Mr. Kri

A long winding tree-lined walk led up go the great porch, which itself ran completely around the house. Halfway up the walk, Tand paused beside a tree.

“See anything peculiar in this?” he asked the Earthman.

As was his habit when thinking, Carmody spoke aloud, not looking at his audience but staring off to one side as if he were talking to an invisible person. “It looks like a mature tree, yet it’s rather short, about seven feet high. Something like a dwarf cottonwood. But it has a double trunk that joins about a third of the way up. And two main branches, instead of many. Almost as if it had arms and legs. If I were to come upon it on a dark night, I might think it was a tree just getting ready to take a walk.”

“You’re close,” said Tand. “Feel the bark. Real bark, eh? It looks like it to the naked eye. But under the microscope, the cellular structure is rather peculiar. Neither like a man’s nor a tree’s. Yet like both. And why not?”

He paused, smiled enigmatically at Carmody, and said, “It is Mrs. Kri’s husband.”

Carmody replied coolly, “It is?” He laughed and said, “He’s a rather sedentary character, isn’t he?”

Tand raised his featherish eyebrows.

“Exactly. During his life as a man he preferred to sit around, to watch the birds, to read books of philosophy. Taciturn, he avoided most people. As a result he never got very far in his job, which he hated. Mrs. Kri had to earn money for them by starting this lodging house; she retaliated by making his life miserable with nagging him, but she could never fill him with her own enthusiasms and ambitions. Finally, partly in an endeavor to get away from her, I think, he took the Chance. And this is what happened. Most people said he failed. Well, I don’t know. He got what he really wanted, his deepest wish.”

- Night of Light, page 19, by Philip Jose Farmer



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[Ed. – Hopper! Be careful, very, very careful, for what you wish!]