It kinda happened at the best time. We were already almost drunk. I had just gotten through 4 loaded vodka tonics on a fine Saturday afternoon when the world ended. The rippling pulse through reality interrupted me and my girlfriend's very chill afternoon of drinks and epic shark attack movie marathoning. I was working my way through my favorite buffalo chicken dip when that mythic pulse carried an unrecognizable voice in a language that had too many grunts and clicks to be familiar, yet we somehow understood the gist of it. The announcement, "ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE" reverberated throughout the collective psyche of the entire human race that day. But many missed the emotional undertones that simultaneously conveyed a darker message, "BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR", and even more missed the softer instinctual undergirding, "LIFE AS YOU KNOW IT, IS OVER".

To be fair, I'm not really sure how much of that ripple I understood that day, but my girlfriend Sarah sure grasped the top layer of meaning. Without spilling a drop of her Jack and Coke, her tipsy hippy ass looked up and managed to giggle out, "I want to be one with nature!”

Her flesh turned brown and craggy while her fingers grew thin and long. I couldn’t even drop my drink as her digits sprouted thick bunches of leaves while her legs joined together and gnarled and pushed into the floor of our house, splitting the couch we were on. I couldn’t bring myself to move even as I watched as her Irish complexioned face darken and turn upward as her hair and body grew to fit her new state of being. Less than a minute went by and my soon to be fiancé was an adolescent tree, in our living room, in our fucking house.

I couldn’t believe it. She looked like the younger, hotter version of the talking tree from Pocahontas. The tortilla chip loaded with buffalo chicken dip halfway to my mouth had lost its earlier sense of priority, but I couldn’t open my hand to even let it go. Tidal waves of meaning and various inputs staggered my brain and this agonizing pressure built behind my eyes as alcohol sought to both dull the pain and haze the message. [FUCK!], I thought as I leaned closer to work though the image my betraying eyes were showing me. Still unwilling to put my drink and snack down, I inched my foot closer to my woman’s foot/root. It did look like oddly fleshy bark in the shape of a foot. I could see the bump where the ankle was and the groove where the legs joined together. Even as a tree she still had a rockin body.