Root by A. Sparrow Read Free Book Online Page A

retreated into myself,
spending less and less time with her circle of friends. The few
times I saw her in public, she would toss a wistful look at me, but
I couldn’t even bear looking at her.
    I had this overwhelming sense of being
finished with it all, that I had had enough, that this is where I
made my exit. But again, this was nothing compared to what was to
come.
    I realize all of this sounds pretty trivial
and pathetic, but I’m not here to impress you. I’m just telling you
how I came to recede into the deepest funk that my young soul had
yet experienced, and how that opened the doors to a world that
would soon become very important to me.
    ***
    When we got back from the mall, I sank into
the couch while mom went outside to spruce up around the yard. She
tried to coax me into coming out and helping, and I told her I
would, but the truth is, I never budged.
    There was some crappy show on, with guns and
stuff blowing up, but to me it was all random shapes and light and
noise. Mom had left her new prescriptions on the counter. The lay
there all wrapped like little birthday gifts. I wondered what new
toys the doctor had given us.
    And then the roots came, and this time they
came fast and they came hard, and they didn’t even wait for the sun
to fall. And I let them come and take me until the world of my
house no longer registered in my senses.
    I found myself naked and wrapped tight again
in that dark passage, a dim glow filtering through the weave of my
pod. I swayed, all snug and tight like a caterpillar in a cocoon,
almost wondering what kind of butterfly I would become, but I
certainly wasn’t growing any wings in there.
    My mind filled with a pleasant buzz. A light
intoxication. Nothing dramatic. Enough to feel pleasant without
being impaired. It kept me from feeling bored and made quite happy
to just chill out and dangle, while I waited for the
inevitable.
    There were those groaning things again, and
this time some of them were louder and closer. They didn’t sound
like people in pain. They didn’t even sound like people. They were
more like grunts of exertion or some kind of belching. They were
way too deep and loud to have originated from a human. They had to
come from something large, something elephantine or
whale-like.
    Somehow, I knew they would eventually come for
me. And I welcomed it. They didn’t scare me. Somehow, I knew that I
would greet their arrival the way an old man greets the appearance
of a city bus on a cold and rainy day. And I was pretty sure I had
the proper fare.
    Light kept filtering through the gaps in the
weave. It flickered and came at me from different angles. Curious,
I pressed an eye close to a hole.
    I saw blotches of light traveling through the
thick roots lining the tunnel. Some moved in groups, lined up with
perfect spacing one behind the other. Others tumbled like
corpuscles or masses of bubbles rising through a tube. Some were
just smears that rendered entire roots and branches temporarily
aglow.
    I had no idea what they were, but they were
damned pretty to watch. Each blotch was a different color, and some
were just gorgeous to behold.
    I relaxed my focus, and watched the reflected
lights dance on the roots that bound me. These roots were uniformly
dim, until I stared at one junction, and a patch commenced to glow
from within.
    It dimmed almost immediately, but with a
little concentration I was able to bring it back, as if I had blown
on some ebbing cinders. Concentrating some more, I was able to make
it move up and down the shaft and divide into multiple patches like
the ones I had seen below.
    This extra light showed me more of what was
going on inside the pod. Some of these roots were tapped right into
my skin, like the runners of a parasitic vine into the bark of a
tree. I peeled one off and found it to be a pad of finely hooked
hairs like Velcro or those hitchhikers you get on your jeans
walking through the weeds.
    It told me I was part of Root, and Root was
part of