Agnes and the Tree
This is an original folktale I wrote and illustrated for Folktale Week 2024. Each part and illustration correspond to that day’s prompt. The illustrations are done in gouache, graphite, and pastel.
part 1: mist
Agnes lived alone, in a small cottage at the edge of a small town at the edge of not much else. She was content, for the most part, all her life. Though she had always felt a bit forgotten, looked over. She would pass by people in town and smile at them, but it was as if they couldn’t take the time to notice her.
She didn’t have friends to speak of, really. Though she fancied the stray cat colony that took shelter outside the inn down the road to be something of her tribe, and she would leave them tins of fish every day.
Still, for the post part, she was content. Until she wasn’t.
One day she awoke to a nagging feeling in her chest, like a rope tied to her ribcage that was tugging her up, out of bed, toward something. Toward what, she couldn’t quite figure out. But whatever it was, she wasn’t going to find it in here. So she donned her coat and pulled on her boots and tucked a couple of sandwiches in her pockets, just in case. And she headed outside through the misty morning, to follow wherever that tug might lead her.
part 2: gate
After what felt like hours of walking through the woods, Agnes came upon a rusty gate that opened onto a dilapidated chapel and beside it, a small graveyard. It was clear that this place had been forgotten for quite some time.
part 3: blight
Agnes felt a peculiar prickle on the back of her neck as she walked up and down the rows of gravestones, examining their inscriptions.
She bent down to one, wrapped in vines that had succumbed to blight. As she cleared them away from the gravestone, she fell back in shock as the name on the stone was revealed to be her own. A strange coincidence, indeed, thought Agnes.
Not wanting this other Agnes’s eternal resting place to be in such dismal shape, she continued to pluck the vines from the gravestone. With a heavy yank she pulled out a fistful of weeds, and along with their roots came something that bewildered her even more.
Find out what happens next, soon, in part 4…