Trees in the Night

Sam felt like she had been hit by a truck. She groaned. Her head ached and every bone in her body screamed. Her memory was fuzzy; what had she been doing?

The bakery. She had stopped at the bakery for a banana nut muffin. Then… a car hit her? That couldn’t be right, but it sure felt like that’s what happened.

Sam lay on something hard and cold. She squirmed, wincing at the ridges digging into her back and legs. She felt odd, like her body was tilted. It certainly didn’t feel like the street outside the bakery.

She slowly opened her eyes, squinting into the sun. No, not the sun. It wasn’t bright enough.

A star?

She widened her eyes. It had to be a star. A very large one, radiating gold and white light around its edges. Sam had never seen such a large, or bright, star before.

She let her eyes wonder around the sky--was that the sky? Layers and layers and layers of clouds, swirls of blacks and blues and yellows? She shivered. It was beautiful, really, but she hadn’t remembered seeing so many clouds above the bakery. Or that many stars. They were everywhere, blinking against the clouds.

Perhaps a storm had rolled in.

After the bakery… after the bakery, she had gone for a walk. Yes, that was right. The avenue swarmed with bustling people in business suits, coffee cups in their hands. Skyscrapers lined the street, which was filled with honking yellow cars.

Something tickled her mind. She had walked along the street, munching on the muffin… and entered a building with glass doors.

Sam massaged her temples with the tips of her fingers. The image of the building burned into her mind. Panels of glass, gray walls. Square upon squares.

She sighed. She supposed she felt a bit better. She didn’t feel like she’d gotten into a fight with a rhinoceros anymore, at least. So, she sat up, and looked around.

Sam gasped. She was on top of a roof! How did she get up there? Why was she up there? That didn’t seem like something Sam would do; she liked reading at the library and drawing in her notebook, not running around on roofs.

She appeared to be sitting on a cottage in the middle of a small village. Cobbled streets crisscrossed between the homes and candles burned in the windows. Even in the darkness, Sam could see the smoke curling out of the chimneys. The smell of cooked turkey wafted past her nose and she took a deep whiff. She noticed a church a few cottages away.

It was all very beautiful and quaint. Sam just wished she could remember how she got there.

She could see an outline of mountains in the distance, and something odd blocking them. Something big. Sam squinted and felt her heart stutter.

Not one thing, but many. Trees––dark, enormous trees that stretched toward the sky. Their gnarled branches were every shade of brown. The tips of their trunks may as well have touched the top of the earth.

They were beautiful, thought Sam. But something didn’t feel quite right.

Sam shivered at the sudden sense of dread that washed over here. She’d seen those trees before, somewhere. She closed her eyes and suddenly remembered the cry of her mother, kneeling beside a casket. Everyone wore black. And the trees were everywhere, pressing in, swallowing her….

She had to get out of here, now.

The bakery. The building. What had come next? Sam drew her knees to her chest and pressed her head against them. The walls in the building had been strange--decorated with squares. Colorful squares--

“Wow!” said a voice behind her.

Sam whipped around so fast she almost fell off the roof. There, behind her, hung a window in midair. How strange.

It was rectangular and huge, much taller than Sam. The window didn’t show the swirling clouds, or the other roofs, or anything that should have behind it. Instead, it showed a bright room with paintings hanging on the walls. A man with glasses stood in front, staring right at her.

There! That was it--the room she had been in, the last thing she remembered. All those colorful squares--they were paintings! But why was the room in a window? Who was the man?

“Incredible,” he breathed. He had gray hair and the shadow of the beard.

Sam shakily rose to her feet and raised a hand.

“Hello!” she said, cautiously waving to the man. “I’m Sam.”

He said nothing and continued to stare.

“Can--can you help me, sir? I’m not sure where I am….”

The man furrowed his eyebrows and took a phone out of his pocket, still giving no sign he had heard her.

“Can you hear me, sir?” said Sam, raising her voice to a shout. “Can you hear me?”

He started typing, paying her no mind.

Sam sighed in frustration. She was really starting to panic; the stars may have shined bright, but it was still nighttime, and she needed to get back home. The trees seemed to get larger. She could feel them creeping toward her, closer, closer….

“Excuse me,” the man said, looking up from his phone and beckoning to the side. “Are you sure this is the original?”

A young man with a blue uniform and a name tag stepped into the frame. Sam squinted. BRIAN, in big letters, filled most of the name tag. A tiny line underneath read The Museum of Modern Art.

Sam smacked her hand against her forward. Of course! It was Saturday, and she did as she always did on Saturdays: grabbed breakfast at the bakery and explored the museum in the afternoon.

“Of course,” said the museum worker, rolling his eyes. “Why do you ask?”

“Huh,” said the man with the glasses, showing the museum worker his phone. “But this says Van Gogh didn't paint any girls on roofs in Starry Night.”

He pointed at Sam just as the trees swallowed her.