In the forest?
Nobody knows I am out here. How long has it been? Hours? Days?
I can’t quite tell.
It’s so dark beneath the dense canopy and there is no sound, only my own footsteps for company, the occasional creak of branches as time does its job. Have I been down this trail before?
That tree with the heart-shaped lump where a limb should be, I saw it earlier. A dozen times or more.
And those footprints? Are they mine?
But I’ve been going downhill, always downhill, toward the bright light yonder.
Scary stuff! Dying in the forest.
Reminds me of hiking in the Cascades where downhills last hours and hours.
Descriptive, scary atmosphere. There is something which is confusing.” ..tree with the heart-shaped lump…I saw it earlier. . a dozen times.” This implies the hiker is going around in circles, not downhill.
Adelaide
I read this as surreal and metaphorical; someone locked in a loop beyond time. Intriguing stuff. BTW, I’m a big fan of Murakami.
A loop that continually goes downhill makes sense to me, as a metaphor
I also saw this as surreal and metaphorical — or perhaps literal but also reflective of what’s going on in the narrator’s life. The descriptions of “heart-shaped” and “always downhill” really helped me form that opinion.
Great atmosphere creation. I love monologue-style stories like this!
The feedback for this made my day, thanks all.
To reply to two comments at once: in the draft I submitted, there was a sentence fragment at the end which fed directly into the opening line making the whole story cyclical.
Love this. Really captures the delirious state of being lost and alone for too long and leaves the reader hanging just as it should. Also loved the line ‘as time does its job’.
Is this a ghost story?