Blue Water in the Sun

I was walking down a hill beside a silver forest. The trees were straight and thin like leafless aspens close together, but metallic, alien, and inorganic. The grass along the edge of the woods was purple-black. I bent down to look at something curious I can’t recall and then moved on. The path led to a clearing on a bluff. The ground was glossy smooth and orange-brown. Beyond this was the water, bright blue water, rippling in the breeze beneath a blazing sun. To my left beside a creek or cove, I saw the strangest tree with two thick, beveled, horizontal branches positioned like the arms of an oriental dancer. Nothing like the others, it could have been a sculpture, though I knew that it was something almost living, vaguely sinister, and wanted to be seen. I stared at it a while and then moved on.

By then I’d walked to the edge of the bluff. Half-seen also to my left, two tall figures, humanoid in form but rounded, bulbous, half-transparent, dimly there and not-there. I knew that they could see me, though they gave no sign and didn’t move. Nothing that I’d ever want to gaze upon directly, and I didn’t. Below, the water, blue and wide and natural, the only thing in motion, obviously deep. Sunlight, bright light, reflecting off the surface. Whether lake or river, there was no way I could tell.

All of this a dream, of course, and vivid. During a now-forgotten stretch I woke up several times, conscious enough to read the glowing numbers of my bedside clock. Each time I fell back asleep and picked up where I’d been, like walking through a door.