Cocooned in black clouds, the wind jumps from behind the forest and rolls down the valley, a tsunami of gravel and branches. Winded, the woodland draws breath.
Like an invader, the wind pushes over mighty trees still dazed by a summer of sunshine, whipping their leaves about their trunks. Twisting their trunks towards heavens. Their roots scream in protest. Their tears are torn leaves, yet they stand.
Enraged, the wind leaps forward. Now wrestling and crumpling together shrubs and golden dandelions lost in its path.
Behind a boulder, a poppy flower. It quivers in the charged air, its tiny hairs like feelers, questioning life. Nearby, a sapling that grew in estranged soil, a seed dropped by a hurried bird. It lowers its branches; it tries to fight the gale. To shield the poppy.
The bluster got to them. It teases the sapling. It puffs and it pants, it spits ice lifting its branches into a dance. Strumming its bows in a request for life, lulling it into deceptive sanctuary. The sapling bends, twists, turns this way and that in the wind. It remembers how he’d traveled, as a seed, it remembers the lesson. It bends over the poppy, a pretense bow, till the gale unfolds further.
The wind, with only a handful of twigs and sand, rumbles away hastening my way. The witness.
Angry, he shows me his size by the cacophony of scents he surrounds me. Earth, foliage, mulch, oils, dust. And steals my hat, hiding it in his clouds like molten lead.
I laugh. Wind spins around me. I am a tree. See my branches? See my leaves?
I lift my hands and feel the clouds with my fingers.
I touch raindrops. They fall like a curtain around me. And I cannot see.
‘I understand now,’ I laugh.
Read – Monday 16th July – A Flash Fiction by Aaron-Onuigbo Kingsley, Nigeria
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