Story adaptation of the poem Once

 
I just remember the tarmac getting closer and the horrifying splits of my opening helmet. I can see the swollen road a few meters away; I'm laying, on my back at the tree-line to some woods, or a forest maybe. I can see my motorbike further in the woods all ravelled after ricocheting off the trees. I can't move. Nothing. I can turn my head and move my face, but everything else is limp; dead. As useless as my Suzuki. I focus on my breathing and trying to move my fingers because if I don't the ground has me. I can't feel anything except a strange, cold ache moving over my lips, then face, then the trees! The trees seem to be moving and hoarding around me! The trees turn black quickly, so does the sky. Everything is black and warm. So quiet and new, I feel new.
I seem to be back on my feet, but everything's still black. There's a soft, dry ground underfoot and I know this because I am bare. The longer I walk the more my vision returns. The light is pale like gaps between shadows, under a larger shadow. I can eventually make out some thick, long poles which I assume are trees. Lots of trees, and never one in front of me. The ground seems to have gone from a loose, awkward moss to a more compressed, springy path. No stones or branches laying on the ground. Just a silent drone, and trees. There is an opening in the trees; a circle, and in the middle, is one huge tree with the girth of a blue whale. Its bark is a smooth, ashen gold. I walk around the tree feeling and inspecting its brilliance. It is totally unblemished, except one small mark, and when I squint my eyes, it could be an etching of a tree, or possibly a stick-man , but it was too faint to be something.

There's a patch of moss raised higher than the rest beside the huge tree. Perfect for laying on and my legs are dwindling beneath me. In the strange light, everything was colourless.

I wake up and the lighting doesn't appear to have changed much. Probably just my eyes needing to adjust to it, and my guts are moaning to be filled. There's something moving along the moss and I instantly curl away from the edges of my moss bed. Snakes? Are they snakes? Hundreds of them. I watch them slither, but none even attempt to come towards me, so I shuffle a little closer. They're not snakes, they're vines or creepers slowly winding around each other. The most amazing plants I've ever seen. As I go to walk carefully through them, they maneuver out the way of my clumsy, pink foot. They shrink and recoil without constricting themselves; perfectly orchestrated. Some of the creepers are carrying little green balls. Fruits maybe? Before my stomach shrinks to a stone I rip it in half and gouge out the soft middle with my teeth. It tastes exactly like oranges. I eat another, then another, until I'm ready to leak from every pore.

Each time I woke up there, the vines had more variety of nuts, fruits and sometimes meat tasting orbs. I'd walked the length and breadth of this small place, and came to the unimaginable conclusion that I wasn't on earth. There was a sky that was an ever changing purple, and a moon would pass the top of the trees, a big moon and always full. The moon had some kind of off-white shifting cloud around it that gave the dark trees a bit more light. Silver light. When exposed to this light the bashful vines crept that little bit quicker; tightening the forest's tendons.

After one tedious, passing moon after another, I carved a horse into the huge tree before I went to bed. As I laid in bed staring at those hideous scratches on the smooth bark, the silver-geist moonlight traced down the thick trunk of the tree. As it hit the carving a thunder rattled from the dark thickets around me. It got louder, and louder, then a beast of a horse galloped straight past me grunting and snorting with all the bustle of an angry sea at the foot of a forgotten lighthouse.

I saw the horse around a few times and noticed the moss had changed in places. I'd started adding more carvings to the tree: birds, insects, deer, roses, eggs and other silly things. I had to stop when the vegetation had suddenly evolved so much that I was almost blinded by its diversity. What I had learnt was that this place always made space and provided for what was here. Even the earthly creatures I had summoned started to evolve over the long time I'd been here. Hooves of animals were divided into toes. Birds were getting pregnant. There were hybrids of hybrids, adapting and flourishing. Some, so strange, that I had no idea what they evolved from. I had to give this place a name, even if I never see a human again. I couldn't name it after me, or any other's name. The last word I could remember, before coming here, was the word 'Suzuki', gleaming on the petrol tank of my bike.

I sat at one of the streams after the passing of the moon, when things felt calmer. Something walked from the trees to the edge of the stream; something upright, with arms, shoulders and a head. It was a woman, but different. Her skin had a glossy pigment and her hair was a deep red. She sat there, nonchalantly dangling her legs in the water, but they weren't feet in the water. Oh no. They were something else; some kind of roots. To me, just now, the most alien man that ever lived, she was captivating. I called her Constance.

