I had to leave the prison that was the metropolis. I suffered the suffocation of its isolation and I was dismayed by the behavior of a society given to dissipation and aggravation towards those they labeled as infidels.
Without delaying, I set out for the region of my childhood, also the place of my mother's decline.
I came upon a hamlet not at all suitable for coexistence. I witnessed the ravages of an insidious plague that would have destroyed the health of the commune. The elders, devotees of an agrarian faith, referred to the arbitrariness of entities inhabiting the forest; in those faces I saw the error and the admission of guilt accentuated.
Before the exhalation of the sparkle, signal of the arrival of rains, they inferred the venia for the procession.
I defined the bundle of black cloth carried on the shoulders of one of the participants. I deduced that wrapping as the remains of the only infant touched by the curse, longing for the relatives.
In the vicinity of the hillock, summit for the rite, the council had been composed around an oak dejected by the aridity and the time and split in the trunk; the arrangement of feathers sheathed in those members with the unfathomable and rural prestige.
By virtue of slipping the shroud, the stench of putrescence, mingled with cedar oil, attested to the bodily corruption that slammed the door to agency. Obeying touch, they would scrutinize the genital foramen to estimate the rancidity of the ichor.
Having completed the insertion in the trunk, they would raise the old oak from the asylum of its death. The havoc would be stopped, and at the same time, the memories between custodians and settlers would return to their past bondage; the former, with the ex-voto, the latter, with the fruits on the table.
For centuries the body will lie protected by the health of the tree, just as my mother lies mummified in this organic cemetery.

#FolkHorror #PoeticProse #Suspense
#SpeculativeFiction


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