scribbles

Knocking From the Inside

Night was fast approaching over the open savannah. The trees and hills surrounding it were draped in soft shadows except for one. A large baobab tree stood at the edge of the savannah bathed in the few strands of orange sunlight that had managed to trickle through the heavy clouds. I hurried my sister through the trees as softly as I could. We had to reach the baobab by nightfall or the legend would not hold true. And the tree was still a vague silhouette against the colored sky.
My sister, Kaela and I were refugees escaping civil war in our home country. Our home and family were all lost in the turmoil and we were forced to begin a journey to the neighboring country along with others from our village. But along the way my sister and I were separated from the group and we were lost. The vast sun colored savannah seemed to stretch on forever in all directions. It all looked the same. The first few days I panicked, How were we going to survive? We were lost with no food, water or shelter, alone in complete wilderness. On the second day we managed to find a small banana tree, thought the bananas were barely ripe, we tore off banana after banana eating greedily, with sweet fruit dripping down our chins.
The next few days carried on like this, we’d walk around in circles in hope to find our village people. Eventually we would sit down in the shade in exhaustion. We’d eat unripe bananas from the nearby trees and sip water from the drying lake. Our stomachs were full and our thirst was quenched but we still lived in constant fear and uneasiness. We’d sleep very little in fear of the wild animals that we could only hear but never see. Neither of us wanted to say it out loud but we knew that if we didn’t find our people soon we wouldn’t last much longer alone.
One hot sweltering afternoon, my sister and I lay down to rest after another one of our walks. We lay our hot cheeks against the cool red soil and tried to catch up on some badly needed sleep. After about ten minutes I have up my attempt to sleep, with the flies buzzing around my face and the hot afternoon sun hitting down on me, it was impossible to sleep. I sat up and shot a quick glance at my sister, she had galled asleep quite quickly but the occasional flutter of her dark eye lashes suggested that she was not in peaceful slumber. I waked around our new surroundings shaking off an army of red ants as I stepped through the thick sun-kissed grass. I scanned the horizon briefly in hope to see any sign of our people, but as always there was nothing. I have a quick glance once more, and then something caught my eye. Its reddish color stood our boldly against the yellow-brown of the savannah, my eyes widened as I realized that the red object I was looking at was a baobab tree! A flutter of excitement rose in my stomach, I had heard about these red baobabs from my grandmother. Red baobabs were sacred; inside them they supposedly held the passageway to paradise. And those who found such a tree could enter paradise by knocking on the trunk of the baobab three times. Excitedly I rushed over to my sister, walking her to tell her about my great discovery. She looked at me through sleepy disbelieving eyes but hurried along with me, letting me drag her by the hand through the scratchy grass blades.
|This was it” I thought. The end to our pain and suffering. The tree was like a gift from the gods in return for the family we had lost and the nightmare we were living through Just as the last few ribbons of color were fading away into the night sky we reached the red baobab. I held Kaela’s hand tightly and breathed deeply, knocking shakily on the tree three times. The red-brown tree slowly creaked open and we stepped inside incredulously but with out eyes closed.
We opened them only to find that we had been knocking from the inside.