The Trees are Bleeding

It's 6am and I'm headed to work.

The sky is still dark. There aren't any clouds and there should be stars but they've all gone out. There is ice on the footpath and frost on the grass. It's so cold. Freezing. Where are the stars?

The trees are bleeding. Black, inky, rolling down their leafless corpses as they claw at the sky. Inverted lightning, dendrites sheeting outwards. It's never this cold here.

The bus pulls up and I hurry aboard thanking the driver. He is a sunken, pallid thing. He seems not to notice me, as if I am not there. The heaters aren't on. I shiver uncontrollably. I cannot see my reflection, but it should be there in the windows. All I can see when I look out is the frozen ground and the trees, bleeding. Am I real?

The bus rumbles on. Through the city. It should be waking by now but there is no one. Not even ghosts like me. No souls hurrying to or from. No cars on the road, windshields fogged with the morning.

The sun should be up by now. The golden rays, brilliant, should have pierced the horizon to warm the world and me. All that there is, is black and starless void. Is the world dead?

There is never a dawn. No light nor heat. Just me and the driver, rolling down the lifeless streets. Our Destination is ever-elusive. Can we have one if we never arrive? Is there time if the day refuses to begin?

The trees are outside again. The blood oozes from them thick and viscous. I have been here before, I remember. But it is not the beginning. There are no ends to a circle. No starts to the universe. Just times and places different.

I get off the bus where I got on and wait again. Wait for it to come back around so I can climb aboard. For a time. The sky never wakes. Neither do I. But then maybe I was never really asleep to begin with. Maybe this is all just a dream.

I stand next to the trees bleeding. The sky is clear and dark, but all the stars have gone out. How long there is left isn't a question. Questions have answers. Just like the earth turns and has time and seasons. But there are neither here, in between. Just me, the bus, and the trees. And the cold.

Reviews

[Delmar Cooper]

I thought this was generally good writing. The use of descriptive words, as Charlie mentioned, while thick were intelligently used, for instance there are no adjectives used as modifiers until the ninth short sentence where "black" and "inky" are actually the subject of the sentence. The piece was stylistically a integrated whole.
I agree with Charlie's comment about the Escher stairs. He put it well.

[charlie]

Sounds like a veritable purgatory.
It's interesting how the story gives a sense of frozen time, but couples it with movement all the same, as when the flow of blood oozes from trees, and the bus trundles through town. It isn't a clash of ideas; rather it fits together - almost like Escher's stairs do.

The descriptors come on a little thick and crowded in the beginning. Have you considered putting some space between them?

[AlphaGemini]

Thanks for the review!
This was just a quick piece on a scenario I found myself in that I wanted to put a surreal spin on. I got my start doing partly metaphorical prose landscapes, and I tend to double-tap the adjectives early on to build a picture quickly. Kind of a style thing I guess.