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The Choices We Make

A short story inspired by rapunzel.

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The Choices We Make
dhgate

There once was a boy with wishes to be rich, so day he would work and night he would school with one small break between,

On his break he would walk to his grandmothers who lived like a shrew with dark crimson curtains that hung in the windows blocking out the sun and people alike ,and sharp jagged denchers that soaked in water that would alway catch the silvery light that hung from the ceiling . She was a small ancient women who spoke of the mountains like they were her siblings and the ocean like a catty friend, and on the young boys breaks she would sit him at her small stone table and tell him long stories of witches and wizards and magical beans. Thinking her crazy and all turned around he sat there listening and fighting a frown when one dark day in his cold stone chair her words became honey he straightened his back, and he opened his ears. With a voice holding warning and oozing with fear the woman told him the last story he would ever get to hear,”

in a dark tower covered in vines of emerald and hunter and lemony-lime there lives a woman with long golden hair who mumbles and stumbles and struggles with her ten mile long hair, see she would do anything to get away to be saved from her tower, the people say she sits trapped in her tower trapped by a witch surrounded by bags filled to the stuffed with crystals and green” now up jumps the boy his eyes wide with hope, he begs and he pleads for the grandmother to speak,” where does this tower hide in this world” promising to bring back whatever he found. She sits in her chair more still than a stone, then breaks from her moment and turns in her throne.

“You must go to where three roads meet and there you will stay and take a deep sleep, when you awake you will find there's a fourth road protected by vines. then With this salt and iron you will break through to follow the road for a mile no... two when on your right will be a tree whose branches are woven with long weeping ropes, holding red bodies holding no face or hans that drip with a blood no longer crimson”. The boy shakes in his shoes suddenly cold mabie he should say he’s not sold.” then after you pass through the heart of the tree you will be in a cave dressed like meadow with bushes and ,grass ,and a looming purple grey sky, there you will find there the tower of emerald and yellow green vines with no proper roof and one winding stair, and now that you're there beware you'll be tested and played with but you will survive as long as you don't eat what the fair folk provide, if you pass the test you will leave with a princes and treasure held in one hand.”

The boy levas the den of his grandmother with quick steps and after two days he is on the vine covered path having been a road in the time before when men rode in machines that moved on there own and the sky filled with smoke and smog from large towers. At least that's how grandmother described them, when the sun began its meeting with the horizon he came upon the tree whose sight took the lead from his step and anchored him to his place. The tree was ten stories tall every branch wrapped in rope ,wire, and, hair which each held a person who had been torn to shreds. They had no face or hands to speak of and each held a pale and empty colour, dripping and dribbling from open sores and holes is a thick sappy crimson that probably used to resemble blood hundreds of bodies hung like this all dripping into one space under the tree. In that space had grown a pool dark and deep that showed his reflection from the torch that he carried with no face and no hands this image stirred in him a terrible fear but forward he moved , though now with a slouch. Through the dark trunk he walked with a stagger into a cave of wonder with a ceiling of crystals the color purple and grey reflecting his torch and a buzzing white light hanging from the top of the tower . In the middle of the room stood the tower. Reaching the bottom of the tower he begins to climb when the vines start to close and tighten around his wrists and feet, then begin to pull him up toward a shadowy hole that he imagined was once a window, the boy then passed out after the vines restricted the flow of oxygen to his brain growing tighter and tighter his world growing dark.

Some time later he wakes up hanging from his armpits by ropes above the still red pit under the tree with human eyes he recalls small moments of being dragged and he tastes dirt in his mouth and in his throat, he'd been fed by the fair folk he was stuck, then a long needle came at the end of a vine came and began to dig at the skin in his wrists and the top of his head , he was to become one of the many faceless victims of the long haired princess.



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