Excerpt: The Black Bird and the Queen

The following is an excerpt from my most recent story, "The Black Bird and the Queen."  As I mentioned in my previous post, this story represents something of a departure from my usual style.

If you like this, and would like to see more of my writing, you can drop me a line at me [at] adamdistefano [dot] com.

 

    I took a first step tentatively into the forest.  I don't know what I was expecting, but the forest was a forest like any other.  The ground was firm.  There were dried twigs and branches scattered about.  It had not rained in some time. 
    The bird kept hopping from tree to tree at a quick pace, occasionally looking back to see if I was following in that human-like fashion.  I had to move quickly to keep up, but the bird, which probably could have flown at a much quicker pace never did so.  It was waiting for me, but at the same time not slowing down.
As I moved, I made sure to always keep the bird in my sight.  The evergreen branches caught in my light jacket, and a couple of times, I thought it might rip, but I kept forging ahead, never stopping to look at the jacket for fear of losing the black bird from sight.
    I had lost all sense of time since I'd gotten stranded.  How long had I been following the bird?  It could have been a minute, or it could have been an hour.  I had no idea.  I was fixated on the black bird.  Suddenly, the bird stopped, and turned to face me.  Its eyes pierced my flesh.  There was communication in that stare.  It was trying to tell me something, only I did not understand.  I had never tried talking to a bird before.
    Again, time passed and I was unaware of it.  Seconds ticked by as I stared into the obsidian pools of the black bird's eyes, completely unaware.  The bird opened its beak, and I expected it to caw like a crow or...  what sound did a raven make?  Instead, no sound escaped, and its beak snapped closed as if the black bird had reconsidered, and in a mad flutter of wings it flew straight up.  I scrambled to find enough room between two trees to look upwards, but by the time I found a good vantage point, the black bird had flown beyond the canopy.  For the first time I realized that the trees surrounding me were no longer just evergreens.  In fact, none of them were evergreens.  Tall, leafy trees with barely any low hanging branches surrounded me.  I knew as little about trees as I did about birds, and so I could not name them for what they were.  I thought that maybe some of them were oak, but in truth, all I knew of oak was the colour in the IKEA catalog. 
    With no low-hanging branches, there was a good amount of space between each tree's trunk.  Not so much that a car could drive through here, but enough that a few men could walk abreast without catching their clothes on anything.
    Above, however, the branches and leaves of each tree intermingled with its neighbour's all coming together to form what looked like a solid canopy.  The sky was not visible.  If it were not for the few rays of sunshine that shone through, the forest would be completely dark.
At the thought of being in a dark forest, I was gripped by fear.  A chill ran up my spine, and I shuttered.  I spun around in place, looking for the direction I had come from, so that I could retrace my steps.
    Every direction looked exactly the same.  There was no beaten path that I had followed.  I had been blindly following the black bird.  The ground was too dry to leave footprints in, and I was hardly a woodsman.  It wasn't as if I could track my own way back to the road.
    My breathing accelerated, and breaths became harder to come by.  I struggled for all of my air.  Was this a panic attack?  I had never had a panic attack before.  Frantically, I searched through all my pockets until I found my cellphone, which had been in the same pocket I always kept it in.  I checked the screen.  Obviously, no more service here than at the road.
    I knew I had to calm down and think rationally.  I closed my eyes, and consciously slowed my breathing.  It was easier to catch my breath this way.  My heart was still beating quickly. 
    I had read a novel, or seen a movie where trackers looked for broken twigs to indicate the way the thing they tracked was going.  I crouched down and searched the ground for broken twigs.  There were plenty, but there did not appear to be any specific indication of what direction they led in.  Twigs were naturally just broken, or there had been plenty of other things or people tramping through the forest breaking twigs.  In either case, the search for broken twigs got me nowhere.
    The thought of climbing the trees occurred to me, but there were no branches hanging low enough for me to get a start.  I tried to do a quick mental calculation.  The road ran west, so when I headed into the forest, I had been heading North.  If i had ran in a straight line, I would need to go South to find my way back to the Mustang.  Unfortunately, I had no compass.  I thought that perhaps I could read the direction based on the position of the sun in the sky, but the canopy of trees blocked the view of the sun, and shadows were ubiquitous.
    I felt resigned, and I slumped against a tree trunk and let out a long slow breath.  I was no longer hyperventilating.  I was not panicked.  How had I gotten myself into this mess?  By following a bird?  I deserved to die alone in the forest.  It would have been natural selection.  Someone as stupid as me should not live to contribute to the gene pool.  Part of me considered blaming the black bird, and then I thought that I truly had lost my marbles.  I was blaming a bird?
     As i sat there, resigned and wallowing in self-loathing, I rested my head against the tree trunk with my eyes closed.  I opened my eyes to look out into the forest once more, and then closed them again.  A split-second later, my brain registered what my eyes had seen and they popped open again.  I saw only the forest as it had been when I first stopped chasing the black bird, but there had been more.