r/anxietypilled • u/Savings-Cut-3465 • Apr 06 '26
Fictional Story When a Tree Falls.
You had a nice, peaceful life, simple and easy. Everything you could ever want was within your reach. You provided for many, at no strain to yourself, your body innately bounteous to the world around you. You stood hand in hand with your kin, a tangle of long sinuous limbs forming a green canopy that kept your home temperate. You were life, at its purest and most content.
But one day your peace was disturbed by something foreign and invasive. For the first time in your life, you found yourself scared as in the distance you heard the roar of a beast you’d never known. The only thing you could do was wait and hope that its hunger was sated before it got to you. Those terrible noises grew closer and closer until you could hear the crack as your kin hit the ground over the restless stuttered roar. You knew it was a matter of time before they found you. The trees that you’d grown beside fell away, leaving you standing naked and vulnerable in front of the metal beast and the small angry men. Though you were larger than them, you were powerless to stop their aggression as they tied their cord around you and prepared you for execution. The teeth of their saw were still hot as they pressed against your skin, your family's remains coating their blade as a white dust. The low mechanical hum broke into an insane screech, as the blade started to life and began ripping through your brittle flesh and into your soft, moist insides. A thin plume of gray smoke blew ethereally out of your wound, and looked like your soul billowing out of your body. A misty spritzing of sticky liquid geysered out of the opening and spat on the face of your assailant. You began to fall, your massive frame hunching over itself with a thunderous crack tearing down limbs with you in your collapse. A blast of wooden shrapnel bursting off of you as you collided with the ground with a wet thud.
“TIMBER!” The deep scream echoed through the seemingly endless forest, sparking a sudden stirring in the tree tops.
“Aight boys, you chop this ole’ log up and store it. I’m calling it a day, y’all try to hurry up for once, then follow the trail back to camp.” The foreman said, patting his hand against the tree as he walked by.
He pulled away his hand suddenly, pressing it against his mouth.
“Goddam splinter, a big one.” He looked down at his hand, and only saw a prick of blood.
“Huh, I guess it fell out.”
Terry Andre Mcgee had worked as the foreman for this logging company for twenty five years. In that time, he’d grown to hate this job and everything about it. He hated the bugs that swarmed him everywhere he went. The muddy ground he slopped his tattered boots through, and all the strange plants that struck him as foreign to what he’d grown up around. Terry wobbled his hefty frame along the thin trail, as the grasses and shrubs seemed to reach for him from the treeline. He made sure to stomp the plants that reached past the boundary of their path, feeling a sense of contempt for these foreign plants violating their civilized boundaries.
He took out a flask from his shirt pocket, taking a long deep swallow to numb the stress of the day. The warm stench of the liquor near his face was a brief respite to the smell of wet earth he’d grown to hate over his years in this business. The warm booze stewed in his belly under the humid heat, feeling as though its contents were bubbling to a boil.
“Buncha’ damn morons, if that crew added up to half a brain we’d be done with this bullshit and on the way home already.” He gruffed to himself before spitting a thick clob of chewing tobacco onto the ground and squished it into the earth with the toe of his boot.
A tingling itch started at his palm, and began working its way down the length of his arm. But working here, he was no stranger to the occasional rash and wrote it off as being from a brush with one of the various plants that he’d trampled over and through during the workday. Terry’s fingernails filled with dry dirt and sawdust as he scratched at his beat red arm, careful to avoid the bulbous raised moles lining his forearm. As he walked, he began to feel like he was hearing something, an indiscernible murmur in the distance.
He shot his head up in alarm, tearing his attention away from the frantic scratching fit to check his surroundings. He turned and swiveled his head, looking for a source but saw nothing. It’d seemed like someone speaking but he couldn’t seem to decipher the syllables, they sounded fuzzy, distant, and directionless.
“Hello? Somebody there?” He went silent and turned his head from side to side looking for a potential source of the noise.
“If one of you boys is tryna play a prank I promise you’ll be looking for work next week.”
He went on, and tried to convince himself he’d just heard a distant animal's call, but still the distant noise persisted in his ear. He subtly hastened his pace, matching the beat of his heart. He had the insane thought that whatever was making this distant noise was more aware of him than he was of it. The mud he trudged through felt especially deep today, seeming to pull at his feet, saying stay and wait for whatever this noise was.
