Wood Whispers

The sun is real hot today and I feel my skin melting off, and it’s only getting hotter by the hour. Doesn’t help that my gear is clunky too. I took a minute off the harvester—that thing is like an oven—since my buddy saw I was getting sick of it. Said I should take it easy sometimes. I told him I gotta prove myself. To get a raise, or something. We both laughed because we know that’s not happening. I don’t know why I work this way no more, when nothing good comes out of it for me.

My buddy offers me his water and I give him a dirty look, like I don’t need taking care of, but he knows I do, we all do, and I know I didn’t mean it, and so I take his water and drink in long, heavy gulps. It’s lukewarm but to me it might as well be golden-gleaming ambrosia, that Greek myth of a food that’s supposed to heal gods and humans alike. I sure feel healed right now.

I take a deep breath of warm air. Wish I was home right now. A cold shower would be nice. And then some comfortable clothes. I must’ve been smiling, then, because my buddy came up and asked me. Not the one who took my place in the harvester and gave me his water, by the way. A different one. He’s real tall and steadfast like those trees we cut down. The oldest one here, I think. He keeps us in check.

“Whatcha smiling for, boy?” He ruffles my hair and his hand comes back sweaty. He grimaces.

“Nothin’. Jus’ thinking.”

He smiles, a crinkled-eye honest smile, like Dad did. I wonder if he got any kids at home. “I used to just think all the time, you know. Back when I was a schoolboy I’d wanna go home, and by the time summer came and I had to do work around the house I’d wish August back to me. You gotta.. gotta be present, y’know? What you have right now, what you are, don’t take for granted..”

I started tuning him out after that. Maybe I’d nod here and there and say some agreements occasionally, but to be honest the heat was frying my brain and my ears were buzzing, because of my headache or the mosquitoes I couldn’t tell, and I felt like I was being cooked alive, so I wasn’t in the place to really respond. Seems like he didn’t care either, he just wanted someone to listen. That’s the thing out here. All of us came from something. Me, I was a great student and I worked freelance jobs to save up for college, and I was supposed to go, but I couldn’t-wouldn’t-shouldn’t, I forget. And somehow I ended up here, cutting trees. See, we all had potential, but something-someone must’ve got in our way, and the thing with lost potential is that it’s never really lost, it just turns to grief. We all got grief in our stomachs and it’s eating us alive.

“..because it’s eating us alive, and you weren’t listening, were you?”

Sometime between my zoning out and now he leaned on the tree next to me, instead of facing me forward. I take a second to remember what’s happening. “No, I was. It’s eating me alive.”

He chuckles and ruffles my hair again. “You’re a thinker, kid. You don’t belong here.” None of us belong here. “I’ll leave you to it. My harvester is calling. Why don’t you make yourself useful, mark the rest of them trees we gotta cut down?” He puts a paint gun in my hand and closes my fingers round it. “See you around, kid.”

I look down at the gun. He’s already gone to his harvester, adding to the familiar topple of trees. I got no choice but to start marking the next ones off. These trees are so tall up close that I have to crane my neck all the way to catch the canopy. The grass is greener than ever. A part of me feels bad we have to get rid of all this. Only a part. Somewhere up there, I hear birds chirping. Still, I get to work, sentencing the healthiest trees to death with a white stripe.

“You gonna kill me yet?”

The voice comes from up, all the way up, like someone is speaking from the sky, but I know it can’t be. The guilt in my stomach churns up my throat and stings my mouth sour. It’s the hardest part of the job, this. I don’t know how we manage to do it. I suppose it’s because nobody likes to talk about it. The murders and all that.

