Forest Green
by Floyd Largent
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
On the day he was born, David Bloom was riding his bicycle home from work. He was pedalling tiredly through a pleasant neighborhood as twilight descended, his headlamp flickering with every revolution of the Schwinn’s wheels. He had just pulled out from the curb to go around an idiot parked in the bike lane when a bright specter loomed before him, screeching and scratching.
The thing’s talons connected along his left side with a bright nova of pain, tossing him crippled into the aether. He fell, screaming in anguish, his head a red-hot fury of anger and hurt, pursued by the evil creature.
The twin beams of its yellow eyes merged and softened, resolving at last into the soft white glow of an overhead fluorescent panel. A man in surgeon’s scrubs looked down at him from a dizzying height. Bloom took a breath and almost lapsed into unconsciousness again.
“Take it easy, Mr. Bloom,” the doctor said gently. “I’m Dr. Binsinger. You’ve been involved in a car accident, and I’m afraid your entire left side’s torn up pretty badly. Do you remember what happened?”
“No,” Dave mumbled around a mouthful of pain. His breath came in short, agonized gasps. Someone touched his left leg; his body arched, and his shriek echoed off the antiseptic white-tiled walls.
The doctor’s face went tight, reflecting his agony. “I’m sorry, Mr. Bloom,” he said softly. “Your leg is badly broken above the knee. It’ll require surgery.”
Waves of debilitating pain roared through him, whiting out all logic, all emotion except fury and fear. He became aware of a soft, repeated mewling coming from somewhere nearby, and it took him a moment to realize that he was making the noise. He struggled to regain control and partially succeeded. “Do it,” he said thickly. “The surgery. Do it.”
“Fine, Mr. Bloom. We’ll get to that in a few days; there are more pressing matters at hand.” He touched Dave’s lower left abdomen and Dave screamed, his control shattered. He felt as if he were about to burst wide open, like an overripe orange left too long in the sun. “Sorry again, Mr. Bloom. You have several fractured ribs, and we think a lung is punctured. You’re bleeding a little from the mouth, although you have no head injuries, and this explains the shortness of breath you’re experiencing. Your viscera are compressed into the right side of your abdomen. There’s evidence of internal bleeding. We’re going to have to open you up to check it out and give you some relief from the pressure.”
Dave heard him from the other side of a red, fiery wall. “Do it,” he croaked. “DO IT! Put me under! Please! Put me under!”
“We will, Mr. Bloom,” came the doctor’s reassuring voice “But it’ll take about fifteen minutes to prepare the OR. I’m sorry.”
“Noooo!” he shouted; the shout turned into a whimper. “Please. Put me under now, please,” he begged, all need for dignity gone in the white wave of agony. “Please.”
“I... I’m sorry, Mr. Bloom. You’ll have to wait.” The kindly doctor looked pale and drawn as he moved out of Dave’s field of vision. As far as Dave knew, there was no one left in the room. He couldn’t move; he didn’t dare. Except for the pain, nothing was left. Nothing. He fell back into an ocean of hurt and waited, his every breath a scream, his every scream a desperate cry for help. For the first time in his life, he actively wanted to die. Anything, even oblivion, was better than this pain.
Twelve eternal minutes later, he sucked eagerly at a strange-smelling face mask, in a cold steel room full of spotlessly clean men and women. Darkness fell over him, a wondrous knight slaying the dragon of his misery, and he accepted it joyously.
* * *
The whole world was a forest. Dave looked around, bewildered. He was entirely surrounded by trees: oak, elm, alder, aspen, pine, fir, hemlock, hickory, sassafras, and a multitude of other species he didn’t recognize, all cast together in an indiscriminate mix that made no ecological sense. Most soared hundreds of feet into the air, forming a verdant canopy far overhead. The light that filtered down to the forest floor was stained an eerie green, and lent a faint emerald cast to everything it touched. Oddly, there were no plants besides the trees; no underbrush, not even weeds.
He stood on a broad expanse of rich, leaf humus, broken only by the upthrusting trunks of living trees and the occasional rotting horizontal ones of the dead. Great multicolored fungi grew on the fallen logs: classic mushrooms, sheets like thick parchment, woody step fungus. There was no roar of civilization in the background and, aside from the plants, fungi and himself, there was no sign of life as far as he could see.
Except for the boy.
When he felt a gentle tug at his right hand, he looked down and saw, with some surprise, that his hand was clasped tightly in that of a kid who couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old. The boy was stocky but trim, dressed in a ragged leathery breechclout that seemed to be made of large leaves, of all things. His tanned features — tinted green by the forest light — were regular and clearcut, half-handsome, dominated by a hawk nose and squarish chin. His eyes were a pale blue-green, his fine hair tawny, unkempt, and waist-long. He was a miniature duplicate of Dave Bloom in almost every way.
