Junipers

There is a place in Rotan forest where nothing grows. I discovered the spot during a recent hiking trip. And, to be completely candid, I got lost.

The path, a narrow ribbon of dirt and rock running through the trees, had taken an abrupt turn to the left, and I, fiddling with the mouthpiece of my Camelbak, continued to walk forward. But the problem was not that I had left the path, I’ve done that before, and since I have an okay sense of direction, I am usually able to reorient myself.

The problem was that when I looked up, a time that had to have been less than ten seconds from leaving the path, I failed to find it again. I must have walked at most twenty feet. And yet, realizing my misstep and turning a full 180, I couldn’t find where I had been.

I wasn’t panicked. The sun was high, my water was full, and I don’t mind wandering, so I just continued walking, lifting my boots over the small ferns and seedlings that dotted the forest floor. Rotan isn’t particularly large and knowing that I would eventually, even if after a full day of walking, reach one of the four highways that bordered the forest on all sides, I peacefully continued.

And then, maybe an hour into my new adventure, I found it. On first instinct, I saw what would have been the evidence of a well-managed forest. A perfect circle of dark, soot, and dead clearly delineated from the rest of the foliage and stretching to the opposite side of a clearing and halting at the trees. Burn plots were not uncommon in this part of the country but closer inspection showed a complete lack of any debris from a fire. The black seemed to be from the earth and soil, with no evidence that anything was currently, or maybe ever was, growing in the space.

Looking back, I should have thought that strange.

But standing there, fatigue setting in from the walk, all I could think about was my camera. I’m no photographer, I will never be Connor Aire, but the passions, which first took hold in high school art, have never fully left, and I still take my Nikon D80 wherever I go. I only have one lens, the standard, and it’s fairly old, but I still naively thought that the machine would still do the moment more justice than my memory in later years and I held the camera body to my face. I took one and then adjusted the settings for another. And another. Each time, I focused on a different part of the scene. One the trees, one the dark, one the edges in between. For the last I zoomed in towards a stray ray of sun. But I didn’t take the picture immediately.

There was a small glare in the eyepiece. Removing the camera from my face I saw it shimmering in the light from the ray: a tiny, bright, green, something.

I started walking towards it, pausing at the edge of green and black, thinking of whether to breach the open. I took one step. My boot sank slightly into the black and squelched. It wasn’t muddy, but I reactively pulled my foot back. I looked again at the ray of sun beaming onto the shimmer. I wanted to get there. It was like it was pulling me towards it, but the black, dead earth pushed me back. I tried again and failed, the squelching causing me to wretch slightly in my mouth. I shook off the strange tingles I felt on my skin and pushed forward.

The air seemed damp in this clearing. I don’t think it had rained recently, but there had been a freak lightning storm a couple nights prior.

I sank slightly with each step into the muck but as I reached the place where the light had shimmered, a small circle of green grass and forest floor rescued me from the black.

And then, in the middle of the patch of grass, like the yolk on a cracked open egg. I saw… him.

He was tiny. I assume it was a he. The features seemed male enough, although I confess I am not party to the physical and biological differences of what I can only describe as a little green monster. It looked like it could have once been a plant and had little leaves at the end of each appendage and two tufts at the top of the head that could have been ears. Its little thin body was bony and textured like wood, akin to a walking stick. And two black beady eyes occupied the center of his face. All together he was about eight inches high and looked like he had stepped directly out of Pan’s Labyrinth.

He laid on the ground, arms—I again assumed they were arms— stretched out to the sides and seeming to reach towards something I couldn’t see. His “breathing” seemed rough and ragged, like he had maybe been blown off of one of the trees in the clearing and couldn’t quite catch his breath. His eyes were wide, though they didn’t seem to have eyelids like you or I, and his head kept swinging back and forth, looking at the edges of the circle surrounding him.

