Bernita at An Innocent A-Blog is hosting a writing contest, Weirdly Contest, so I decided to enter.

The goal is to write a scene, of a maximum 250 words, based on this picture. My entry turned out mildly strange, but the contest is entitled Weirdly, so that works.

Sacrifice

A man stood before an abandoned orchard. Black, twisted trees stretched out of the ground like fingers from a shadowed beast trapped below, a stark contrast to the pale grey sky.

He pulled a crumbled mass of paper from his pocket and unfolded it, flattening it with the palm of his shaking hand against a rock on the ground. His eyes burned as he focused on the picture. The colour from the field had bled up into the trees, striping them a yellowish green and blending the image together, yet it still revealed the exact scene he saw before him. Every time he closed his eyes and tried to drift into sleep, that image haunted him.

He rose to his feet and stumbled from the path toward the nearest tree. After six days without sleep, his legs moved like thin, brittle twigs. He brushed his hair back. It clung to his fingers like wet moss.

“What am I to do?” he asked in a weak voice. “Why bring me here?”

His questions were met with a cold silence. No birds in the sky called out, no insects buzzed below, and no branches creaked in the wind. It was the silence of something waiting, the silence of expectation.

He reached the tree and ran his hand down its leathery bark, his fingers leaving a trail in the moisture on the surface. Laying down at the base of its trunk, he watched the sky disappear as he sunk deep into the grass.