Expansions on an Idiom

Kellen Murphy

I: If a Tree Falls in the Forest

Walking down to the beach, the boy takes a deep inhale of the cool late Autumn air. Wind tumbles down the bay, inducing goosebumps upon the boy’s skin. He told himself today would be the day; his unease and cowardice towards the ocean was to finally be thwarted. As he first steps onto the cold gray rocks along the water, his heart begins to race, pounding hard, slightly undulating the surface of his chest. The boy looks up to the overcast sky and swallows hard. He told himself he’d do this.

Beneath the tremors of adrenaline and the thumping of his heart, the boy suddenly ejects himself forward, propelled by the energy of his fears. He does not waste time with acclimation; he knows he has to do it quickly or else he’ll turn around and give up. His legs move him frantically forward as the gentle clack of stones under his feet turns into splashes of cold saltwater. The goosebumps that already cover the boy’s body become even more plentiful as he dives into the water. He knows no restraint.

By the time the boy submerges, the childish phobias he once had quickly turn to dread. The water is much colder than he initially anticipated, and it begins to get harder to move. He kicks off of the silty floor to reach the surface once more, attempting a small yelp before taking a breath and submerging, though the boy truly is a lone tree in a remote forest.

He is a small mammal in the snake den, the ocean paralyzing him with its cold venom. The current pulls him out, his limbs now frozen in shock, and all he can do is watch as the bay he came from gets further and further. The boy’s lungs give way and he fills with seawater. From the deep silt floor, he watches his last bubble of air rise to the surface; he sees nothing but the overcast sky distorted in the freezing waves. No sunlight, no remorse. Just grays and greens.

 II: Does It Make a Sound?

A spark flies across the dark empty room. Neurons fire, synapses reanimate.

The light is blinding when the boy opens his ancient eyes. He lays on a cold piece of furniture, akin to a dentist chair, completely unable to move, while two creatures sit beside him. His mind races as he looks down and sees what lies in the place of his body: a brown and wrinkled array of crooked limbs, he’s been preserved no different than a mammoth in permafrost. The creatures beside him have oblong faces and short round bodies; the boy didn’t need to look hard to know that they were nothing close to human. The two of them operate the interfaces of some technology with the upper of their three limbs. The boy sits under the light, emotionally and physically petrified.

The boy’s eyes scan the room, the rotation of his eyeballs is the only freedom he has at this moment. The last thing he can remember is the unfeeling overcast sky distorted in the bay waves, but that feels like it was forever ago. Millennia ago, perhaps.

One of the creatures touches something on the strange interface and the boy hears a whirring near his head, against his left ear. In an instant, the feeling of his muscles clenching cascades across his body, though the leathery carcass that lay before him remains unchanged. The whirring changes pitch slightly, and now the boy’s memories come flowing into his mind.

Projected in his mind, he is in his kitchen, tiptoeing to the freezer past his bedtime and releasing the vacuum of the door to snag a pint of his parents’ ice cream in secret. He opens the lid and sets it upside-down on the counter, slowly opens the silverware drawer to grab a spoon, and carefully carves a spoonful out of the top of the tub, being careful to maintain the exact same shape in the pint that was previously left by his parents. His memory forces him to put the spoonful of ice cream in his mouth, chocolate and marshmallows and almonds dance their sweet dance throughout his mouth. Here, in this terrified state, the boy feels a phantom of a tear coming to his eye, though his mechanisms to do so were carved out by the tools of time.

The whirring comes to an abrupt end, and the boy’s memory stops playing before he even swallows the dessert. The creature closer to him makes a long sound of breaths and clicks and the second responds similarly, as if deliberating some neural study. The sound of something like rogue synthesizers and electronic hisses fills the boy’s mind, and the creatures deliberate some more. The sound is grating and annoying, and the boy winces when it swells in volume. Though luckily, it doesn’t last terribly long. The whirring machine by his head quickly starts its hum once again, now triggering the olfactory decipherers of the mind. He is hit by a colossal wave of terrible scents, occasionally interrupted by something sweet or flowery. Much like the grating sound, this sequence distresses the boy, but it, too, doesn’t take terribly long. The whirring of the machine ceases once more.

Clicking and heavy breaths permeate the hospitalistic room again; the closer creature reaches the shortest of its limbs towards the other, their finger-looking appendages engaging in a handshake-esque movement. They turn and face the boy, making eye contact with him for the first time. His heart drops. Their eyes look hollow and unfeeling, deep circular pools of black tar across from each other on either side of their faces. Despite their unfeelingness, the boy feels as if he knows that he sees them. They are aware that they are perceived.

His body wants to sweat with anxiety, though those mechanisms don’t function anymore, either. He feels as though he sits on the edge of a cliff, unaware of any crashing end to break his fall. The creatures’ faces have a long wide hole between their eyes; a ravine across the lightly-wrinkled backdrop of their faces. The boy fears that perhaps they will eat him, or kill him for fun, or keep him like this forever. None good options, though the third seems the least amicable. He’s known death before.

His terror is a Shepard Tone in his mind, rising and rising for what feels like infinity as the creatures continue to look straight through him. With another short spout of clicks and breaths, the further alien reaches its limb towards its interface, motioning to press a large blue square. His mind tries to force a scream through his fossilized mouth.

The world goes black once more. No grays or greens, just a conclusive cut.

Kellen Murphy

Kellen Murphy is a musician and writer from Anacortes, Washington. You can find his work at KellenMurphy.bandcamp.com