Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: Serve - Sever - Veers - Verse (08/14/25)
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TITLE: Severed Dreams | Previous Challenge Entry
By Lynae Fisher
08/21/25 -
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Her golden hair stuck to her tear-stained face. Dirt covered her clothes as she sat at the edge of the bank.
“They ruined it! They cut the branch! Now I can never reach my perch again.” Little Julie continued sobbing. “It was ugly, they said. It was in the way, they said. So they chopped it off. Now I can’t reach my perch to rest.”
She paused, expecting to be ridiculed for wanting to sit in a tree. No ridicule came.
“I know, I sleep in the house, but here, I rest. It was so peaceful up there,” Julie continued.
Julie turned her head to see who had spoken to her. She nearly laughed at herself when she saw it was a little cat. Nevertheless, it was a very beautiful gold colored cat. The sunlight streaming through the foliage of the tree glistened off the cat’s fur like gold.
“I know what you mean.” The cat spoke again. Somehow, it seemed to her its voice was deeper than one would expect from a cat —if one expected a cat to speak at all. “Rest and sleep can be two very different things.”
“Now it is gone.” Another wave of tears poured down her face as she looked up to see the black oozed wound on the end of the branch where it had been cut short along with her dreams. It had served as a bridge across which she could walk out over the bank to reach the perch.
“Is not the lower corridor still open?”
The evergreen boughs formed an arch at the edge of the bank. At the top of this, the bridge branch had stood, waiting to be pulled down like a bridge over a moat. She had never really taken the time to explore the corridor of cave-like paths through the forest, but had always ascended to the perch instead.
Wiping her sleeve across her eyes Julie looked out into the forest with a heavy sigh.
“I supposed I could explore a little.”
Getting up, she attempted to dust her pants off, only to turn it into mud with the tears on her hands. Carefully, she stepped down the bank and into the forest corridor. Tears ceased falling from her eyes as she explored the paths that drifted away from special bush. Soon the winding paths lead her to a beautiful spot where the sunlight beamed down through an opening in the evergreens and lit upon a small grove of deciduous trees.
“Serviceberries!” she cried out in delight. “They are ripe too. I should take some to Mommy for dessert.” Pulling the hem of her shirt down and cupping it upward to make a basket, she began filling it with berries.
“She would like that.”
The girl paused thoughtfully. “I would never have found this place if the bridge had not been cut, would I?”
The cat sat down and curled its tail neatly around its paws.
“I wouldn’t have found this fruit and this beautiful place of even sweeter rest had I stayed there always.”
“Further up, and further in, dear one.”
A slight smile cracked across her face. Suddenly, she stopped.
“Wait… What did you say?”
A cricket began its evening song.
“Further up, and…” she turned back to look. The cat was nowhere to be seen. She mused over the words. They seemed familiar. Her eyes grow wide as she remembered the saying. She searched the ground for tracks left by the cat. There she saw its track.
She placed her small fist inside the print left by the great cat. No wonder the cat looked a little different than most cats.
She looked back at the trees loaded with their fruit. She looked at the hand full of berried she carried. None of this would she have found if that thing so dear to her had not been severed from her, ripping dreams away with it. The words of her pastor’s sermon from Philippians 3:13 replayed in her mind.
“Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before”.
(fiction)
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