This is a dry run. One of many. I know the way so well I can find in the pitch black of night. I have before. I won’t last that long tonight, at least I don’t think. But I don’t know, I never know. Maybe this is not the dry run. Maybe this is the real thing. I can’t know. I don’t know my future self as well as I should. In truth I’m a little afraid of him. I have no assumptions on who he will be when I meet him in the depths of the grass.
Young ingrown tree arms and spiny weeds cut into bare skin. After a few minutes, the small pains dull and dissipate. My body is an unfeeling vessel, I am a floating apparition disappearing from the realm of man. Were I to turn my gaze above the top of the prairie, I might see the twin glinting silos marking my only point of reference to the world behind. But I won’t tonight. Tonight I’ll go as far as I can to meet those who dwell in the other place.
When my grandfather told me stories about the tall grass, about the hands that emerged from the ground to snatch up tasty little children, I never thought he believed what he said. But the stories were larger than the words of an old man, the words used carried breath and held blood-running veins through them, no matter how dead they appeared when unfurled from behind the lips of an unbeliever. From a very young age, I knew I could find the truth if only I was willing to search for it.
If only I wasn’t such a coward I would have met them by now.
Tonight is only another dry run. I felt it before I even entered the grass. I wouldn’t have the nerve to wait them out, to sit and contemplate the process before fear won out. Still I have to press on. I want only to see if there truly is depth to this muted flat plane we walk upon. As the sun exists only as radiating bursts across a purple, I almost to the spot where the brush is at its thickest, where the marsh is met and passage is the most difficult.
Soon I will meet the me that exists in this place.