Later, I was an adult. I had been married for 3 years, I had seen the trees in passing, including the one that had cast a shadow over my Mum’s house, but my wife and I had moved about an hour away for her work and I hadn’t seen many of them afterwards. It was nice, I felt a lot more peaceful, a lot less on edge. We had a day like any other. I had gotten home from work and she was watching TV, having gotten home an hour sooner. I watched for a moment, it was the news, I was very surprised to see the same Wizard I had seen many years ago. It irritated me in a way I hadn’t felt in a long time, I tried to remember when but it wouldn’t come to me.
My wife said something that I couldn’t hear, the irritation was definitely something from when I was younger.... I asked her to repeat herself, she repeated it louder and yet I still couldn’t hear her, I didn’t respond.
She repeated herself again, shouting this time, there was definitely something I wasn’t getting, was it in my Mum’s old house? it was starting to get frustrating.
She got up from the couch and started to look concerned. Every sound was reaching a fever pitch. Based on her body language and the look of concern she was trying to speak quietly but she sounded louder than she was before, yeah, it was when I touched the shadow of that odd tree outside the house.
What she was saying was still unintelligible, relief over figuring out why this was weird calmed me, but being unable to understand what she was saying frustrated me again. The sound of everything grew louder, I was reaching the end of my-
-my nails were dirty and in pain. Another motion caused more scraping along my fingers. My arms felt as though they would disconnect at the elbow due to constant stress and overextension. I stopped the then constant motion to look around, it was dark, I looked around. I wasn’t anywhere I recognised, all I could see was a field with a short wooden fence off of what looked like a main road surrounded by forest. I panicked for a moment and looked for any of those fleshy trees and thankfully none were in sight. After a few moments of looking around pain shot up my arms, it was as if they were going to explode. I looked down at my dirty and ruined fingers and found that I was partway through digging a hole in the middle of the field. It took a moment for the question to hit me; “what was I digging for?” A few more seconds of investigation revealed nothing obvious to bury, all that was there was me and the open air, the absence of anything to bury gave me a relief I didn’t understand. As I was standing up I was scared by an approaching man. The man took a few seconds and looked at me, he said “Good thing you caught yourself, you were about to become one of them”. “One of them? Those trees?”. The Stranger paused. “Yes”. He unbuttoned his shirt to show a chest that looked like it had some kind of scarring, He followed, “it almost happened to me a long time ago, the way people older than me talked and treated others led me to treating them the same way.” He buttoned his shirt back up. “It only took one time for me to see the end result for me to not want to be that way”. I started shaking from the cold. “I think I’ve seen it, I definitely don’t want to become that, how do I stop?”. The Stranger replied “You have to focus, whenever things get stressful, frustrating. Loud… You have to focus, take some time to make sure you don’t let the things you say come out of your mouth automatically. The more you let yourself slip into that kind of thinking the more you allow yourself to slip further”. I sat to think about it for a few seconds. The Stranger broke the silence. “Well, I’m off, best of luck, I’d tell you to man up but that wouldn’t do either of us any good”. The Stranger began to walk away. I got dressed and made my way home.