Chapter 1: The Cereal Bowl

The Vast World of the Tree

Surrealist Short Stories: A Collection by Elena Militaru

I must have been five or seven. Not six. Six doesn’t sound familiar. So we go with five or seven, when I first told my parents I was building a world to live in.

I was in my father’s bedroom, watching TV and eating a bowl of cereal when I spilled a good amount of milk on the carpet. I didn’t want to deal with it. So I lifted the edge of the rug and poured more milk underneath. 

My mother — a cleaning freak (something she always hoped I’d become too), couldn’t find the stink for days.But eventually, she did and she confronted me with her discovery.

I said, “In my world, the milk wouldn’t stink. In my world, the milk would dissolve. It would disappear.”

They didn’t get it. Neither of them.They didn’t know where this world was, how to find it, or how I got there in the first place.

But I told them clearly that I’m not inviting anyone.

It is a creation of my own.

The first thing I ever made — and the thing that now creates me.

I didn’t come here fully polished — God knows I didn’t, and nor did you.

I’ve always felt that I needed help from outside myself to become anything at all. Otherwise, I feared I’d just be consciousness running around left and right, never knowing which way was left or right or right enough.

So the world had to be built somewhere else —outside the reality of my human body, which felt too small, and too full of rules.

I never understood why I had to be a child first and then become an adult. It felt so forced.And I’m not exaggerating when I tell you: I was counting the days until I became one — whatever being an adult meant to me back then.

The world took time to form, like Earth. For a long time, it was nothing but a vast field.With something in the distance that looked like a tree —but the tree was blurry, and no matter how far I ran, I couldn’t get to it.

Maybe because I was still a kid. Five or seven, like I said.