A sudden thought popped into my head. The grass surrounding him, a perfect circle with him directly in the middle, could not be natural. Had this tiny thing, in the midst of falling from unknown heights, somehow—and I still have no idea how—made the circle to prevent himself from falling into the sticky muck that otherwise occupied this clearing? Had he tried to save himself from landing in it, which undoubtedly would have trapped and held him until he either died from his injuries or drowned in the depths?

At that instant, his head stopped shaking and his eyes focused on me above him. I had not seen a mouth before, but now a slit in his face opened into a tiny cave that seemed to silently scream up at me. I bent down and not knowing why, tried to comfort this tiny organism.

“It’s okay. Take it easy little guy, I’m not going to hurt you.”

His mouth continued to be open and the eyes closed into a pained expression. Was I hurting him by talking too loud? His ears, if he indeed had any, must have been sensitive. I dropped my voice to a whisper and slowly, with as much tenderness and as little pressure as I could, ran my finger down his arm.

“It’s okay. It’s okay.”

His silent cries stopped. His mouth closed and his eyes looked at me with a longing stare. And something like a cloudy green tear ran from the corner of his eye to the ground below his head. Where it landed, a small stem shot up with two green leaves.

My breath caught and I whispered, “Wow!”

He began to breathe heavily again and out of pity I reached down to the tiny thing and carefully lifted it in my hands. With it laying on my spread out palms, it turned slightly to its left, wrapping its leafy arms around my thumb, holding onto it as I carried him out of the muck and into the rest of the forest.

And immediately, I found the path.

______________

What on earth am I doing? Have I gone insane? Is this even real? Should I call National Geographic? Should I call the cops?

I asked myself these questions daily for the next couple of weeks, as I slowly nursed this tiny thing back to health in my two bedroom apartment. Again, I claim to be no expert when it comes to raising anything living, let alone the little monster that I now find myself in possession of.

However, he no longer seems to be in pain, which I am grateful for. That is to say, he no longer silently screams at me like he did in the forest the day I found him. If anything, the line of his mouth I would sometimes describe as a smile.

The first couple days he was here all he did was sleep. I carried him to the sill of my living room window and placed a pillow under him. He curled up like a cat sunning itself and just drifted off.

He doesn’t eat anything. I tried unsuccessfully with various fruits and veggies that I had stored in the fridge. I even tried a little meat in case this guy took after the plant from Little Shop of Horrors. I am thankful he does not. He does like water though, which I guess makes sense for a plant.

Now that he is feeling better, he also is actually very mobile. I am glad that the fall didn’t hurt him too badly, but I will say that finding a little plant monster in the ice maker is a little disconcerting at eight in the morning when you are still half asleep.

I work from home so this thing, I have taken to starting to call him Roger after the main character in one of my favorite movies, doesn’t change my daily schedule very much. He sleeps, drinks water, sits in the sun, and watches me work at my desk. Roger seems to keep a very strict schedule, and I can time down to the minute when he will be sleeping, drinking, etc. I only found this out after I had forgotten to get him water for a couple days. I had returned to the room and found him wrapped around the Aloe Vera plant eating the tops off to suck out the water.

I will have to go get more houseplants soon. He seems to have eaten most in the house and the others are dead.

So for now Roger and I are co-existing.

Three days later I decided to stop by the local florist’s on the way back from lunch with a friend. As the bell DING-ed with the opening of the door, I was greeted by smiling eyes and a bright green nametag.

SALLIE.

I made my way down the aisles of fresh cut flowers and greenery. Buckets were filled with this season’s wild varieties of purple, blue, and red, tiny sprinklers stationed above each to provide life-giving water. The small greenhouse room at the north end of the shop carried the more exotic scents, but with the temperature increase and the sealed doors, a mist had formed over the glass so that the condensation blocked any curious onlookers. I continued to stroll, while the clerk’s eyes followed me from her place at the counter.

“The Gerber daisies are on sale, if you are interested?” she chimed as I walked past the bunch.

I turned and looked at the flowers: the whites of the petals seeming to explode out of their stems.

“Yeah. Maybe”

I chose two of the long stems, pulling them out of a water bucket in front instead of examining the planted varieties behind.

