The Forest

I love the forest—the smell of eucalyptus, the sound of bird wings rustling into silence like a deck of cards shuffled in one hand, and the scattered shimmer of light: long, bright blind fingers reading their way across the moss-covered floor. She is at my side, or I at hers—either way we are together.

Harder and harder, we pedal up the hill and turn to the right, but the bicycles veer off to the left, into the courtyard of a beautiful church, long abandoned.

We enter the open door. The floor is checkered in huge black and white tiles that slough fine, grey dust in long narrow mounds that look like rows of curving dunes on a sea-less shore. An elevated pulpit curls out from the sculptured wall like a pale orchid blooming on the side of a rock. I climb the winding stairs and step onto the little balconied stage whose floor is a jumble of broken slats.

In praise, jubilation, or mere readiness, my arms shoot up from my sides, pointing to the windows and choir that are not there.

“Look! Here I can be myself,” she calls out to me from the center of the darkness below.

Peeling off her clothes, she crawls onto a low wooden crate. Her whole body glows like a jellied candy held up to the sun. She brushes the back of her hand against the nape of her neck, lifting her dark hair in a long arc that spills back over her shoulders. Her arm descends, unfolding outward into another arc, finally pointing to a painting framed in gold—it is a landscape of the same forest just outside the church.

Her shadow rolls across the floor, up the wall, and settles into the shape of a dark doorway leading into the painting of the forest. Entering this doorway, I see the stairs straight ahead, running deep into the moist red soil, farther and farther from the last glimmering light that quickly disappears behind thick branches and masses of bruise-black leaves.

The darkness bristles with gunfire. I lift my rifle toward the enemy hiding behind the huge fallen oak. My aim is sure. One by one each of them startles upward and pirouettes to one side before tumbling forward over the dead tree, like a puppet whose strings have been suddenly cut by a sharp, swift breeze or the silver edge of an outstretched wing.

“You cannot win,” the last one calls out, already dead.

I lift my hand to check my cards. The ace of diamonds slowly turns from red to black.

How will I explain, and to whom, that it is still the ace of diamonds. I want to check the hearts to see if they too are black, or if the spades and clubs are covered in blood, but the alarm rings out: the castle’s on fire. It’s time to leave—run over the dark lawn, through the colorless shrubs. I must scream and yell—call for help as if I mean it.

Outside the beautiful gate, five men walk toward me, unarmed except for long coats with high velvet collars. Across the square in the building on the corner she is waiting, and something to eat is laid out on a table. From there it is a short walk back to the forest.