Note: I really hate using Abiword on my Eee. It tends to freeze up when I go into fullscreen mode, or when I open documents with more than a few pages. There has to be some way to avoid this ... But until I find out, it looks like most of the stuff I'll be doing with it will be using a normal text editor.
Anyways, the story:
Imagine a small town – not small in the sense of the word that it covered only a few square miles, but small in the sense that it had a small-town feel to it. Most people knew most other people, but not well enough that any of them would be threatened by the relationship. A bit like a suburb, except that it was almost completely self-contained; in fact, it produced more than its inhabitants could use, mostly in the form of food – vegetables, fruits, grain, and meat. It was one of those special places which grows and grows, until it expands for miles in all directions, but, through careful planning and a fair amount of luck, retains the small-town feel that was mentioned before. Most of the houses were separated from the streets and their neighbors by gardens – not lawns, but actually gardens, producing vegetables, fruits, and shade. In fact, the town was filled with plants. Even the approximate center of it retained the small town feel; indeed, there were a few tall buildings, but the town square was a quite large park, with a large grassy area in the center, surrounded by trees.
Perhaps in part due to the peacefulness of the town, the citizens were very complacent. More like good-natured sheep than anything else, really. Nice sheep, of course, the sort that you would like to know, the sort that you would feel comfortable allowing to stay in your house while you were on a vacation to a less dangerous place, but sheep none-the-less.
And so, when the rock – perhaps it was a meteor – landed in the middle of the trees in the park, no one paid it much mind. Sure, the younger people in the town went to look at it, and took some pictures, and some of the scientists (some of the sheep liked science. They tended to spend a lot of time building elaborate structures of glass, through which they arranged for colored liquids to flow. The fact that they would often drink these liquids suggests that they were juice, or perhaps some sort of alcohol) even went to look at it, and measure it. They spent a lot of time bustling around it – even after everyone else got tired of it – and no one noticed when they went somewhere else. The older people in the town politely looked at the pictures, and said stuff like “Well, things these days!” and “Rocks falling from the sky! What do you think they'll think of next?”
This attitude explains a lot, really.
And so, the youngsters went back to their normal lives, and some of them fell in love with other youngsters – well, they thought that it was love, and who am I to contradict the dead? And so, as was the tradition, they went into the woods to do, well, what youngsters who think they are in love do when no one else is around. Being in love, they did not pay much attention to the changes in the wood – the trees had, somehow, become taller and more sinister (I say more sinister, but, to be honest, they were very friendly trees before), and there were strange, slightly metallic vines on most of the trees, which seemed to move whenever one looked away. And so, coming to what they considered a suitable location for doing, well, what they were going to do, they leaned against one of the trees.
Their parents were a bit worried when their children were not home by midnight, but were not overly concerned. After all, when they were young ... well, let's just say that they understood how easy it can be to loose track of time. When no one saw them the next day, of course, it became time to start looking for them. Neighbors were called, the authorities were called, and, in the sheep-like way, went around asking people pointed questions about what they had been doing on the night of June the 23rd. It was actually May, to the embarrassment of the authorities when someone told them. Eventually, the truth was clear: the two youths in question had last been seen walking in the park, possibly in the direction of the forest, but more probably in the direction of the store which happened to be on the other side of the forest, in each others company. They had not been observed to have left the forest, or to have brought any supplies in with them (well ... not the sort of things any should considered to be essential for survival).
The authorities congratulated themselves on a job well done, and had begun to give themselves the rest of the day off, when they were told that, in fact, the youths had gone in the last night, and, it being almost nightfall, they would probably have come out if they were able to. The authorities privately decided that the youths had probably fallen and injured themselves, and decided the the honor of finding two injured people in a dark forest is greater than that of figuring out that two youths went into a forest to ... well ... and didn't come out. Besides, there could be nothing that they had spent so long doing in the forest that could not be unhealthy in some way.
And so, the authorities secured a supply of lights, blankets, and stretchers, and went into the forest, along with some concerned members of the citizenry. One of them – a bit unhinged after years at war – even brought a few guns, muttering something about guerrilla warfare and “them dirty hippy bastards.”
Put yourself in the shoes of a police officer, well meaning, but having spent so much time in inactivity that your reflexes had been slightly dulled. You are venturing into a dark wood to ... well, you know all that. You go into the wood, with the rest of your squad and some citizens, waving your lights around and calling out for the two missing people. Privately, you hope that they had already been making their way back out of the forest, but had been distracted by something shiny, or possibly each other. You hope to find them quickly, and be able to get out of there as soon as possible. After all, one of the eyes just winked at you!
Wait, eyes? Why the hell does a tree have eyes? And more than eyes, sharp, spiny vines, which you had been walking on for the last few minutes, and which had been making a crunching sound so much like dead leaves, but somehow different, like old, brittle bone – indeed, it would appear that you've just stepped in a corpse's rib cage, a corpse wearing clothing suspiciously similar to that of one of the youths. Looking up at the tree, you see where the eyes had come from: the other youth sits at the bottom of the tree, it's – for it can only be called and it now – eyes bleeding blood, and limbs chained to the ground by vines. And, from the tree, the eyes keep on winking, as you are ripped apart, limb from limb, your life giving blood used to nourish the vines, and the trees, your eyes taken for another tree, and your blood, your glorious blood, giving life and motion to that which had been motionless for so long!
The other members of your party hear your screams, and are just fast enough to see your eyes being plucked out. They die in similar ways, except for one of them, who is able to run, and made it as far as the edge of the woods before he tripped, and, looking up, realized that the grass in the open area was moving towards him, gleaming a dark, red, like fresh blood on green leaves, in the light of the moon, and lived long enough to feel the grass plunge into his body by the way of those of his veins that reached the surface, and begin to pump his blood out.