“AHH!”

Dropping the flowers, I looked at my index finger. A drop of blood was welling on the pad. I took in a breath and looked down at the flowers. There were small, green thorns on the upper part of the stem.

“What on Earth?”

The store manager walked to my side, her keys jingling at her hip. She seemed slightly annoyed that I had pulled her from the front, but she was even more annoyed when she saw I had dropped the flowers to the floor.

“Is something wrong?”

“The daisies have thorns?!”

She reached down and picked up the abandoned daisies. Running her fingers along the stem, she looked at me with her eyebrows slightly arched.

I glanced at the flower in her hand. It looked like a normal daisy.

“Sorry,” I backtracked, “I’m just bleeding.” I showed her my finger for effect.

“Maybe you hit the bucket handle? Some of them have sharp edges.” She looked from the bucket handles to my finger, her brows furrowed.

“Yeah that must have been it.” Of course she didn’t believe me. I didn’t believe me.

“I’ll take three of those, please. And some yellow solidago.”

I left the store with the flowers, and my finger, wrapped in paper.

When I arrived home Roger was sitting on my desk at the computer, using his entire body to move the mouse around the pad.

“Hey. What are you up to?”

I came up behind him and looked at the monitor. Various weather reports from a week ago were pulled up on the screen, along with several tabs of what looked like blog posts about a lightning storm in the area.

Roger looked up at me with blank eyes and then stretched a long thin finger toward the screen.

“Ugh. Sorry I don’t know what I am supposed to do with that.”

He pointed at the screen again and then pressed his body against the mouse, moving the cursor to one of the tabs and then clicking to switch windows.

A page about Rotan forest flashed in front of me.

Roger pointed again.

“Rotan?”

He then moved the cursor back to the tab from before.

He pointed.

“Lightning storms? At Rotan?”

He seemed satisfied.

I continued to stare at the pages on the computer, adding a quiet, “okay” before moving to occupy myself elsewhere. I was moving in the kitchen when I heard a rustling of paper and plastic and turned to see Roger attempting to climb into a ‘Save the rainforest’ tote.

“Oh yeah, almost forgot,” I said, dipping in front of him to grab the wrapped flowers and setting them down on the table in front of us, “I got some new flowers to replace the ones that keep dying.”

I unwrapped the solidago and daisies, laying them on the wood. Roger quickly approached and peered at them from a few feet away. He was crouched and bent forward slightly, seeming to prop himself up from where the knees would be.

“No eating these ones,” I scolded him and chuckled a little. I sounded like I was telling off a toddler for eating too many cookies.

Roger approached the flowers and briefly touched one. Almost immediately the flowers burst to their full bloom and then decayed in a matter of seconds. A pile of debris was sitting on the counter.

“How--?”

Roger looked up at me with his teeth slightly barred and slowly backed away from me and the flower-ash, jumping off the table to run to the window.

I approached the table and picked at the pile of ash arranged in the shape of a flower. The soot stained my fingers.

“Well that was a complete bust.”

I swept the ash into my hands and carried it to the trash, using some soap to clean myself up afterwards.

Your average person would have been freaked out by something like that occurring in front of their eyes. But your average person didn’t have Roger living with them, so I thought very little of it at that moment. I returned to work at the computer after I cleaned both the table and myself, exing out of the tabs containing the weather forecasts and Rotan, instead opening other websites I needed for work along with a faux flowers site, a futile attempt to maintain some greenery and perhaps preserve the still living specimens tucked away in the house.

___________

Every flower or plant in my house is completely dead. No, not dead, disintegrated. Every. Single. One. I also think I may be going crazy because three days ago, as I was walking in a park, I tripped over a root. Let me explain. I only tripped over the root because it burst through the sidewalk and wrapped around my foot. And then after my face met the pavement, I turned to see the root going back into the ground like nothing ever happened.

