The Wooden Corpse Version 2
This is the second version of this story that I came up with. I developed it when I was going for my masters at the Academy of Art in 2009. Enjoy!
The sky turtle swooped through the clouds at high speed. The old marionette sitting within the rickety shack built on it’s shell and steering the turtle in a serpentine pattern. The broken plywood board with the circus’s logo on it still hung from the turtle’s side. The broken chains still hung from both their necks. A flier for the circus with the marionette’s unhappy image and the words “Come see the amazing living marionette!” was still flapping about, stuck to the plywood. The marionette looked behind him once again. He looked all around, then satisfied that he’d lost them, he relaxed and sat back in his chair, bringing the turtle to a slower and more steady flight pattern. He reached over and grabbed some plant food. The label could be seen reading “Miracle grow! Help your plants come back to life! Even let old dead branches, already cut, grow back to where they came from!” He popped it into a valve in his chest and it fed into his mechanical heart, visible through a small window in his chest. It glowed green. He used up the entire bottle of plant food. He began to dose off. Images of the tree he’d been created from danced in his mind, a tall, strong tree, full of life. Suddenly he was jarred awake as the alert on his instruments flashed and beeped. His radar went off… He was there. He grabbed the reins and maneuvered the turtle down through the clouds.
The clearing in the forest was dead still. The old dead tree at its center showed stark beneath the night sky. From the eastern storm front, a figure could be made out, coming closer and closer. Eventually the giant sky turtle swooped into the clearing. The marionette jumped down from the turtle and gazed at the old abused tree. He reached up and took off his gas mask, putting it and the strange glowing jar it was attached to aside, he breathed in the forests air. He then slowly approached the tree, in disbelief that he was actually here. He put his arm up to part of the huge, deep gash in the tree. The wood grain in his wooden arm matched the trees wood grain perfectly. This was indeed that tree, though also brutalized by man, it was still his tree.
As he stood there he waited expectedly, waiting for his arm to start to re-absorb into the tree… But nothing happened. He shoved his arm more into the tree, desperately. He scratched off the remaining paint on the arm and put it back up, still nothing. Frustrated, he threw himself hard into the gash. His body cracked in places and he almost immediately fell out of the tree and to the ground, his eyes tight shut in pain, emotion welling up inside him. His hands dug into the ground as he tried to get a hold of himself. He finally sat up and looked at the tree. Suddenly, he had an idea. He went to the turtle and grabbed the bottle of plant food, suddenly remembering it was empty. He dropped the bottle to the ground and thought for a second. Then another idea came to him. He dug thru his things, finally finding a syringe. He walked back to the tree and opened the glass window to his heart. He stabbed the syringe in, flinching in pain, and filled it with the green liquid inside it. As he did he felt a little of his life force drain a little from him and his wooden body shriveled up a little bit. He stabbed the syringe into the tree and pumped in the liquid. The tree came to life just a little bit. The marionette’s eyes lit up and he put his hand back in the gash. A little of the wood in the hand de-materialized and sunk into the wood in the tree. Ecstatic, the marionette drew more of the liquid from his heart and then more. But each time he became weaker, but a little more of himself de-materialized and absorbed into the tree. After a few more syringe fulls, his whole body began to de-materialize, smiling, he waited for himself to fully absorb. But then, he cringed in pain as his heart began to flicker and the tree began to fade again. His body was now nearly just a mechanical skeleton and he couldn’t hold himself up any more. He reached out a hand toward the tree, tears welling up in his eyes, as he fell backward and hit the ground hard. His heart broke out of his chest. It fell to the ground, breaking in two. The light faded from his eyes as he saw the remaining liquid drain from the heart.
A season passed. Through fall, the marionette began to decompose. Through winter everything disappeared under snow. Then spring came and in between the two pieces of broken casing, a new tree sprouted.
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