“Come on, Dad,” the boy said. “We’ll never get to the Glitterweb if we don’t keep moving.” He sounded tired and depressed.
“Wh-what’s the Glitterweb?” Dave blurted. He stood rooted to the spot, staring at this boy who’d called him “Dad.” The kid stared at him for a long moment, his eyes wide with surprise. Then his face broke into a broad grin. “You talked!” he crowed, squeezing Dave’s hand until the man thought it might break. “Finally! Say something else!”
“Okay, then, where are we?” Dave asked, voicing the first thing that came to mind.
The boy’s grin faded. “Don’t you remember? We’re in the Forest. We’ve always been in the Forest. We’re going to the Glitterweb, just like we’ve always been. It’s a really long way. Don’t you remember?” he repeated.
Dave shook his head numbly.
The boy smiled tremulously. “Well, it has been about two years since you’ve said anything...” At the startled look on Dave’s face, the boy’s eyes went wider. “Wait... don’t you remember me? Don’t you even know my name?”
Dave started to say no, but then a thought struck him. He’d always wanted a son, and he’d always wanted to name him after himself — David Parker Bloom III — so he could call him Trey. Maybe he had. “Trey,” he said softly.
The grin reappeared, bigger than before. “You do remember! Oh, Dad, what happened to you? Why didn’t you talk to me for so long? I thought I’d die sometimes, watching you stumble along with those empty eyes, never saying a word... I thought you’d gone crazy, or I did something extra bad I couldn’t remember! I’d talk to you and make believe you talked back to me, just so I wouldn’t go crazy, but it never worked. The only time you ever came alive was when you killed the grazers. Oh, Daddy!”
The words came all in a rush, and by the time he was through, Trey’s joy had evaporated and he was crying with great, wracking sobs. Dave drew him into a tight embrace and murmured comforting words to him until the tears died down.
At last Trey pushed himself out of Dave’s embrace, hastily wiping his tears away. “I... I’m sorry, Dad, I just got carried away. I didn’t know what happened to you...” his voice trailed off as he stared at Dave’s midsection, and his left eyebrow rose in a gesture that was so characteristic of his father that Dave himself wanted to cry. “The scars are back,” the boy stated, sounding shocked. “Turn to your right, please?”
Dave did so, mystified. “Yes, they’re all there,” Trey announced, moving closer to examine him more thoroughly. His fingers traced along the hard ridges of Dave’s abdomen, toward his navel. His touch was cool and light and, looking down, Dave could discern a vague band of lighter skin slanting down toward his pelvic region. If this was a scar, it was an old one, at least ten or fifteen years old. Where...?
On impulse, he craned his head down toward his left side. Other scars were visible there. One was round, like a bullet wound, and faint stitch-marks radiated from its edges. Below it was another scar about four inches long, and below that was another perhaps a fourth that length. Nodding to himself, he pulled up the edge of his loincloth — his clothing was similar to the boy’s — and discovered an eight-inch scar on his hip. Another scar, perhaps two inches long, lay just above his knee.
Drawing a deep breath, he said, “Where did all these scars come from?” although he knew the answer to that already.
Trey shrugged. “You told me once that a monster attacked you. Something like a giant grazer? It had a funny name.”
“A car?”
“Yes! It tried to kill you, but you got away. You had to be put back together. You said it happened a long time before I was born.”
Only yesterday, that’s all. Dave nodded. “What did you mean when you said my scars were back?”
“Well, while you were, uh, gone, they went away, too. Just disappeared when you stopped talking that day. Only, last sleep, you bled like a dying grazer from every place where the scars had been before. I don’t why. I couldn’t stop it, and I was afraid you would die. But a little before waking time, the bleeding stopped, and the wounds vanished. I didn’t notice that the scars had come back until you talked to me again.”
Dave nodded, looked around at the trees. “Where did you say we were, Trey?” he asked after a brief silence.
“In the Forest, Dad. We’re going to the Glitterweb celebration.”
“How... how long have we been on our way to this Glitter thing?” Again, he knew the answer before the boy replied.
“For always, Father. We’ve been on our way since I was budded. And you told me that you’d been traveling for years before you had me with you.”
“Years... How did I get here in the first place?”
Trey shrugged.
“Well, then, here’s your mother, son?”
Trey looked confused. At last, he replied “Mudder? Is that something to do with keeping mud off? There are plenty of streams—”
“Mo-ther,’ Dave said again. “Where is she? Did she... die?”
Trye looked a bit frightened. “I don’t know what a ‘she’ is, Dad,” he said quietly. “Or a mo-ther.”
Copyright © 2025 by Floyd Largent