Two days ago, I was woken up in the middle of the night by leaves smacking my window. I attempted to ignore it, jamming my head back against my pillow. But after ten minutes I crawled out of bed to cross the room in the dark to the window. My english ivy was knocking at the panes, with little balled up fists of leaves and stems. I didn’t get back to sleep.

One day ago, Roger and I were in the backyard when we were attacked by a tree. The grass was dead, had been for days, and the branch of my neighbor’s maple reached over the fence. Reached! Roger hissed as it approached and eventually took refuge under my lawn chair away from the tree. It proceeded to instead shower me with seeds that dug into my skin and scraped my hands.

But nothing was truly terrifying as what happened immediately after. With a howl and a yelp, Roger sprinted over to the fence and scaled it’s 6 feet in one jump. He slapped his hand against the trunk and I watched in horror as the maple blew up from the inside! A thick cloud of soot and dust showered the yard and several dogs were barking in the background.

I think it is time Roger went back home.

____________________

So on the following Thursday I again packed my Camelbak with various types of granola bars, trail mixes and some water. I laced up my boots, grabbed my keys and drove the easy ten minutes to the entrance of the forest and put the vehicle in PARK. I then grabbed the small green plant monster from my dash, placing him on the backpack. I shoved my keys into my pocket to begin walking.

It occurred to me early on that I would probably not be able to find that same dark spot as before, having wandered off the path for almost an hour. but I soon realized that Roger must have had a sense about the forest and he quickly began pointing rapidly in various directions until, from his cuing, I found the clearing.

At first, I wouldn’t have said that the clearing was the same one I had found previous. Grass had started to peek through the black muck in places here and there. And the trees had seemed to grow inward more to obscure the light. But the little plant monster on my shoulder was hopping up and down with what I would guess was delight and he dove off my shoulder the first chance he got.

As he walked, the grass grew and decayed rapidly, like a timelapse of the seasons shifting before my eyes. Everything he walked on, touched, almost looked at, bloomed and then moments later turned to ash and sludge.

So he had created the giant circle around him? Then why did he seem in such distress over being surrounded by it that day he found him?

Suddenly, a crash came from behind me and as I turned, I narrowly ducked in time to avoid a branch flying towards my head. It zoomed over me into the clearing, crashing mere inches from Roger. He turned towards it, growling.

Then, from across the clearing, came another.

This one Roger saw and jumped to sort of highfive it. It burst into ash. He came down on the ground growling louder and turning in circles. I stood there dumbstruck. What the hell was happening?

Then, from around my ankle, I felt a strong tug that pulled me off of my feet. My face slammed into the ground and I quickly tried to roll onto my back. Long, green vines were snaking their way up my legs and I began to panic as I tried unsuccessfully to free myself. As they wrapped along my waist I screamed, craning my neck to spot Roger in the field. He saw me and quickly ran to my side, placing his hands on the vines and turning them to ash. As I scrambled up another vine caught Roger around the wrist and dragged him backwards. Two more joined to bind his arms. He couldn’t get his hands free. I had tried to grab him but got knocked over by a tree moving from my left and barreling into me. The roots had emerged and it was crawling towards Roger. I looked up at him, him growling and snarling at everything around him. He looked at me from where he was being dragged away. He looked so small and weak but I knew the destruction that was under that face.

So I ran.

It didn’t take me long to get out of Rotan, my adrenaline racing as I fumbled for my keys. I turned them and made to leave when I heard it: a loud, visceral, blood curdling scream. I floored it.

____________________

It’s been hours since I locked myself in my own bedroom. I ran as fast as I could from the hallway and slammed the door behind me. He had been so close that he hit the door with a thud just moments after. How did he get out of Rotan? He made such an awful sound. A mix of whining and yelling and grinding teeth. But I haven’t heard anything from the other side of the door for a while. I don’t think he’s able to figure out the lock on the handle. Maybe if I tried to run to another room he wouldn’t notice. No, he’s still outside, messing with the handle again. His finger scraping against the wooden door. Up and down. Up and down.

CLICK.

“Roger?”