Encounter Beneath The Oak


I make daily obeisance and peanut offerings to the weresquirrel living in an oak tree in our front yard. 

It appears to considers me as any numinous incarnation from the rodent todash space might: with feigned indifference that melts to exaggerated jubilation, perhaps so that it might convince me to lower my defenses and inadvertently provide an opening through the thinny. 

I hear the limnal kammen sounding. I hear it. 

This furry son of Maerlyn and I had such an encounter just now. "Ah," I heard its wee dereistic voice say in my head, "So we meet again, and so again you bear the goober Arachis. Eftsoons shall it be again, and again. So it must be and so it must always be." 

And yet I know it speaks falsely. How could it be otherwise? 

I know it waits for me there, waits for me behind the tree I planted with my own hands, waiting for the world to move on, waiting for the beam to break at last. The ancient beast waits, and plots, and munches.

— J.F. "Jeff" McCullers

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