On the edge of a dirt road a circle of onion plants breach the grass. Tucked between a river bank scattered with old alder trees and the ramshackled wooden fence of some farmland they sit at the foot of an oak. Swaying in the breeze as a brush of viridian fingers, the sprouts lean towards the brook so as to listen to the rush of water. To smell the aroma of the bleeding rocks that give up their hidden colours and glimmer.
They reach and they reach, but this hollow legged spider of onion sprouts cannot lurch far enough. Rooted in place, the onion is trapped. Or so it should be, however on this morning the dampened soil has dried up. Only ever so slightly but enough to produce a crack in the earth within the halo, giving off the appearance of a midday clock. A crack that itself now reaches out for the stream. A crack that grows, ever so incrementally, from the centre of the onion ring towards its circumference. A crack that is soon joined by a web of many more. Starting small, creeping off of the initial breach, and out into their own chaotic direction. Before long the dirt begins to creak as it convexes upwards into its own little hill. The circus of sprouts buckle outwards, with some folding over in the disturbance. An earthen egg pushes its way out of the ground.
A pale and spherical thing reveals itself. Veined like an onion with a similar papery outer layer. It continues upwards, opening a pair of dirty brown eyes like that of a cow, quickly being dazzled by the sunlight. Dry lips pass by a choker of soil and spit out some particles. The mass is still more. Collar bones like sticks and flesh of earth. Leafy hands and rooted toes. A green man emerges from the ground wearing his onion crown.
The smell of the wind is stifled by a muddy nose but the iron burns through. The onion king knows this smell. He knows the hills and the river. He knows the trees. Not these trees, but their kind. This place is familiar but new, a soft recollection that peels through his oniony head. It’s the hair stuck on the back of your throat or the wind that hits your hand and ties itself between your fingers.
With this beckoning he steps away towards the path, deciding to follow it and the river downhill. If he is where he thinks he could be, home will be this way. Certain landmarks he knew but the trees were missing from a hill, or a boulder was shattered and eroded far more than what he recalled. Something awry sits in the clouded glass of cellulite sat atop this pebble spine, a shell that blocks his periphery filled with the flashing and pulsing summer light. Zoetrope like the sunny rays play around for the king, all while his anthill heart quivers with anxiety, slaloming between the tree trunk colonnades.
If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
Turning the final corner he could see. This sun and the trees had conspired to paint a setting in infinite greens of a small forest clearing. A piece that stuns the onion king, but only for a second, as the display was made to cover over something. Pushing aside the oaken leaf parchment and squinting against the solar paints the king now spied his home. Piles of rocks buried beneath the turf. A myriad of cobble mounds that now held the roots of these great ents. His entire village reduced to catacombs beneath a rhizome far older than he could ever live, yet clearly younger. The crucible where the blood of the stones was collected and hardened, the huts where the young slept, and the nestle where twine was wrapped. All buried beneath the trees.
No mental map the onion man conjured up could guide him through these woods. He knew the location of the stream but its shape was not the same. The mounds would help him orient, but many more were still hidden or maybe even long gone. The place where he had lived for so long, the entirety of his life, was so strange to him now. A new layer of ancient atop his home. A revenant with nothing. The onion king of what?
A stiff and rigid posture bends over in the wind, a formally together looking creature now crooked and hunched. In shock he begins to fall down the steady gradient, onion brain peeling away like a headache and his sticky lips murmuring in an attempt to speak. Between twig ribs the soil in his chest erodes away with chunks of stone falling back into the earth. His arms are limp and his legs crack like rotten branches. Here he begins to fall with his eyes keen on the ground, in particular a sharp looking rock destined for his forehead.
But then he stops. Caught by the arm. David blinks, now staring at a dusty laminate floor. Looking up to his right arm he sees who caught him, a middle aged woman in a black cardigan with some kind of id card in a lanyard around her neck. She looks at him kindly.
“Come on David, your daughter’s here to see you. She says she’s brought some pictures of you and the boys fixing up your old motorcycle at the Isle of White.”
He had no idea what she was referring to but acquiesced anyway. He looks back down the hall in the direction he was initially heading as this woman leads him away. A family sits at a table seemingly filled with anticipation but David doesn’t match this mood. Instead he continues to look back at the window at the end of the hall that lights up the building in viridian from all of the foliage on this summer’s day.