(011)
“Can’t you see it!?” Yasmine wheezes, her voice both flirting with and resisting laughter.
The pair of them are led on their backs looking up at a tree, cheeks flushed, pupils wide and full of giddy elation. The sun is at its peak in the sky. Bright colours bleed into each other, bubbling in the heat all around them, held back only by the shadow they’re engulfed in – leaving them lost in a world of their own. Jon scans the branches for a way into what she’s describing, trying to focus between the continuous shifting and morphing, but seeing nothing. An involuntary noise croaks out from his throat and triggers a new wave of laughter washing over them.
“Come on!” Yasmine points up in the vain hope it’ll help, but only sends Jon rolling onto his side, holding his stomach. “Look!” She pulls him back over, intent on getting her point across but grinning wildly. “You see that bit there, where the thick branch starts?”
Jon shuffles his head towards her, closing one eye to follow her finger. The tree bulges and writhes in front of him, the boughs ripple and shimmer, and the colours are at the same time muted and vibrant. “Yeah.” He says, staring at the midpoint where it splits into one of many Y’s.
“Okay,” Yasmine lifts herself up onto her other arm to point just that bit more accurately, looking over her shoulder at Jon, then back up at the tree, “you see that knobbly bit just above it?”
“Mmhmm.” Jon nods, one eye still shut.
“That’s the eye-” an errant snort from Jon, but she fights past it, “that’s the eye! And then below that to the left, do you see? That’s the beak.”
Jon squints trying to disrupt the image he’d already formed, desperately trying to get past what his brain wanted him to accept it as. A tree.
“Come on! How can you not-” Yasmine’s hand goes from point to open palm, gesturing in the general direction of what is so abundantly clear to her, and from that moment onwards, no longer just her.
“Oh my god.” Jon opens his other eye to drink the epiphany in, now unable to recognise anything else. “I can see it,” he laughs, “I can see the chicken!”
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