The Jester relaxes, hanging his legs over a singular dead tree. The branches and trunk: long, thick, solemn age in light, dry brown. The grass of the fields is a dark, thick saturation of short green. The Moon and Sun are nowhere to be found. The path on the ground curves in left and right swings, from one part of the horizon and away into its polar opposite. The sky is blank. No stars, just black.
He rests on the thickest branch, like a hammock with a back curve. He stares up and away into the above of somewhere. Black and white stripes on long, skinny arms and legs. Red over the shoulders, two hanging dangles of red points with creases, and two golden buttons across the rectangular torso. His skin is the flour color of white bread baking. His nose hangs as a thin protrusion, like his legs and hat, from his small ram-shaped face; dangling investigations.
He sits in between the realm of the material and the nothingness, a fence in between. His realm his own, of spirit beyond.
The traveler walks through the dream, his spirit floating through, beyond its life but not dead. On his long path through the realm, he asks the hanging Jester, “Where is this place?”
The Jester swings his feet and legs in back-and-forth pendulums, gleeful at the question. “In between the unreal realms of the material and the nothingness. This realm is my home! Of spirit beyond! But how would I know?”
The traveler wonders about the last part of the Jester’s words. “How would you not know?”
“Well, if I did not know, then how would I know not?! You see! Very funny. Anyways—” The Jester leans his head a little off the rest of the branch, letting his nose hang like a rope. “Now let’s see…”
His nose droops down into a length before curling up like a cat’s tail, into the traveler’s face.
“Hey, you stupid thing!” The traveler thinks the act rather rude.
The Jester sniffs away anyway. “So, your name was Samson? You also smell like the lostness of Christopher. Eww…”
“What?!” Samson replies.
The Jester responds, “My name is Fool, and I am indeed very stupid, but yet you ask me questions!”
The Fool is cheerful at the talk. He chuckles as his feet swing at a steady pace. Whenever he calms, Samson’s soul is left with a squinching face of confusion.
“I am hungry!” the high-pitched Fool announces, with a finger pointed upward. He pulls out a deck of cards and indexes through them like paperwork, each long finger swelling toward its end, so that every fingertip is bigger than the knuckle it grows from. “Hmmm… I don’t like the kings or tens…” The Fool pulls out a queen of hearts, and swallows it whole without chew. He then takes a chomp at the whole deck, chewing up a corner of the cards in his mouth.
“Where did you pull those from?” asks Samson.
“My ass,” the Fool says sarcastically through a mouth full of card food.
The Jester now tosses one black joker card away, it having a single bite mark going through it.
“Ahh… Okay… Joker card number 73,428,873,108,382,382,583,100,397,472—”
Samson interrupts as the card flies away into the dark above, during the long number spoken. “I don’t care.”
“Now you’re getting it!” the Fool says.
Samson is speechless, his annoyance heard in his sound. “Where am I going?”
The Fool nods his head, pulling out a map from nowhere. It shows a picture of green with one path through it. He points his large, round fingertip right at the path. “You entered from South of route zero, so you are going Northway, and you take the only exit there is, right here!” He points at the top of the page.
“I hate you,” Samson says in a low voice, his mind and patience bothered.
“What do you expect from a circus fuck named Fool?” the Fool says, his face crinkling in a smoosh through a shit-eating grin.
“Okay! I’ll play your game! I will just summon this!” An axe is summoned in the air, in likeness to the Fool.
“Now you’re getting it!” The Jester-Fool is now excited with childlike joy.
Samson swings the axe, inspired into existence, like a lumberjack into the single tree in this entire realm, an annoyed exertion striking from his face and into his severance of lumber.
“Noooo! What are you doing!? Samson the traveler, answer me! This is my—my—my tree! My tree!” The tiny Fool of long proportion gets higher-pitched with every word and every stomp on top of his favored hanging branch.
“Fuck you,” Samson says matter-of-factly, still chopping away at the Fool’s tree, now losing almost a third.
“In all my years of 418,274,572,832,019,303,183,192,729,282—wait, stop! I am trying to tell you something!” The tree falls over and collapses with the Jester, and he falls into the grass, which bounces him like a trampoline. As he bounces back up, he looks at Samson with the angry look of a toddler.
His voice grows into an innocent shriek now: “That was my—my—my tree! My first ever tree in this realm! Given by God! You broke it!”
“Yes, I did,” says Samson, now with a hint of a satisfied chin-and-mouth grin.
“Fuck you too! I’ll tell God on you!” The Fool is now shaking his fist as Samson walks off into the horizon.