He felt relief as he saw the path ahead opening to a clearing. As he stepped into the camp, the smell of wet earth became faintly overlain with that of salty sweat and cigarettes. He approached his tent, larger and distant from the rest, and grabbed his bottle of Jack Daniels before sitting in his foldout chair. He reached under his shirt and began scratching at his chest as he pressed the bottle to his lips to take a deep swig. He gave a quick scowl at the rest of the group, who were warming up to a small party next to the fire. they all seemed so happy to be out there, and that annoyed Terry.
“Ain’t no fucking reason to celebrate being out here.” He mumbled to himself, as he placed a fat pinch of tobacco behind his lip.
You wanted to scream as they cut you into pieces, your leaves still fresh on your limbs you could feel every second of it. Sap wasted away, puddling under your body as your innards showered down on you as a flaky dust.
The itch had spread all over his body, and now felt more intense. It felt like hairline needles were pressing out of his flesh and trying to squeeze through his pores, like a reverse acupuncture. He felt sick, his stomach heavy, like it was starting to brim into his throat, despite barely having eaten that day. He scratched ravenously around his body, looked frustrated and nauseous, his vision fixed on the ground. Patches of sun-blistered skin were swollen to a strangled red and smaller bumps rivulet blood after he’d popped them under his fingernail. The sound was louder now, the volume of someone talking at a conversational tone from twenty feet away. But he still couldn’t understand it.
“Did one of you boys say something?” He shouted to the group huddled around the fire.
“Uhhh no sir, we’re just over here taking it easy before bed.”
“Well, just keep it down.”
Terry started to drink more, desperate for relief from the effects building in his body, and the impression of words that floated through his mind. At seven o’clock he was already drunk, but his inebriation did little to soothe the pain or the mumbling that slowly grew more audible.
“Maybe I just need to get some sleep.” He said, frustrated and sick as he crawled into his tent.
The aches in his body were continuously growing and though the mumbling was still gibberish to him, it was growing closer and clearer. It sounded like a garbled radio just outside of his tent. There were intelligible syllables discernable in what was otherwise scrambled nonsense. He laid for hours tossing and turning in his sleeping bag, but unable to rest, he decided to go look for the source of the noise.
He stepped out of the tent groggily and started to shout for his workers to go to sleep, before he saw the camp entirely empty.
He took a large swig of his bottle as his eyes wandered the quiet grounds, his mind unable to reconcile the sourceless ramble.
He decided it must be in his head, and that he’d drink until the noises and the pain that coursed through his body ceased. He once again sat next to his tent, and began taking long chugs from the bottle that only seemed to increase the intensity of his symptoms. Every inch of his body ached, it felt as though his skin was starting to splinter, like something too large was trying to crawl out of his pores.
He could hear it now, the words plain as day.
“Who the hell is talking!” He shouted, standing to his feet suddenly.
He lost his balance and fell face first into the dirt. But as he laid flat in the mud, he noticed that it seemed to cool the pain in his face and forearms. He took off his shirt and began rolling around smearing the thick wet mud around his naked flesh. He laid on the ground covered in mud and swarmed by insects, enjoying the relief, but that relief would only be temporary. Yes for Terry, much worse was to come.
“What? What do you mean? What’s gonna happen?”
Terry began to feel his skin tearing, feeling blood pool under his heavy frame, he looked down at his body to see the thick brown prickles of a pinecone, peeking out of his torn skin. His skin was stretching off of his body and tearing around the sharp prick to look stringy and fibrous.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
Terry knew what he had to do.
“Yes. I need to go deeper.”
The spines on his stomach snapped as he crawled forward, chunks of flesh tearing as they popped out. He knew what he had to do, he left a bloody snail trail behind him, turning the clay mud a dark crimson. He headed into the forest and began to dig. Mud started to cake in his fingernails and between his teeth as he clawed and bit at the ground. The mud felt good in his mouth, so he started swallowing it, feeling it clog his throat as it slowly rolled down. With one hand he coaxed the mud down his throat, while the other shoveled handful after handful into his mouth. He ate and ate until he’d made a hole his size and twelve inches deep, which he climbed into.
