Deena wakes on a cold, Australian morning to a spontaneous forest, sprung up overnight while she slept.
The other tent? Gone.
Friends? Gone.
Phone reception? None.
Temperatures? Falling. Fast.
Now Deena must figure out where the forest came from—and, more pressingly, how to make it go away again—before someone dies. Herself, for example.
For everyone who longs for something more—regardless of the price.
Dreaming Of Forests
THERE WAS A FOREST. That was the simple fact of the matter: there was a forest now, and there hadn’t been before. Deena let the tent flap drop clo-sed in front of her, inhaled steadily, and tried again.
Nope, still forest. She bit her lip, debating: go out and explore, or hide in the tent?
In the end, exploration won for the simple, prac-tical reason that nature, as it were, was calling. So she caterpillared her way out of her downy sleeping bag, pulled her hiking shorts on over the black, fleecy leggings she’d slept in, zipped up her polar fleece jumper, crammed her grandmother’s knitted beanie over her brown hair, and pushed her way outside.
The other tent was gone. For a moment, that made her pulse race—but then the reality of her surroundings overtook her senses. The air inside the tent had been warm, musty. The air outside yester-day had smelled of the sea, a salty tang with just a hint of rotting seaweed.
Today, the air smelled like sap, and living things, a green smell she associated with her grandmother’s garden thanks to that summer she’d spent there when she was twelve, when they’d spent hours of days of weeks pruning and twining and tending, re-turning to the house only for meals and sleep, hands crusty with black dirt her grandmother called gold, under-nails caked with the stuff, elbows and knees stained black—and green.
This, Deena thought, was what every green scratch-and-sniff thing should smell like. Forget your apple, forget your lime; this was green. She inhaled deeply, and despite the oddity of the situation, felt her eyes light up as her body relaxed, melting into the space while at the same time inflated, buoyed, full. Something about this wondrous, spontaneous forest was familiar—and right.
She had no idea what the trees were, but they were tall, straight as ship masts or indigenous spears, thick and thin, rough-barked but paler than stringy barks, a brownish-grey, and the tiny, emerald, coin-sized leaves looked soft as butter, soft as petals.
Deena had tried keeping plants in their third-floor apartment back home, but somehow she could never remember to water them enough, or else she watered them too much and they died, thin and pustulant. She cried, every time, as her mother shook her head and made Deena walk them down to the communal skip bins in the alleyway behind the complex.
Her grandmother had consoled her on the phone each time, had promised that one day she’d have plants aplenty, more than she knew what to do with.
But one day wasn’t soon enough for Deena—which was why she’d taken up hiking, of course. If she couldn’t have plants at home, by golly was she going to surround herself with them in her spare time. So a forest? Amazing.
The other tent, her friends, vanishing? Less so.
Nature was still calling.
And the current cover situation was a little thin for her liking; yesterday, there’d been a handy thicket of salt bushes and something vaguely acacia-like between the grass and the sand dunes. Today, it was just open forest all the way down to the sand behind and to her right, and all the way up to the mountains ahead and to the left.
On the other hand, there didn’t seem to be anyone else around.
Sighing, she attended to her body’s needs, butt cheeks momentarily icing over as a wind whipped down from the mountain, setting the trees rushling and shushling—but it seemed like a freak gust and nothing more, and soon enough she was clothed and warm again—and hungry.
A brief forage in the tent revealed a couple of muesli bars tucked into the pocket of her raincoat, and of course, there were the packet soups in her hik-ing pack, and she still had a couple of litres of water. Nothing to heat it with, though; Rachel had had the Trangia in her pack, and some time in the night—as was pretty usual, these days—she’d snuck into the boys’ tent, taking her pack with her for a pillow. Which meant that all of the above—Rachel, boys, tent, packs, and cooking stove—were now gone.
Deena sat heavily on the stump by the front of the tent and dropped her chin into her hands.
It wasn’t that she’d never believed in magic before—she’d seen her grandmother’s garden, after all, and although she’d stopped protesting to the contrary so people would stop protesting her sanity, she knew full well she’d seen creatures in her grandmother’s garden when she’d been little that had no right existing on this mortal plane.
But on the other hand, until now, magic had been content to merely linger in the background, a blurred, bokehed backdrop to real life, something vaguely sensed, but never fully realised.
What, Deena wondered, had made the difference today? Why now suddenly jump arrestingly into the foreground?
Or, she wondered, gazing around as the trees whispered secretively, why here?
Hmm. That seemed like a crucial question.
The tent, she felt, was light enough. It would be a bit of a headache to get the whole thing into her pack with her camping mat—yesterday, Rachel had been carrying half the tent, but that clearly wasn’t an option today, and neither was leaving the tent be-hind—but she should be able to manage. Because as she saw it, she could either sit here all day, hoping and wondering whether the others would come back—or she could go explore this magical, magical forest that even now was layering calm over her like blankets, like she belonged here, and find out what had happened to the others.
It took about thirty minutes, moving purpose-fully, to down a couple of muesli bars, swirl a packet of soup into one of the water bottles and gag it down, and pack up all the gear. It did fit in her pack—only just, and she’d had to let all the straps out, but it wasn’t too heavy, just bulky.
And so, with the legs zipped onto her hiking shorts, turning them into pants once more, with her heavy boots on and her beanie still crammed over her hair and her hands deep in the pockets of her emerald-green polar fleece jumper, and her dark blue pack sticking up over her head and weighing down her hips, Deena set off through the trees that had miraculously appeared, heading back approximately the way they’d come in the evening before.