Article: 261280 of talk.bizarre From: Andrew Solberg <andsol@cml.rice.edu> Newsgroups: talk.bizarre Subject: Marquette House nightmares: 3 Date: 1 Dec 1995 01:14:12 -0500 Organization: iTRiBE Mail to News Gateway Lines: 68 Sender: nobody@athos.itribe.net Message-ID: <49m6fk$3h2@athos.itribe.net> X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] X-Provider: iTRiBE, Inc <URL: http://www.itribe.net/> X-Gateway: Posted via the iTRiBE News<->Email gateway X-Disclaimer: iTRiBE, Inc. neither endorses nor assumes any responsibility for the contents of this posting. Status: RO THE LAWN ******** I am weeding the lawn. My son is watching me. He is three years old. He has found a stick and is poking the ground with it. Mostly, though, he is watching me work. The grounds of the house are overgrown. The house is a rambling plantation- style mansion that probably dates back to the Civil War. It backs up on the bayou. Tall shrubs screen the house from inquisitive neighbors. The shrubs have never been trimmed. There is ivy growing up onto the columns of the porch. It has never been trimmed either. There are many weeds in this lawn. Wild onion and spider grass grows profusely here, colonizing the St. Augustine. I must keep the lawn neat. It is part of my job. I have a trowel and a hand rake, and a canvas bag on my belt. I pull the weeds and put them in the bag. There is a large oak along the side of the house, close to the stablehouse. I am weeding close to this tree. My son has grown bored and is looking for something to get into. He sees that the tree has many acorns. He begins to pick up sticks and bits of bark, and throws them at the acorns, trying to knock them down. I watch him play. He is a fair shot. Some of the branches hang low enough for the acorns to be within only a few yards of his arm. He knocks down a few acorns and collects them greedily. The rest he cannot dislodge. He reconsiders his strategy. There is a broom leaning against the house. He runs over and picks it up. Holding it by the bristles, he clumsily bats at the acorns. Again, a few are low enough to be knocked loose. The rest are too high. My son is young and easily discouraged. He begins to cry. I move to comfort him. There is a sudden TCHACK! sound, as six-foot spines of some kind of organic material spring up from the ground in front of me. They look like the quills of some giant porcupine. There is also a creaking noise. It is coming from the oak tree. I see that its limbs are moving. My son is crying and does not notice. I am frantic. I push past the quills. I cannot move my feet. They are buried in the grassy lawn. The lawn has become swampy and is sucking down my legs. My calves swiftly disappear into the grass, as to my thighs. In seconds I am buried up to my waist, utterly unable to move. My son is some ways distant from me. The oak tree reaches down a gnarled limb and scoops my surprised son up off his feet. The limb cradles my son the way a nurse would hold a newborn in one arm. It lifts him up into the lower reaches of the foliage, close to a cluster of acorns. My son recovers swiftly from his shock, and picks a lapful of acorns. The oak limb then gently lowers my boy to the ground. As the branch creaks back up to its usual resting place, my son waves goodbye to it. Then he comes over to me to show me his treasure. I find that the sucking pressure is gone, and I can worm my way free from the ground. I look at the acorns my son has collected and brush off his shirt where the tree has touched him. I realize, now, that my masters do not care about me at all. I am secondary. What they really want is my son. When it comes time, they will make him one of them. There is not a single thing I can do about it. -- This post is COPYRIGHT 1995, Andrew Solberg. All rights reserved. Standard usenet distribution is acceptable; other forms of reproduction or reprinting may be considered in violation of international copyright law. Andrew Solberg is HWRNMNBSOL: andsol@cml.rice.edu, Math Dept., Rice U.