Suzuki had expanded along with the numbers and diversity of its inhabitants. I'd wandered further into the dark trees, purely out of curiosity and the creatures got more and more strange the further I went. Although there were no signs of prey and predator, fear grew in my bones.

I never found anything dead. Not even a leaf or a fly. Nothing ever died here, or showed any signs of perishing. One thing I'd learned, is that Suzuki provided for the survival of its creatures. Not what they wanted, but what they needed. I wasn't one of its creatures, yet it still gave me what I needed. I know I'm not one of them because I'm getting old, and I'm going to die. Suzuki's first death. I wonder, what will happen to my corpse.

Constance was strange. Of course she was strange, but she was quiet, silent even. I often spoke to her but she just looked at me and didn't make a sound. She made me feel like a nestling waiting for its mother, beak agape. We sit by the stream watching the water run.

"Can't you speak?" I ask. "Or don't you want to? Am I the wrong species?" I threw my words at her knowing there'd be no reply.

I saw a yellow drop slip down her cheek and onto her perfect breast. Then another. They pool, and then, they are absorbed by her silk-like skin.
"Are you crying?" I ask. This time more cautiously. "Never mind. I'll talk to myself then."
"I have been talking. You don't listen." Her voice is perfect. So heavenly and human. I can't stop staring at her. Gobsmacked! Even my penis is fully erect for the first time in many moons.
"I like it when you sing." She said.
"Yeah." I sighed. "Me too." And before I can finish I burst into laughter, and she smiled a huge baffled grin.

She grew attached to me, following me everywhere, and I grew attached to her ear. She didn't say much, but she listened wonderfully. She loved hearing about me, and earth, and I enjoyed telling her. In Suzuki, there were countless camera moments for the memory; Constance's eyes when she saw her first waterfall, and how alive they became as she watched me thrust my head under the heavy water - then hers, as I held her hands while she, with her own will, forced her crimson hair into the vertical torrent. As if I was leading the blind into a deafening fray; her eyes so electric and huge that they swallowed everything. Including me.

We never grew bored of each other. But she was still beautiful, and my skin had gotten loose, and my bones could barely carry me anymore. She was suffering and sad, but smiled through. My cockled heart wouldn't be enough. She couldn't understand when I talked of death, and how everything has its place, and time. How could she?

Age now had a firm grip of me; kept my dilapidated frame on that same patch of moss by the huge tree. Constance never further than a whimper away. Her thoughts had ran away from me; too painful to learn death. There was never much to say anymore. She, like Suzuki, knew all my thoughts before they passed my tongue, but I was still old fashioned, and maybe liked to hear my voice sometimes, to remind me.
"Constance?" She turned to face me, eyes as sad as a puppy left in the rain. "You will be fine. Suzuki will take care of you. You know that, right?"
"Suzuki was dormant." She started. "It needed a nucleus. Something to guide it, give it direction. I believe a word to suit this definition would be God." She walked over to the huge tree. Ran her fingers along the faded carvings. "God's tapestry." She whispered.
"Wait!" I weezed, as I lifted my left arm. And as I did, a deathly pain sheared up my arm and straight through my chest. This was my time. I could feel the life pouring out of me. Constance picked something up from the ground and started scratching into the tree. She stepped back to admire it as tears flowed from her big green eyes and disappeared back into her skin. It was a man. A carving of a man. Through the severity of my pain she heard my thoughts of torture, destruction and greed. So did Suzuki. The eyes of the moon came slowly down the big column of a tree.

"You'll know death, Constance. You'll know it." Is all I could think.

The moon touched the head of the carving and the whole of Suzuki began to rumble. Trees were shooting into the ground and Suzuki began a deep ululation.

Everything flashes white; a loud, violent white. Then parts of green and blue come through the white until I can see sky, and trees. Familiar sky and trees! It is the treeline where I had crashed and my toes, and ankles are moving slowly. I was going to walk again. I hear a low gnarr from behind my head. Suzuki? I turn my head to meet a pair of steel blue eyes just centimeters away; wolf eyes. Its lips jolting up as if they were on strings, showing its slathering teeth. I take a deep breath and before I can scream it clamps its jagged mouth around my neck. I just see the sky, and its beauty is another moment of forever. Behind the clouds, I see the eyes of Constance consuming all dread with her laugh, as the wolf snarls until its teeth hit bone, and I smile, everything goes black. Black and warm. So quiet and new, I feel new.