Monday, September 16, 2019

Forest of Evil




painting by Behshad Arjomandi.


Forest of Evil

In the darkness of the forest near Vlad’s castle,
the stench of evil has saturated the tender bark
of aspen and birch. The trees became barren.
Last Fall, as the leaves dropped, they were the
last signs of life

The bubbling brook that fed the trees was
poisoned, because of the thousands of corpses
dumped into the creek near the Castle. The water
turned gray, the pebbles turned red. When Spring
arrived the trees could not blossom. Their bark
became black with a deathly ooze.They began to
lean over, their spines broken. Their spindly 
branches intertwined into a bulwark of sharp 
brambles.

First the birds left, except for those who feast on
carrion. Then the animals fled. Soon villages were
abandoned. Years later people asked what had
happened in these woods, but no one knew the
answer because those memories were left here
with the trees.


Glenn Buttkus

Prosery

Posted over at dVerse Poets Pub

6 comments:

Jade Li said...

Best description of cursed I ever read. What a tragedy for the area.

Merril D. Smith said...

An evil place indeed! I suppose there are such place--though sometimes people willingly forget the evil that happened there, or pretend it never happened at all.

Truedessa said...

This is definitely a haunting tale. What indeed happened there?

Kim M. Russell said...

Nicely done, Glenn, from the stench of evil to the poisoned bubbling brook, you gave the area and the Castle a devastating character.

brudberg said...

The only thing good about this story had to be that Vlad will vanish when there's non left to impale.. the alliterations in the description made it all the better.

Linda Lee Lyberg said...

Wow- a truly haunting story- well done!