Tree Sprites Part 2

She woke to the sounds of sirens. In the distance coming towards her. A great big noisy rush of metal. Most of nature would be scared by the noises and the speed of these big brutal beasts but it was a reassurance to the Human who had just crashed her own rush of metal.

She heard a voice telling her that help would be with them soon. She couldn't see much, her eyes trying to make sense of the world outside her pounding head were failing at their task. She could smell winter with the occasional nasty scent of burning chemicals and she could feel a big pain in her leg. Her sense of memory was good. She knew exactly where she was and how it happened and that there was a strange creature sitting in her lap.

The strange creature sitting in her lap. Of course we know it's a Tree Sprite and that it's asleep because it's so warm in the car.. but her lap felt icy cold where it lay. There was no pressure where it was resting in her lap but just a very icy feeling almost to the point of discomfort. She reached her hand out to touch the Tree Sprite and then she was suddenly unconscious again.

She didn't forget about the Tree Sprite because she had lived and it had hurt her, meaning that she would still have the memory. However, since there has never been evidence of the Tree Sprite the memory would usually be ridiculed and quashed by those who believed the Human to be 'mad'. The Human would usually assume the madness to be true and would dismiss and distrust their own memory which often led to the Human later gaining the experience of Dementia since they would no longer even trust the truth.

So we now have the female in a hospital recovering from a knock to the brain and being told to believe that she had imagined or dreamt about the creature she told everyone about because she was "clearly in shock and her mind had made it up to make the pain of the 'cuts' in her leg less of a problem". We of course know this to be untrue and that she knew it too. It was very exasperating for her.

BUT. The ambulance staff had put the "strange ornament" among the Humans belongings at first believing it to be a piece of ethnic tat but shortly thereafter forgetting that it had even existed!

To be continued...

Tree Sprites Part 1

The grass was crispy. Cars were glittery and the paths were white. It was frosty. Actually it was -3 degrees and very cold. The perfect condition for the Tree Sprite.
Young and bouncy they were as they only awoke if the temperature was -3 at 0600 hours on a Tuesday morning. Now of course this is very specific and so very rare that Tree Sprite would sleep for the rest of the time. Not everyone knows this but sleep does keep one youthful and the Tree Sprites slept so long that they were almost going back in time!

Very few humans see the Tree Sprites and those who do will soon forget, unless they make you hurt. It was one of the things Tree Sprites had developed over the years of sleepy evolution and fast human settlement to keep them safe. Dead or dying people were the only people so far to have been able to describe the Tree Sprite and so they were thought to not exist, to be witchcraft or more recently, a medicine induced hallucination. But this was the day when that changed.

She was driving home from work. It was 06:07 and she'd been driving for an hour when she entered her home town and saw the white paths, glittery cars and crispy grass. It was very cold but not in the car. Thinking about breathing in a nice fresh breath of ice cold air she pressed the button to make the window come down and the air bit into her like a short sharp shock. So did the Tree Sprite. It was about 6 inches tall and had long limbs about two thirds the size of it's body. It looked very human except it was twiggy. She later supposed that's why they survived for so long sleeping in the trees for years on end because it was camouflaged. 

But yes, the Sprite. Almost as soon as the window had opened in it flew bouncing on the steering wheel and landing in the humans lap. It bit her quickly and sharply on the leg. She cried out in shock, swerved the car a little bit and merged the bonnet with a lamp post.

Looking into her lap the Human saw a Tree Sprite curled up into a little ball and fast asleep. It wasn't -3 in the car.

To be continued...