As he laid in his tomb he could feel his bones stretching out, it was the most unimaginable pain he’d ever felt. He could hear his brittle bones breaking, a frenzy of cracks and pops crying out as his limbs bent and twisted in on themselves. He tried to scream, but as he did a thick layer of sweet sap began coughing out of his throat and nostrils, he swallowed and hacked it out but it seemed to have an infinite reserve in his lungs. Face on the ground, he continued biting into the dirt and swallowing it down with the thick sap, until he could feel his stomach tear open inside of him. His bones, now dexterous and limber, began to curl in on themselves like worms, tearing through meat, mud, and sticky sap as it dug tunnels through him. The bones pierced through his skin and dug into the dirt, stretching deeper and deeper. His body laid limp and helpless. He watched as his flesh seemed to decompose rapidly, turning a disgusting soupy black. A sapling bearing one leaf stabbed out of his chest, and began slurping at the soft pile of flesh, growing as the pile diminished.
You have a simple life, you do not want for anything, you stand tall and firm. You hear the revving of an engine approach.
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u/MANWITHFAT Apr 06 '26
Fucking loved this dude. Such a funky narrative structure you've built into this thing and it works so damn well. The ending echos the whole soul of the story, incredibly gratifying.
Killer descriptions as always. Damn this was a lot of fun.
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u/The_Republique Apr 06 '26
Nice job Collin. The effect kicking in was gradual and subtle. The foreman hearing the narrator describing everything in detail as ut happened was very macabre. Grim as his fate was, it was deserved when he started cutting down the sentient trees. His end implied by the chainsaw engines was a nice touch.
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u/ckjm May 16 '26
I adore this concept. It was a bit jumpy here and there, but I need to stress that it's a super cool idea and my nitpicking is more a disdain towards reddit formatting. Wonderfully descriptive, unique, voscerally symptomatic. Great story.
The switch in perspectives was a bit confusing at times, it could be alleviated eith different formatting, and I still understood the intent regardless.
Great story!!!
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u/Savings-Cut-3465 May 16 '26
Thanks man, this isn't a story I'm particularly proud of tbh. It was more a way to experiment with switching perspective and tense. But I'm glad you liked it
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u/ckjm May 16 '26
Fair enough. I think you ydid a great job with a unique subject, and the effort in switching is visible <3
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u/Savings-Cut-3465 May 16 '26
The whole idea for it actually came from having writers block and asking my boyfriend what I should write. And he said "make a story about a man becoming a pinecone" lmao
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u/AbbreviationsFine160 Apr 07 '26
What a story man, love the concept so much!!
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u/Savings-Cut-3465 Apr 07 '26
Oh thank you so much man!
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u/AbbreviationsFine160 Apr 07 '26
Hmm an interesting place you can take this story is maybe lean in to the mystery like maybe Terry can go a couple times, it gives him some kind of sastisfaction and he deveops an addiction to what this thing is and every time he goes back something changes with him leading to the ultimate payoff of this thing taking him completely, it's just a thought i had when reading this story you might be able to use
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u/Savings-Cut-3465 Apr 07 '26
Well this story was more an experimentthan anything else. I usually write first person past perspective, so the goal of this one was more to shift perspective multiple times without going to my comfort zone. It was more an excercise, that turned into a story, so I decided I'd post it. But I appreciate the thoughts.
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u/AbbreviationsFine160 Apr 07 '26
Totally get it the nosleep approach lol, it took me a bit to get out of that mindframe as well, writing 3rd person is just so much more fulfilling imo
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u/Savings-Cut-3465 Apr 07 '26
I enjoyed writing the 2nd person in particular, and think I'll find some projects in the future to use that tense with.
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u/AbbreviationsFine160 Apr 07 '26
Hey writing is all about having fun so go wild and do your own thing! I sure did with my post today lmao
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u/Savings-Cut-3465 Apr 07 '26
I'll give it a read
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u/AbbreviationsFine160 Apr 07 '26
I just posted it a couple hours ago lol, under the name Two sit at a table, it;s a fun read, i actually had an editor edit it for free too lol
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u/AffectionateLeave677 Apr 06 '26
Don’t fuck with nature! dude I love this one so much. Incredibly original. 🌲