I shouldn’t listen to everything I hear, but this particular story was hard to ignore. I was sitting in a coffee shop somewhere in the outskirts of the capital, minding my own business, when I overheard a conversation between a young gentleman and what must have been his mother. He kept telling her about a forest he had dreamt about. She did not want to hear it. “Please, just eat your pancakes,” she kept repeating.
This forest was special, it was home to a tree that was the oldest living entity in this world. A tree so magnificent and powerful, that it held heaven and earth together. But it was what the boy said next that struck me. This forest was inhabited by humanoid creatures that had achieved a oneness with nature, they had become nature. Tree people, he called them. The most ancient civilization known to man. They had seen it all, as their first hour was synonymous with the birth of life itself.
I wanted to find these tree people. But this was just a silly young man’s nightmare. A man I had never spoken to. A man overshadowed by the gripping presence of his mother, who was not having any of it. Maybe it was my lack of perspective, or that insufferable itch of boredom running down my back, but I wanted to believe him. It wouldn’t be the first time that, through strange cosmic events, entire places and people fly out of somebodies mind and will themselves into existing. All I needed to find was a tree as old as time itself.
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You are currently traversing the limitless expanses of Visual Fiction. Each narrative fragment in this collection unravels a memory of a man drawn into an alternate reality. With every piece, he steps deeper into the unknown, attempting to describe the indescribable, to paint the unseen, and to make sense of the senseless. These tales offer glimpses into bizarre worlds that can at times feel both intimately familiar and strangely threatening.
