Iglesia ……………………………………… Episode 22

(Iglesia is a serialized novel, published on Tuesdays and Saturdays at midnight ET, you can read all of the episodes by clicking on the tag.)

Previous Episode

When he awoke the next time, he was inside a huge piece of wood. Or maybe a tree. Or something. At least that was what it looked like from here, wherever that was.  He blinked a couple of times, but the view stayed the same. He couldn’t figure out how to change that view. After a minute though, he became more oriented. It seemed that he was lying on his back …and he was staring up at the inside of a tree. It was sort of like looking up the inside a chimney, but a chimney made of what looked like…..some sort of soft light yellow, blond cedar, with patches of slightly darker wood where the wood grains became closer and stacked more together and larger, lighter stretches where they became spaced further apart. The intricate grains of the wood formed designs and patterns of shape and color. It was beautiful and soft and warm and smooth and swirled and swooped in and around burls and knobs and condensed and expanded ….and it smelled damn good too!  

He just lay there for a while, the smooth, blond wood swirls and swoops intoxicated his eyes, the light and shinier red highlights drew him to them and he followed the beautiful patterns and twists and turns and creative curls and loops that only nature could make, and that made man made artistry look simple and crude. Some sort of wonderful fractal or perhaps sacred mathematics was at work that made the eye feel like they were part of the wood or that the wood was part of the eye or that the patterns and swirls within the eyes and the wood were somehow the same pattern and swirl.The surface of the wood was smooth but bare and he wanted very very much to run his hands over it and to put his nose up against it and smell for a long long time the soothing life-filled aroma. He pictured himself running his hands over the smooth and supple and luscious grains and currents of the shapes and bumps as he would rub them over a woman…a woman he was calm and comfortable with, comfortable enough to just spend hours touching and rubbing and feeling the softness and warmth and luxurious smoothness and just …inhaling sensation…without the urgency of lovemaking or conversation intruding. Just ….feeling.

He couldn’t move though…it was like he was not inside his body again….but he was. He was looking out from eyes and smelling and….he heard birds….and water. He was not floating anymore, but he was not in quite in control of his body either. He was not really one with it. So he started to try wiggle his big toe, and then his fingers and so on and he eventually started to feel like he was part of his body again. He raised his head and he could now see the beautiful floor and he could tell he was on some sort of platform…..and dressed in….some sort of soft leather…bucksin? The floor was part of the tree as well, he was in the hollow of tree. A very LARGE hollow….of what had to be a VERY large tree. Someone had leveled and made the floor, flat and smooth. Above him, far above him, the chimney like top of the hollow darkened gradually to oranger and red from the blond of the lower wood, the woodgrain languorously swirling around and swooping up into the higher reaches and at the top a deep rough red. He raised his now more controllable head again and now he could also see between his leather clad toes that there was an opening, a large knothole big enough to easily crawl through. He could tell he was high off the ground and it looked like a very large branch projected out from the hole, big enough to walk on. If he could walk.

He stared again at his toes and invested his consciousness and his will into inhabiting them and then focused his way up his body feeling his ankles and his calves and his thighs and his butt and brought each part back to life and back under his control. He continued up until he had activated his whole body up to his neck. he was quite proud of how alive his neck was now. And he could move his body and was just about ready to master the whole sitting up process…once he rested a bit. He closed his eyes and visualized the entire sitting up process, seeing in his minds eye what each group of muscles would do and how they would react with the other muscles to perform this now complex task, he plotted and planned ……right up to when he fell asleep again.