Off to Seek a Wizard... -8- Please Don't Eat the Mushrooms by Erin Halfelven

 
I screamed again. I yelled something sensible like, "Oh shit! A bear!" I tried to roll over, stand up and run away, all at once and not one at a time. It didn't work. I did manage to roll over and over, off of the hillock, in fact, and landed nose deep in a trickle of water and the mudhole that surrounded it.

Meanwhile, the bear had kiyoodled something awful and took off running the other way, with much greater efficiency.

I sat up in the mud puddle and looked around. No bear in sight.

Instead I realized I was sitting in a small glade in the most ginormous forest I had ever seen. Trees like skyscrapers as far as the eye could see. Bushes as big as football stadiums. A sunflower bending above my head as wide as a handicap parking space. A bird of some sort peering at me from a branch way over head; it looked like a chickadee the size of an ostrich.

When I say ginormous, I mean ginormous.

Ants as big as chihuahuas wrestling with some nasty piece of rotten flesh. A three-foot caterpillar with a face full of knives chewing and chewing and chewing on the stalk of some plant that belonged in a horror movie itself. Gnats as big as baseballs.

It made me doubt all my senses. Had it really been a bear that startled me? What had I seen?

Also, what had I heard? When the bear ran away it wasn't with an inarticulate, "Arggh!" He'd said something.

I closed my eyes. He couldn't have. Bears don't talk. Yeah, right. A girl doesn't get sucked out of airplanes and survive a fall of tens of thousands of feet and wake up in a forest where everything is ten times it's normal size, either. Even if she isn't exactly a girl.

"Curiouser and curiouser," I said. "I don't remember eating any mushrooms." I glared at the caterpillar just on general principles.

As a magician, I know several ways to make things look bigger than they really are. One of the neatest is forced perspective, which they use a lot in the movies. It involves choosing your angles and putting the smaller things closer but making it look like they are farther away. I didn't see how that would work here.

I stared up at the bird again, trying to figure out how it could be close and yet look far away. Anyway I could figure the angles, the bird had to be as ginormous as everything else. "That's a big chickadee," I said.

I thought a moment more about what I had heard the bear say. I'd actually heard it quite distinctly, despite my own screaming. He'd clearly said, "A bear! Where, where?" That confused me. Not just that the bear talked but that it seemed to be afraid of bears.

I looked down at myself, covered in big wads of sticky mud. I tried to pull myself out of the mudhole but the stuff stuck like glue. I knew I had mud inside my bra and in my panties, too. Disgusting. But, I couldn't get any traction to push away and kept slipping back into the mud until there wasn't a clean spot on me.

I heard snickering coming from the greenery where the bear -- or whatever it was -- had disappeared.

"If you're going to laugh at me, come and help me climb out of this mud!" I shouted.

The voice I heard before said, "You said there was a bear." It sounded like George talking.