A boy lost in the woods. The path is a dragon to be fled, cobblestones made of logical paradoxes to be solved. There is a sign pointing to freedom and wealth. There are warnings; a cacography of leaves and bare twigs, foretelling failures and eternal damnation.

The spirits sing sweet songs, gossamer echoes of Ariadne’s thread. “Here is freedom, here is choice.”

But the boy cannot see them. Their silhouettes fade into the fractal worry of a thorny bracken. His disoriented footsteps presage their own boulevards. When the boy is lost, the trees are lost too. He is sure that if he wanders far enough that he will find a destination.

“Here you are, you are exactly where you are going.”

The diary

In another room, down a passageway that now stretches distorted through the aperture of the captive wayward, is a diary. Here are the memories of the place that was before, and the steps that became these steps.

When he was younger he could climb over the bushes, traversing the entire maze in a series of arbitrary and determined leaps. But as the walls grew higher he could no longer see above them, and became trapped in a cul de sac of apathy. It was during some of these depressed hibernations that the boy dreamt a series of step ladders that would return to him the freedom of his youth.

“It is hard to watch the stars when all you can think of is ladders,” the fairies mourned.

The map

Painted on the floors and on the walls, and on the hands and feet and forehead of the boy, is a map. It is painted in a pointillism of arrows, all of them pointing towards themselves.

“You are here, and you are going there, and therein lies the boundary of your existence,” read the holy texts.

When the boy flails in desperation, he seeks proofs to equations yet unwritten, and flow charts for algorithms to undelineated means. But there is nothing there. And the calloused soil beneath his footsteps prove the iterations of his orbit.

Meanwhile the angels sing of the glory behind time, “Here we dance in your imagination, a false diagnosis, a cross-current of premises, a temple to the infinite.”

A boy lost in the woods