The Fall and the Flight

The air thinned, a crisp, ancient breath against my skin. Seventy-four days. The number itself felt like a carved inscription on the rough bark of my world. The villagers’ whispers, once a distant hum, had faded into the rustling symphony of leaves, a forgotten language spoken by a forgotten Gilles. But the boy who had scrambled, desperate and foolish, up this colossal sentinel was not the Gilles who now clung to its uppermost branches. The simpleton, the ‘sukkeltje,’ had been shed somewhere between the first dizzying ascent and the slow, arduous crawl towards the sky.

My gaze, no longer darting with panicked uncertainty, was fixed. High above, nestled within a tangle of ancient boughs, it waited. The Object. It had been my silent companion, my enigma, the point around which my isolated universe had begun to orbit. It was not a bird’s nest, nor a cluster of strange fruit. It possessed a geometry that defied the organic chaos of the tree, a polished surface that caught the sun and threw it back in shards