Turn on your heel and walk back around fifteen, twenty years, when I was just in grade school, and my mom was trying to find meaning again after the car crash that left me an only child, and she dragged me along with her. We flew across the country, from the city of sin to Floridian beaches and Yellowstone geysers, coincidentally all the places my sister wanted to go before that crash took her away. One of her biggest wishes was to visit California’s tall redwood forests, in all its sky-scraping glory. I remember holding my mom’s hand until I just wasn’t. Got lost, I guess, and she must’ve been worrying for me since when she saw me she burst out in tears. I didn’t feel one bit lost, only found. I felt like the breeze then. I mean, I felt free. I remember looking down, down at the forest floor and then up, up at the cloudless blue sky and the windswept canopy. That moment, I realized, the forest is alive. It breathes and talks and bleeds, bleeds, bleeds like the rest of us.

“It’s eating you alive, isn’t it? From the inside out.” The forest echoes with a parody of laughter. I swear I see a flock of birds, screeching and circling above me. My tongue feels heavy in my mouth.

It’s haunted. Somebody must have died here and this forest is haunted. Yes, that’s why I’m hearing things.

“Something did die here. We are dying, little by little, day by day.” The ground is gonna open up and swallow me whole. “You need us, you know. If you weren’t so blind, you’d see death coming to you too.”

I look down at my hand, which feels like it doesn’t belong to me any more. The paint gun feels foreign and cool. I shift it around gingerly, trying to remember what shooting it feels like.

“That gun. You know a gun to be a weapon. So why do you use it on a living thing?”

I answer in that same, silent voice. The trees watch me with an expression I can’t place, at least I swear that they are. I have to get out of here before I suffocate.

“Look up.”

An invisible force slides under my chin and tilts my head up, up, and in that moment I realize that I am the forest and the forest is a part of me. The blazing sun burns through my eyes and I can feel a scream bubbling in my throat. A cacophony of screeches burns my ears and all those dark birds swoop down, down, talons outstretched, nipping and scratching at me, and I swear the trees are moving closer and closer, and my head feels like it’s about to explode. Vines fill my lungs and my breath rattles, and my blood turns to sap. Thorns pierce through my already melted skin and this is the end, but the pain is cathartic and it feels like a new beginning, for me.

I don’t know how long I’ve been out for. I might have been running because my legs feel like jelly and that’s how I found myself at someone’s feet, crawling and gasping for air. I might have passed out because I don’t remember anything, and the sun is past its noon point so I must’ve been away for hours, but whatever the situation is, I’m looking up at my buddy who’s looking down at me, a mix of curiosity and disgust playing on his face. Vaguely, I feel the paint gun in my hand.

“You’ve been out for a while, had me worrying. Don’t run off like that no more, alright?”

I try to breathe, try to explain that I was sent to mark the next trees for cutting, try to tell him that I couldn’t do it, couldn’t raise a weapon against a living thing any more. I tried to tell him that the forest was alive and we were killing it, and we would kill ourselves, and that we need it and it lives inside of us, but I must’ve been rattling since he looked at me like I was crazy, which I might be.

“..and I couldn’t do it, because it was looking at me, and I felt like I was gonna die, am I dead? And the birds, they were scratching at me, look,” I show him my arm, torn up and bleeding, but they don’t look like bird scratches to me, and to my surprise my fingernails are bloody. “But you gotta believe me, it’s alive—”

“Alright, alright, I know. The heat and all that. I’ll bring you back and give you some cold water so you can ride this one out, how’s that sound?”

It’s not the heat, I curse in my head. It’s not the heat and he knows it. “You’re guilty.”

“I’ll call the doctors or something. Heat stroke is a real problem around here.”

Anger seethes under my skin and foams in my mouth. I feel like an animal. Is this what the forest feels like, horribly injusticed, without say? If I had the strength I would claw at him, grab his collar and make him understand. But my tongue is heavy and I can’t find the words and I’m fighting for breath anyway, so I just close my eyes and let the forest eat me alive.

About the Author:

Blaine Burden is a young writer with an affinity in art and reading. She is a hardworking student who has a passion for analyzing psychological elements in pieces of media. While she prefers creative writing, she often pours her effort into writing for school which gives her the means to showcase her argumentative and analytical prowess. To Blaine, writing is a form of self-expression, and she hopes to continue her creative work in tandem with her post-graduation studies in medicine.