Notes: every part is one hundred words each. There are three allusions, try to spot them all!
The hazy afternoon light has a way of illuminating through the autumn foliage, setting the edges of leaves aflame. The forest glows, now, at the most opportune and inopportune time possible. The world is dying, achingly.
An apple sits on the forest floor, unbruised and untouched. You pick it up, examine it. It is the shade of red the red maples are, a brilliant colour that serves it no real benefit. It seems almost fake.
You bite into it. It’s sweet, tangy, almost the Platonic ideal of an apple.
The birds do not sing; a rustling gathers in the leaves.
You end up missing when autumn turns to winter. You only realize when the first snow falls, but even then, the solstice has already passed. You watch the snow, that which eats all your words and leaves only the quietest quiet.
Distantly, as if from a dream, you hear laughter; children playing, you think. It won’t be long until the snow melts, the green grass appears again. If winter comes, spring cannot be far behind.
You watch the snow, nonetheless, and hope you aren’t dreaming. Winter is the time of death, yet still there is life when the crocuses bloom.
Spring creeps in the way it always does. Slowly, and then one day you wake up to find new growth on the trees, flowers blooming, and the sun shines golden again, unobscured by clouds.
In the spring, you remember that in order to die, you must grow first. In a couple weeks, the flowers will fall off, the leaves will shed as the world prepares to sleep again in autumn.
For now, though, the cycle of the seasons continues, and if you tilt your head just right, strain your ears a little, you can almost hear the breaking of dawn.
The peak of life, after the blooming of spring and before the dying of autumn, is Summer, the last season to make its way. It feels hollow, where nothing bursts in growth, where nothing dies. It is temporary, in the way Sundays anticipate the coming Mondays.
It follows spring, yet you can never tell exactly when. The butterflies skitter, the birds call. Dawn is early, dusk is late; so time stretches on.
The autumn will come, not all at once, but little by little. Not the rising sun but the setting moon, not a lit match but the growing grass.