Stacy--Part Thirty-Four

Splog # 124

Thirty-Four

 

   Stacy glanced behind herself, where the cauldron was no longer in sight, and even searched the sky overhead, rolling her head through a wide arc, in her confusion at the beast's sudden disappearance. She looked back to where she had last glimpsed the animal. There was nothing anywhere in sight. The tiger had simply vanished. Before vanishing, it had first leaped through the air as it had when it jumped into and out of the cauldron. She made an effort to recreate what she had just seen in vivid detail. The spring of the back paws and the stretching forth of the front which then took the brunt of the landing. When the tiger came to the earth, it had ceased its forward motion and turned back in her direction. Then it had simply dropped out of sight, as though laying itself down in tall grass. But there was no tall grass for it to fade into. The grass all around her was fairly short. It could have been mowed within the last week, she thought. Well, maybe the last two weeks.

   She shook her head and began mentally gearing herself up to rise and resume a walk that would be a little more difficult than it had started out, when she caught a touch of red from the corner of her eye. A couple of feet to the right, her eyes came to rest on the apple she'd been casually munching before the tiger had panicked her into the dash which had ended so precipitately. This thought distracted her from the apple and she turned around to discover what had caused her tumble. She remembered stepping onto something that had thrown her off balance. Almost directly behind her there was a mound of loose dirt that had been pounded by a footprint which had then blossomed into a skid mark. But she was then distracted from her distraction by the peculiarity of the behavior of the aforementioned apple. She blinked her eyes a couple of times, shook her head and turned back to find out if she had actually seen what she thought she had seen. She looked directly at the apple with a quizzical expression on her face and watched it slowly and jerkily rock back and forth as it lay in the grass. She tilted her head slightly on her neck, as if to get a different perspective on the strange sight that presented itself to her. The apple seemed to be attempting to roll itself back towards her. It would rise a bit or turn a bit or roll over, each movement being so miniscule as to hardly register on her sight, but all together producing an effect that couldn't be denied.