by Abbie Doll
A meditation—
Picture a thicket of bamboo. A towering emerald forest. Nice and dense. Sunlight speckling the stalks.
Embrace the serenity, and breathe. Deep.
She listened, allowing the calming imagery’s swift delivery of reee…lax…ayshun, RSVP’ing yes to the bamboo’s cordial invite into this thriving garden of contemplation. As the green welcomed her into its warm folds, she felt all her pent-up tension dissolve, all the kinks in her knotted mind unwind.
Her brain chucked its trauma, its baggage, all its shackles aside and proceeded to play. To frolic with the unadulterated ease of a newborn. She opted to picture the fresh, ebullient green, not the jaded, greyer shade. Each stalk she stopped to study resembled a growth chart—progress marked with unsteady-yet-sturdy notches every few inches or so—and she couldn’t help but share in their eagerness to grow, to expand. To become something more than they were before. It was beautiful, this whole process of spiritual elevation. Becoming inflated with joy.
Beyond the bamboo’s calming aesthetic, she found the word itself was a meditation of hushed whispers. She spoke it slowly—the first syllable a massive inhalation, holding all the air between her lips until they started to flutter with anticipation…before releasing the second in some drawn-out sigh of long-awaited exhalation.
Bammmm…booooooo. Bammmm…booooooo. Bammmm…booooooo.
Phew. Repetition eroded any meaning the word once carried. Bamboo, bamaboo, bambam, bomb-boo, mambo, boogie, BAM. BOO!
She let the word mingle in her mouth, presenting it with the freedom to pop.
Again and again, she returned to her breath. Focused. Visualizing every last ounce of her embodied stress exiled to this soothing forest of green where a gentle breeze blew the leaves in a whispery rustle, rhythmic with their gentle scratching. Calm, harmonious music streamed, plopping like a warm, spring rain in this sacred backdrop; a bright melody trilled from a bamboo flute, urging her body to melt into the tranquil river of this enticing environment, breaking down all barriers between self and nature and every little undefinable thing in between.
The process brought her peace. Glorious, comforting peace
—until it didn’t.
The guttural roar of a neighbor’s chainsaw broke through the barrier, obliterating her cherished patch of privacy and solitude. Sliced right through it. So long, sweet, sweet bamboo.
She let out a sigh. Threw on a pair of noise-canceling headphones.
It was too late. All the serenity she’d accumulated up until this moment, all the peace she’d managed to achieve, evaporated.
There was no hope of resuming the process now. Not when the once-serene landscape sat ruptured beyond repair.
Just then, a panda barged into the folds of her disgruntled imagination and started chomping away at the splintered fragments. So much for her perfect personal peace pasture. The creature’s obnoxious mastication gnawed straight through her sanity like squishy maggots feasting on decay. The delicate whispers were all but gone, replaced by slimy slithering and impossible-to-ignore crunches.
Determinedly, she continued her endeavors, taking a series of deep breaths, chasing after her lost hush. Breath after breath after breath, she strived to resume relaxation—strived to re-arrive at her center, but this turbulent current kept driving it further and further away through some tangled jungle maze.
The next inhale dropped another unpleasantry in her lap—the gag-inducing stench of lit tobacco. It flooded her nostrils like a raging river, irritating her throat with its urgent rapids. The hint of smoke triggered unwelcome imagery from childhood—snippets of ashtrays crammed with powdery debris, ashy dandruff peppering every exposed surface with its grey-on-grey confetti, all these smushed nubs and stubs jutting out of the rubble pile at random precarious angles like loose body parts in the aftermath of a city-crumbling earthquake. She studied the disastrous scene, sifting through the remains, searching for anything salvageable but came away empty, feeling as though her fingers were caked in cremated lung dust.
The bamboo setting dispersed. She watched in muted terror as it vanished in a sea of furious flames, surrounded by smoky tendrils seeking to spread.
Now in lieu of bamboo, smoldering remains. A murky sea of smoke-stained teeth. Grinning at her, mockingly. A whole shore lined with rotten fragments of these disembodied teeth. No shells, only teeth. No water, only tar. Thick, thick, thick, destined-to-drown-in tar.
The tide was coming in…
…corrosive waves lined with bile foam.
Fast approaching…
…she gulped—
Category: Featured, Short Story