Burning Spirits

• Lena Forde, Grade 8, Pimlico State High School
• Short Story
• 2011

Excellence Award in the 'Step Write Up 2011' competition

I stood in front of my tree. The tree was mangled beyond repair. It was withered and crumpled. Branches jutted out at strange, angular places you wouldn't expect. Gnarled knots formed a rough layer of leathery skin on the surface of the poor plant.
I felt the shimmering, invisible warmth in the air as I changed. Changed from human to feline.
My ears swivelled around and around as if listening to find the right place and angle on my head to settle down. My nose tightened and shrunk and whiskers sprouted from my cheeks. Fur rippled over my body and a tail blossomed from my rear. I stopped to catch my breath after I was sollidly phased.
After all, I had just run from the other end of the forest. This was the forest of shifters' trees. Trees that held souls so that they wouldn't escape when we changed forms. Now, a fire was consuming the wood like it was some sort of addictive food.
My cat form stumbled further back into the curve of the tree's hollow. The cool, dusty floor of my palace welcomed me, as did the clammy air that rose up to spiral out of a cramped, puckered opening where there used to be a knot of wood.
My intellegent ears picked up the crackling, rustling sigh of fire outside. I warily peeked out. The slits of my eyes met billowing clouds of dark grey and red, oddly flourescent balls of warmth.
When the freak fire died to a crumbling, vaporus bundles of coals, I gingerly padded outside of the sooty, glowing fibres that claimed to be my tree.
It looked like a shrivelled crisp packet thrown onto a fire. Wispy, crumbly, ashen black, some of the piles of coal still puffing out faint dollops of smoke.
I felt like my soul had been wrenched out through my guts; It basically had been. My tree - the tree I had been born under, the tree that clasped all of my secrets, the tree that bursted with the ripe fruits of my worries and my sorrows - was gone. Dead.