"Morose," was the word cried. A grimly and excited voice. It continued to speak. Speak about a great fire and the purpose of a mass death. Another also joined in, but more subtle and devoted to preventing the first voice from continuing.
However, these distant pleeds were not even remotely heard, for an awing tune of a flute started to echo throughout blocking them. Morose, as he was named, was a young but very intelligent boy. He had dwelled in his own company for long periods of time lately, merely playing his flute. Isolation was the chosen reality of his life as he sat on a lone fallen kapok in the river, at least a mile away from his tribe. He often distanced himself physically and psychologically from everyone he‘d been bought up with and especially when the more important chiefs went on their daily hunts for animals for "the burning" - a sacrificial belief.
The boy stopped playing and suddenly dunked his green striped face - the markings all the boys had been forced to wear lately - into the water to cool down from the harsh humidity. As the paint gradually washed off and drifted down the river, he remained submerged for at least a minute. Here, he observed the unusual fish being flowed in the current. Swiftly re-emerging and gasping for breath, he’d then look into the water half-starved of oxygen and stare past his reflection to ponder about trivial things relative to what he was staring at.
"What would it be like it like if I breathed, and lived, underwater? How much would the world change if the river suddenly flowed in the opposite direction? What if..."
Unable to give himself the answers he often over-persisted and eneding up looking at these thigs more abstracted, which lead into poetry. Dripping with water, he crawled off the creaking log as it started to drift away. Fireflies flew above the water, giving an essence of a serene aqua. The young boy stood on the spot like an old statue admiring it, before walking slowly backwards into the forest with his eyes still fixated among the view. He was swallowed up by the darkness of the forest as panicky calls from his tribe suddenly cried out for him again.
Raided with fleas, large bags forming… he was defiantly already losing himself. He used to reply and turn up when called for, then that fell to just turning up. Today he decided to ignore it all but entirely. His eyes were as wide as, as he walked with a tuneful flute in his mouth. The smell around the area was toppling. A rafflesia, a seldom discovered parasitic plant that smelt like a thousand dying corpses, lurked here. It had a petal missing, for this was the origin of his newly-acquired mask which he sometimes wore. Morose would spend a whole week next to it in the shade of a tree, watching the wild birds - particularly quetzals - live their carefree lives. Believe it or not, this was the most terrifying experience of his life. In isolation he was losing his sanity… his rational hold on reality was dwindling yet for some reason he couldn’t help distant himself from everyone.
The tribe were very overprotective of their members around these times and called out, sounding close. There was no doubt they’d come looking for him, so Morose had an impulsive thought earlier of hiding himself in a foetus position in the rafflesia using the remains of the petal he‘d cut off for his mask to block the view of himself in the stem.
Over the years that passed, alone in just this small area, Morose turned to adolescence. He‘d started to climb trees to sit alone on tall tree stumps, soaking in the bird calls, insect trills and shimmering energy. Over time however, the increasing lack of animals in the general area made this more infrequent, as well as harder to hunt for anything. His weight halved. Skulking himself on these high branches, often in hunger, he would glance down and occasionally see other tribes, as well as his old, come into the forest in threes. One would be savagely murdered by the other two and taken back. Sometimes however, it seemed the more wise knew what was coming and retreated, causing the remaining two, if they never captured the escaped, to attempt to turn on each other.
It was during this time that Morose was gradually introduced to new creatures, which he occasionally glimpsed skulking around. It was peculiar for they seemed very human-like but deranged in appearance and behaviour. They merely just stabbed with thorns every moving living thing they saw without rest. Corpses of any animal imaginable lay about, which provided food at least.
Morose often confronted some of these deformed ‘monsters’ as they became more common but they never replied, just chased him screaming murderously to his enjoyment as he answered his own questions for himself.
On the border between light and dark he routinely sat in the shadows along side his rafflesia plant, which he now referred to affectionately as his ‘pet’. He gazed up watching instead of animals the artistic ripples frequently appearing in the canopies along side the frequent thicker mists that had recently been forming.
A decade must have passed of a very familiar routine. Morose’s mind had sunk irreversibly deeper within itself. The rainforest itself had changed dramatically too. The wild animals - toucans, gibbons, you name it - those creatures that he‘d once sit and watch, had fallen in numbers dramatically. His tribe surprisingly still called for him on occasion but cutting himself off for so long he refused to understand the language they spoke anymore - even his own name. He occasionally wondered, when he had time away from doing nothing, why they still remembered him. This thought would then lead to wonder how long he'd been alone. Very alone. There wasn't any animal or tribesmen passing by at all anymore despite the calls.
The days had turned darker. The silence now was unbearable. It was like being locked in a soundproof room with no entrances or exits. He turned to his old mildewed flute for company which could break the silence. He started to practice wondering if that is how the rainforest would sound if it was lively again. Poor attempts often echoed throughout. He’d lost the skill.
A little while after this gave away his whereabouts, and a creature had soon found him. Instead of killing him, it pinned him down and stitched his mouth up with a curved thorn using weird materials as stitches. From this moment on, couldn‘t talk too much let alone play any instrument. He often smiled instead at anything to express any which way of emotion.
From that moment on, Morose never moved from that spot of the shade of the largest tree around and glared at a small glistening stream that ran into the river he’d once loved. He smiled unnervingly whilst lost in himself in pity. He climbed the nearest tree, and stood proud and laughed as loud as he could.
Continue..? (still in progress)
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