of the water. Her heart pounded as it walked past and climbed up one of the trees until she could no longer see it.


She drew her eyes back to the pond, surely she could not drink from it, she imagined the parasites inside just waiting to burrow into her lungs and intestines, but she was so thirsty. Her throat and stomach felt as if they were lined with sandpaper, her tongue and gums and lips ached from dryness. When she breathed in the dampness of the air had refreshed her at first but now she breathed as if she were a drowning fish, gasping for moisture and never getting enough. She forced her hand forward, her fingers hovered above the murky waters and she imagined something diving out and pulling her under. Just as her fingers were about to touch down breaking the solid layer of surface water she stopped.


It was then that she realised that she had a backpack on, had it been there before? How could she not have noticed it? She didn't know. She took it out and looked inside with both a sense of familiarity, as if she had done this before and she knew what was coming, and the curiosity of a stranger. There was a bottle of water, 'thank god', she thought, an mp3 player, her mp3 player, she recognised it, the book she had been reading and her lighter. 'Everything I need' she thought, 'but food', and then she noticed right at the back a coil of net, unwrapped it was about a square meter. 'That might work', she thought. She drunk a mouthful of the bottled water and put the backpack on, she wouldn't touch the pond water yet, hopefully she would get out of here before she had to do that. But how had she known to pack those things, just the things she had hoped for? How had she known she would end up here? Her spine shivered and she started to run again as best she could.


Time became a strange concept, she didn't have a watch and soon she forgot to document how much had passed. She began to notice that it was getting dark and she must stop soon. 'How can I still be here?', she wondered, 'how can I still not understand what is going on?'. Her stomach growled in demand of food but none came. 'Maybe I will take my chances with the mushroom', she though, 'maybe then I can drift off until this madness ends'. She thought of eating some of the plants instead, or insects, but she wasn't that hungry yet. She knew that soon she must sleep and the thought of that terrified her, perhaps she should stay awake tonight but she would have to sleep eventually. She thought of climbing a tree for safety but she didn't know what was up there and the thick branches were too high. It wasn't until dusk that she came across the solid ground of the entrance to a cave. 


She did not want to go inside into the dark, she knew snakes lived in caves sometimes and imagined waking to find its head next to hers and her arm warm and asleep. She sat on the bare ground at the cave's mouth and watched fireflies dance above her head. She knew that she was prey and that she would be safer if she lit a fire. She gathered dry branches placing them in a heap and surrounding them with a wall of rocks. Every time she picked up a rock she did so with trepidation, she tried not to venture far from the bare dry ground of the cave where the rocks seemed safe, but to get wood she had to move a little closer to jungle ground. The first few sticks were alone but after she had used them all and had to venture further away she begun to notice the scurrying of insects as she disturbed the ground. She imagined tarantulas and scorpions but only saw large ants and beetles. When it was finally done she lit the wood with the lighter and it went up in flames, illuminating the twilight sky.


It was only then that she felt safe enough to slow down. She took off all of her clothes and checked her skin for leeches, or anything else that might be there. She had some bites on her legs, which she itched until they bled, but apart from that she was safe. She shook all of her clothes before putting them back on again and lay on the ground by the fire. She opened her book and begun to read.