Spooky month story

Instructions

The concept of “fiddler’s green” originates from ancient maritime folklore. It’s an afterlife for sailors who serve at least fifty years at sea, an infinite green field of grass and trees and flowers, full of nothing but mirth and joy, a fiddle always playing. Always reminded me of that old song, y’know? “I see trees of green, red roses too.” Now, I’m not a sailor, and I certainly haven’t spent over 50 years at sea. I’m just a regular guy who’s always been interested in folklore and mythology. Fiddler’s green was always a favorite of mine, along with all the other strange forgotten afterlives, cloud cuckoo land, rock candy mountain, etc. It gives you a kind of insight into the lives of the people at the time, what they believed obviously, but also what they wanted, what the culture was, all that. This isn’t really that relevant to the matter at hand, but writing helps distract my mind. My life was, by all standard and metrics, pretty normal. Just bog standard. I’d say how long ago this whole thing started, but it’s just so hard to tell time now. It happened when I went to sleep. I felt a bit of pain in my chest, but I figured that would go away after I rested it off a bit. In a way, I was right. It was hard, but I drifted off to sleep. I was stirred by some sort of horrible screeching. When I woke up it was bright. Far brighter than my room. Far brighter than it should have even been outside in the middle of autumn. I sat up, rubbed my eyes a bit, and stood up. And then I saw where I was, and frankly, freaked out. Just a big, green field, blue sky, yellow sun, and that horrible, horrible screeching, what I would later figure out was a “fiddle.” I’d agonize over it for a while, maybe I was just dreaming, maybe this was some cruel prank, maybe I had a rare hallucinogenic mold growing over my bed, anything. But after long enough wandering this perfectly-temperatured hellscape, I figured that this was no time for skepticism, and time to actually think about this. As I said, I was never a sailor. Never anything close, I had a persistent fear of the water back then. Suppose I never really need to worry about water again. Were they just right in some ways and wrong in others? Do they just go to the one that’s actually good and all of us landlubbers just get horrible fiddle field hell? The most reasonable thought I’ve grasped is that this is really just what we all get, and sailors back in the 1800s just had more near-death experiences, and could only describe this place approximately. For example, that certainly isn’t a fiddle. My one question is why isn’t anyone else here? In the myths it was always supposed to be about fellowship and partying, and that’s a bit hard to do when you’re the only person here. Is it just so big that everyone is so far away? Maybe that’s why they’re partying, after like a billion years of wandering (which oddly isn’t tiring here, feels pretty unnatural) they finally found literally anything except grass. Well, all that is to say, live it up when you can, and get used to nature walks, because, as that one guy said, “I see trees of green, red roses too,” and soon enough, you will too.