Mid-Week Flash Challenge - Week 10

Oh my goodness, we are now in double figures: 10 weeks! And it only feels like yesterday that I started this challenge. And last week we topped the record with a whopping 8 incredible entries! Whoo Hoo!

The challenge is coming along nicely, with a few regulars who are showing such wonderful support by sharing it around and encouraging others to join. I am extremely grateful, thank you.

So to this week's photo prompt. This piece of art is by Igor Zenin, a photographer from the Republic of Moldova. This piece is called, quite simply, Dancing Trees.

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Captured 

Pete snuggled down into the underbrush and lay in wait. He was going to capture them this time for sure. It was going to be sensational, and he was going to rock the world with it.

It had been a hard trudge here in the dark finding his way through the trees and the underbrush with just a small torch, but the sky had lightened since he had settled in, and once the sun started to peep over the horizon he knew they would come out.

The first time he’d seen them he’d been sure it was some kind of flash back from the poppers he’d taken at a rave a couple of nights before. Such a thing wasn’t possible. Trees weren’t people, or more accurately: beautiful feminine effigies.

When the trunks had lifted up out of the ground like released balloons, Pete had shut his eyes and shaken his head, sure that it was some hallucination or distortion in his brain. But when he’d opened them again there were no rooted trees in the area, only carved naked women dancing around wearing trees like hats as though celebrating some invisible party.

He’d remained transfixed and unmoving like a garden gnome, with his fishing rod poised over the small lake that divided him from the spectacle, watching their movements until, after an indeterminate amount of time, they’d sank back down into the earth and all that could be seen were trees again.

He’d waited a while and then gone over and walked round the trees, touching them, reassuring himself that they were indeed trees, that the bark was wood.

From then on he had returned, randomly, covering a variety of times, and established they only came at sunrise, and only for a few moments; that the window of their existence was short and if he was to capture evidence of them he had to be ready and waiting.

So here he was, video camera set up in front of him on a mini tripod, and a photographic camera round his neck.

As the bottom of the sun rose above the hills on the horizon, the bottom of the trees lifted and the dancing ladies returned to life.

Pete pressed the record button and sat back to watch, mesmerised, lifting the photographic camera up to his eye intending to take some shots, but finding himself lowering it again to watch them through his human lenses; their movements hypnotic, ebbing and flowing. Although he became aware that time was running out, and wanting stills as much as footage he placed his finger on the button, intending to let the shutter run and take picture after picture.

But he hadn’t considered the sound the camera would make. They might be dancing, but it was to an inner music, there was only the swishing sound of wind through trees as they moved.

By time the shutter closed on the first photograph, they stopped moving and all eyes turned to the bush he was under. By the second it was whisked away from above him. There was no third because he dropped the camera when a branch swung across and threw him up into the air, before another grasped him. It pulled him into the folds of its branches and he was only aware of a downward motion as darkness surrounded him.

He came to rest in a hollow earth chamber, and waited, his eyes unable to penetrate the darkness, his mind unable to calculate the passing of time. But nothing happened and no sounds reached him, and he began to wonder if they ever would.