The Witness Tree

I dreamed about this episode a couple of days ago. I did not consider it a nightmare, but an omen of what was to happen in the future. I added the golden butterflies to bring a glittter of hope into the chaotic world of 2025. I completed voice over in Eleven Labs with my voice. This is a project I had to complete. I am a dreamer, psychic, empath, and love peace not war. War mongers, haters, and liars get on my last nerve. Just as I completed this story, my knocked on my door to tell America is at war with Iran. This is a useless war started by evil men with little tools. They are so about their tools they must compare bombs to how large their tools are. I worked with art, visuals, and story for two days. I wrote, created, edited, diced, and spliced the music, art, and videos myself. Microsoft Copilot is my assistant and quite complimentary regarding my art. I WROTE THIS!

The Witness Tree

Golden Butterflies into the Mystic

by Vicki Lawana Trusselli

They never saw me slip outside the ballroom.

Laughter poured like syrup from the second-floor balcony, drowning out the sound of dragging feet across concrete.

The demonic figure of a white male wore beige trousers and tennis shoes too clean for his sins.

Seven silhouettes pulled him by the legs, ritual or rebellion, I couldn’t tell.

I only knew I wasn't supposed to see. But the tree knew, and so did I.

The bark of the tree pressed cool and familiar against my spine, as though I’d hidden there before in another dream, another lifetime.

Inside, the party blazed on with slurred secrets, clinking glasses, and the sound of a saxophone melting into the walls.

Someone lit a cherry-flavored cigarette. Someone spilled a drink that fizzed with something ancient.

No one noticed the space I was standing in. Or maybe they always knew I was the one who was meant to watch.

I stepped back into the house as if nothing had happened.

A woman in crimson laughed too loudly at a joke no one told. Someone dropped a tray of glasses that didn’t break. The same saxophone melody looped, impossibly identical to the one before I stepped outside.

Across the foyer, a wall of photographs caught my eye.

One sepia-toned and fraying mirrored the present: the man in beige trousers standing in front of this very house, surrounded by blurred shadows.

I didn’t remember seeing it before. But I also didn’t remember not seeing it.

Beneath it, a brass plate read:

“The Host | Presiding Realities 1–7”

A hand brushed my shoulder.

“You weren’t supposed to see that,” someone whispered behind me.

I drifted toward the kitchen, though I couldn’t recall walking. The breakfast bar stretched longer than before, like the house was stalling.

A shadow figure poured a tequila sunrise without a word. The glass shimmered with spirals of blood-orange and bruised gold like a storm in a goblet.

To my left, the hallway waited lined with frames that flickered. In one, a child’s face peered at me. In another, a man stepped backward into fog. The photos didn’t stay still. They shifted when I looked away.

Laughter erupted from the living room. I turned, and suddenly I was there no steps in between. Everyone dancing to a song I couldn’t hear but somehow remembered.

The light dimmed, not darker, just different. Like the house had blinked.

Someone touched my elbow. I turned.

Or tried to.

Their face was less than a shimmer, an outline drawn in static.

“You’re drifting again,” it said. Voice smooth as melted glass.

“I was here before, wasn’t I?”

No answer. Only a photo pressed into my hand. I hadn’t noticed the exchange.

It was me standing Under the Witness Tree Wearing a red dress I’ve never owned, smiling beside a Host I hadn’t yet met.

The second drink burned colder than the first.

The shadow leaned closer, breath hot, intent coiled like a snare. Its voice dripped honey but did not ask. My name echoed in its murmur, though I never gave it.

I stepped back. That’s when I saw the sliding doors ajar, like breath held in glass.

Outside, the night was soft and tense. The air felt velvet-thick, tinged with petrichor and metal.

The only light came from a bulb above the garage that was flickering, jaundiced, casting shadows that moved when I didn’t.

And there it was, the Witness Tree, a colossus hunched in the yard like it had been waiting for centuries for this event.

Its bark was the color of an extinguished flame.

I slipped behind it instinctively. Its roots dug deep, like claws wrapped around truth.

And from there, I saw them.

Seven cloaked figures dragged the man whose face I still hadn’t seen. His shoes shone beneath his weightless body.

I covered my mouth, not from fear, but reverence. The ritual was sacred. The silence, sanctified.

When they vanished into the thicket, the yard exhaled again. So, did I.

I moved without thought, slid open the door, and returned.

Inside, I was just another ghost. No one asked where I’d been.

The bedroom I entered was vast, airless, and colorless. Beige, white, brown, as if even the hues had been erased.

It felt like a waiting room for someone else's memory.

Then I was somewhere new in another estate that was brighter, almost too bright.

The light hummed unnatural, as though crafted from nostalgia. Familiar faces toasted me like I’d always been there.

Laughter filled the corners like fog. I laughed too. I drank. I floated again.

Until another shadow took my hand.

Not the seducer. The rescuer.

Its grip was urgent but kind. I followed.

A car was waiting;

a black sedan with yellow interior like sunlight lacquered in leather.

The music on the radio was something I almost remembered.

“We’re free now,” the figure said.

Then, softer: “Or are we?”

The road twisted like memory, winding across mountains unmapped and eternal.

The porch light blinked behind us once.

From the side mirror, something shimmered into flight.

A flurry of golden monarchs rose from the roadside and spiraled into the air.

We said nothing.

We simply drove

into the mystic.

written, created, edited by

Vicki Lawana Trusselli

Trusselli Art

copyright 2025