”Moi, je parle pour les arbres, parce qu’ils n’ont pas de langues,” the man said to me, grasping my hand firmly and regarding me very seriously. He held my hand so for about a minute. It was a very intense experience, and I felt very powerfully the weight of his convictions.

After we parted, I walked a while through a field of corn that was higher than my head. The ground was rough and broken under my feet, and the light which came through the stalks was yellow and unhurried. I looked up at the sun as it jumped out from behind the heads of corn, flashing with blinding brilliance.

I walked through this field for some time until the corn began to thin and I found myself climbing a shallow hill. As I continued upwards, it got steeper and steeper until the incline was completely vertical. This hill rose high above the cornfields which surrounded it on all sides. I saw the path I had taken through the cornfields and by a kind of crazy coincidence it spelled the word, “buttocks.” I pondered the likelihood of this happening entirely by chance and I stood there amazed, and a little amused.

I was at the top of the hill now, and sitting down. I mopped my brow with a handkerchief, and watched the crows flying here and there in the beautiful lazy hot summer sun. In a distant field I saw a herd of cows, all wearing pink tutus, and dancing while flamingoes watched and squawked their approval. These were cultured flamingoes, I could tell.

Beside me was a sapling tree, the species I could not tell. It had grown up as far as my knee, and there were two branches on each side. Each branch had five leaves on it, and there were two leaves growing out of the top.

I looked at these leaves intently for ten minutes. They were a kind of dark pink in colour, thick, and bumpy all over. They had a leathery appearance, but they were soft to the touch and moist.

Just then a crow landed behind me and let out a noise so loud and so sudden that it startled me enough to make me jolt. I lost my balance and rolled all the way down to the bottom of the hill.

I lay there unconscious for three weeks. During the day, a cloud of a thousand butterflies would land on me and cover me from head to toe, to protect me from the sun. And at night owls and voles would wrap me up to keep me warm, and bats would bring me berries to sustain me. I dreamt of moonlight and earthworms and the dark, heady smell of loam. I dreamt of rock and the slow passage of time, of the birth and death of mountains and the creeping of the continents, making their way around the vast circumference of the planet.

My sleep was interrupted by a short and fat old woman wearing dark and old fashioned clothes. If I had been awake, I would have noticed that she smelt musty and her gray hair hung down limply. She had a huge warty nose, and she leant down close to me. In a shrill voice she cried out, “Fish Fingers!”

Immediately I heard this, I leapt up with a shout, sending the butterflies silently flapping upwards and outwards like some kind of aestival snow.

I began to run, following the callipygian path I had traced out three weeks previously. I ran for a year, right round the globe, and when I reached the hill again, I stopped. There was no corn this year in the field, only a low, scrubby kind of grass. I walked across it and began to ascend the hill towards that tree.

In the year of my absence, the tree had grown so that now it was nearly three times my height. It still had those thick, pink leaves but now there were tiny little white flowers dotted all over it like stars in the night sky. I moved closer to one to smell it, and it had a delicate perfume like that of the jasmine flower.

I felt the leaves against my face, moving in the wind. As I moved from flower to flower, I began to notice the movement of the leaves didn’t match the wind. I staggered back, with a sudden realisation that these weren’t leaves at all, but tongues! The tree had been licking my face! I looked at it, and it felt like the tree was looking back at me, and laughing. I began to laugh myself, and we stood there laughing together, me and the tree, until sunset.

I climbed the tree and stood on its highest branch, the scent of its flowers now filling the cool evening air like a spirit. I help my hands to my mouth, and called out, “Eh, oit! Tu qui était trés serieux! T’es stupiiiiiiiiiiide!”